Who Is Carmilla and Why Is She a Threat to Victorian Age?

Carmilla chooses her victims (young women isolated from society and without friendship) mainly because they are easy prey. She is a sensual, tender and affectionate woman herself -- beautiful to behold, as Laura describes: "She was slender, and wonderfully graceful…her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous" (Fanu 30). Bertha is a young woman intended to meet and befriend Laura, till she falls victim to Carmilla; and Laura is equally young and eager for a confidante. The fact that Carmilla first introduces herself to Laura when Laura is a girl and crying because she has been left alone in the nursery suggests that Carmilla is an altogether different kind of femme fatale -- not one who preys upon men to achieve her own aims but rather one whose very nature compels her to seek the embrace of young women -- and then their blood. Why does Carmilla choose to seduce women when she could just as easily, one assumes, seduce men? The answer is that Carmilla is attracted to women and they to her. Whether the attraction is merely sexual or part of a gender formation that rivals the patriarchal power structure of the Victorian era is perhaps incidental in the light of the greater significance that is Carmilla. As Kathleen Costello-Sullivan states, the Victorian foundation was crumbling and the popularity of the vampire in Gothic literature signaled the "Victorian uncertainty" (xviii) regarding the patriarchal society that had built itself upon the Church and then abandoned the Church for science and reason. In Carmilla, the patriarchs have their revenge on one who destabilizes their power by decapitating the title character and burning her body parts.

In the picture by DH Friston, the reader sees Carmilla half-leaning, half-climbing into the bed, reaching toward the chest of the General's niece, Bertha Rheinfeldt. Bertha is exposed from the chest up, a prominent bosom on full display, hid materially only by the form-fitting thin fabric of a nightgown. Her head is turned to the left, her left arm back over the pillow extending behind her head, and her long golden hair flows outward to her right. The outline of her legs is discernible under the bed's blankets and they appear to be slightly parted. Her position suggests a number of interpretations: she may be one who is in deep slumber, or one who is caught in the feverish struggle of sickness, or one in the climax of sexual sensation. From the waist up she is bathed in a kind of ethereal light. Carmilla, on the other hand, is bathed in shadow. What is she reaching for? Is she reaching to snatch the beauty that belongs to her victim? Is she reaching to begin a ravishing embrace? To steal her life? Her face indicates no evil threat, no perverse desire. There is in it rather a curious fascination, as though Carmilla were an innocent, aroused by the beauty of the goddess-like woman before, wanting only to reach out and touch it, to crawl out from her dark corner and feel the glory. This original pictorial representation of Carmilla gives a subtle suggestion as to the sympathies of both artist and novelist: as Zizek states, it is the ability to "elevate the everyday, trivial object into a sublime Thing" (117) that separates the masters from the amateurs. Here, the sublimity of the sketch is found in the sympathetic portrayal of Carmilla, the femme fatale.

In the background approaches General Spielsdorf with a sword, ready to do violence to Carmilla, as though he represents the established order that is there to make certain no one taints the purity of the princess in bed. His sword is held waist-high and the image carries certain phallic connotations, as though his masculinity were more a threat to both women than Carmilla to Bertha. The image taken on its own gives an uninitiated reader no sense of the evil that Carmilla is represented to be in the story. One wonders whether the artist betrays some sympathy with the titular character, pitted as she is against a patriarchal power structure and elitist purity, which keeps her hidden, dark and oppressed. Indeed, there is almost a holiness about Carmilla, whose head is covered by a long veil, as though she were a medieval woman covering her hair in a church out of respect for the Holy of Holies in the sanctuary. She could remind the viewer of Mary Magdalene, for the beauty in her face and the piety in her demeanor. There is a degree of reverence in the posture of Carmilla, too, seen as she is bent at the waist with one arm stretched out: she appears to be making a gesture of obeisance and supplication while simultaneously finding herself unable to resist the lure of the beautiful Bertha. The parallel that can be drawn between Carmilla and Mary Magdalene, the sinner turned saint, with a so strong a love for Christ that she was among the first to learn of His resurrection before any of the male heirs to the Apostleship. Just as Mary Magdalene combines sensuality and spirituality in her character, so too does Carmilla combine the two. Just as Mary Magdalene may be seen reaching forward to touch the sandal of Jesus who saves her from stoning, so too can one interpret the image as Carmilla reaching out to touch the breast of Bertha, which contains so life-giving solution to Carmilla's needs. Yet, is Carmilla to be considered an anti-Magdalene because she ultimately crosses a line set by the Church's doctrine? Or is she simply misunderstood in a patriarchal power structure that restricts female sexuality in such a way that it is rendered nearly obsolete, represented by the darkness that covers Carmilla?

If Laura longs for a friend/companion, it may be said that Carmilla longs just as much for a female companion/lover, from whom she can take blood. Trapped in a state of isolation, both because of her desires and her undead existence, Carmilla must achieve what she wants on the sly, making friends through means of deception, changing her name every place she goes, and lurking in the night to find satisfaction. In this context, Carmilla's vampirism appears more sympathetic, her anger at Laura for singing a Christian hymn at a passing funeral the result of a bitterness at her own inability to pass into the next world, held back as she is by the curse that keeps her undead. There is a tragedy hidden in the story of Carmilla and it is rooted in her exclusion from the natural rights of others.

That her "friendships" tend to be deadly for the other is what makes Carmilla a femme fatale. Without this lethal aspect to her persona, Carmilla at once becomes more than a type: she becomes a complex being with real humanity. Such an individual would have been absolutely unconventional for Victorian audiences -- thus, the lesbian persona has to be presented within the vampire trope and molded within the femme fatale type: her embrace brings joy, her mouth brings death.

For a modern audience, Carmilla may be viewed as a prototype for "women religious, who embrace both feminist orientations and Catholic traditions" (Gervais 384): her sexuality is upheld be feminist ideology and her distaste for hymns for the dead is explained by her particular situation; also, her prayerful manner is certainly rooted in a Catholic tradition -- thus, Carmilla embodies a mix of characteristics that casts her as a forerunner of the modern feminist woman religious, who, as Gervais notes, are part of a movement with the Church to "challenge some of their institutional religion's precepts and engage in feminist-based transformative strategies" (384). Indeed, Robert Geary notes that Carmilla is a representation of the Victorian fear of social collapse without its "Christian context": having left the doctrines of the Church and found the Age of Enlightenment to be too empirical in its science (and the Age of Romance too frightening in its liberty), the Victorian Age strove for balance of a modest kind (22). Carmilla tips that balance in her favor: buried like a ghost from the Age of Romance, Carmilla lurks under a new name, seeking her victims in the shape of young defenseless girls, whose trust and confidence she can easily win because of her beauty and her natural affection.

Carmilla may be seen as a threat to the patriarchal power structure of the Victorian Age because she represents the liberal spirit unleashed in the preceding Romantic Era and depicted in horrific terms by Mary Shelley, wife of Romantic poet Percy Byshe Shelley. Carmilla is not only a seductress but also, evidently, a lesbian, whose sexuality is not anchored by any relationship to family or procreation but staked rather to pleasure, desire, sensual satisfaction, and emotional fulfillment. That she must lurk and practice subterfuge in order to achieve her aims indicates the social mores of the time in which courtship played a defining role between men and women and bi-sexuality and lesbianism were more than taboo: homosexuality in Victorian England was a crime, as Oscar Wilde learned the hard way.

Thus, the fear that Carmilla strikes in the heart of the Victorian reader is equal to the sensation that she also provokes: the fascination that the femme fatale holds for the reader is like the fascination that the crime genre possesses -- both are able to repulse and attract at the same time (Mast 182). One is repulsed at the apparent amorality that the villain displays yet attracted by the license that he/she takes in achieving his/her goals. The conflict is between will and moral code, which is often written by society -- yet, in the crime genre, the social moral code is typically corrupt and the hero has more in common with the villain in terms of establishing their own codes to live by (Chandler 23). The hero's code is commonly social in the sense that it ultimately respects the value of the common good, whereas the villain's code is ultimately self-centered: the villain is willing to sacrifice the common good and/or the lives of others to attain his goal. In this paradigm, one may locate Carmilla as femme fatale (villain) and Laura as lonely heroine, whose life as an outsider makes her both similar and susceptible to Carmilla. Moreover, Laura discloses her own attraction to and repulsion by Carmilla: "I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust" (Fanu 33). Carmilla's words and warmth lure Laura, but Carmilla's mysteriousness about her history and her melancholy that betrays the experience of one who has lived too long a life, are what repel Laura. Thus, Laura is conflicted about her feelings towards Carmilla -- yet, she again and again, apologizes for attempting to discover more about her friend, asserting to the reader that she knows she had no right to question Carmilla. It is as though she is defending the vampire -- as though she, in a way, forgives Carmilla; as though she is complicit in their relationship, even after all is said and done.

However, a feminist understanding of Carmilla allows the reader to view her in a much different light: she becomes not the femme fatale of a Victorian Age interested primarily in preserving its own sexual mores (rooted in prudery) and patriarchy, but rather a victim of sexual/gender oppression. As E. Michael Jones notes, the vampire genre is one in which the "dangers" of sexuality (i.e., conception, matrimony) are represented by a "lustful" blood/life-draining inhuman being that spreads death and contagion rather than life through the "life-affirming" act of procreation (32). In the case of Carmilla, the threat of sexuality is doubly felt because she is not a male seducer (capable of "ruining" a woman) but a female seducer -- and so the danger is ambiguous: if Carmilla's "victims" do not die from her touch, is Carmilla still a threat? She is: not in the same sense as Stoker's Dracula, who represents the libertine assault on Victorian morals. Carmilla is a threat simply because she represents female sexuality and pleasure. Laura for instance recalls the blissful embrace that Carmilla first gives her as a child, and the shocking bite upon her breast that follows -- the premature sensation of sexuality rearing its head and emerging from adolescence. Yet, the reader notices Carmilla's reaction to Laura's cry of distress: Carmilla does not assault Laura -- rather she slips from her side to hide underneath the bed, as though she were a frightened mouse that had no intention of alarming the one that she held so fondly.

Laura's depiction of her first meeting with Carmilla is in fact indicative of the religious aspect that lies subtly below the surface of Carmilla. She presents herself to Laura in a most pious manner, as though praying for admittance: "I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneeling with her hands under the coverlet" (Fanu 8). Laura's reaction is not fright -- for she was vexed at being left alone in the nursery. Here, now, as later in the story when she is older but equally isolated, a new "friend" comes to see her, bringing affection -- "she caressed me with her hands…and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed" -- and an almost mystical experience for Laura, who "looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder" (Fanu 8). Yet, when Carmilla attempts to take from Laura a return of pleasure, Laura cries, startled by the feeling of "two needles" sticking into her breast. Her cry appears to startle Carmilla just as much: "The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me" -- yet the way in which Carmilla hides under the bed may appear less innocent when considered in the light of the childhood stories in which monsters lurk out of sight underneath one's bed.

The "Carmilla experience" is soon replaced by the "priest experience" as Laura is visited by a new kneeling, praying individual -- the "white-haired old man, in his black cassock"…with the "thoughtful sweet face" (Fanu 10). He prays with his entourage, "Lord hear all good prayers for us, for Jesus' sake" in an attempt to ward off the evil that has apparently so distressed Laura (Fanu 10).

Thus one sees in the presence of the priest, the Victorian Age's answer to the awakening of the sexual appetite: prayer. That Carmilla's bedside manner is replicated this time by a man, whose vocation is qualified by celibacy -- the exact opposite of Carmilla's sensuality -- may suggest that the patriarchal control of that time was based on an anti-sex ideology. Here, the male power prays (just as Carmilla appeared to be praying) but not for admittance to Laura's bed: rather one can assume that part of his prayer is that no one be admitted to Laura's bed to do her harm. The spiritual man replaces the sensual woman, whose spirit is driven by sensuality and based on female sexuality. The patriarchal response is to override the sensations caused by this exposure to female sexuality by insisting on more spiritual prayer, with the ultimate focus coming to rest on Jesus.

The religious connotations of this early scene are important in understanding the interplay between religion, sexuality, feminism, and the patriarchal power structure. As Rosemary Radford Ruether states in her assessment of the Catholic Church and its disposition towards feminist ideology that "traditional views of women and sexuality" are still maintained within the patristic nature of the Church, which even today "is still pursuing a global crusade against abortion, birth control, and redefinitions of the family that might include homosexual couples" (184). Ironically, Laura postulates that "it is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply" (Fanu 111). This reference to the dictate of God to Noah in Genesis 9:7 suggests a still greater significance to the Carmilla femme fatale: she represents a new order, transposed on the old Christian order: instead of begetting children in the old order, Carmilla begets vampires like herself -- new beings which have their own code and sexual needs. In this context, Carmilla represents the Victorian fear of sexual revolution and the need to keep sexual transgressions undisclosed, the skeletons buried within the closet (Jones 132). That Carmilla is able to escape her closet indicates that the Victorian Age was having difficulty suppressing the rising urge of female sexuality and its challenge to the patriarchal order. The rise of industrialization surely played a part in this surge of feminism, with women taking a more active role in social politics, from Susan B. Anthony to Florence Nightingale as industry made upward mobility more possible.

However, there is no hope of upward mobility for Carmilla, once her secret is discovered by the patriarchs of the land. Her end is bloody and gruesome: a stake through her heart, head cut off, parts burned. These actions rid the realm of the menace of the vampire -- yet Laura still retains the memories of Carmilla within her own mind and recalls them with a mixture of feelings -- "ambiguous alternations" between remembrances of the sweet, beautiful Carmilla and a remembrance of the "writhing fiend…in the ruined church" (Fanu 112). The image is full of portend and hindsight shows how much it has foreshadowed the present: Carmilla may be dead at last by the end of the novel -- but her spirit lives on in Laura. Likewise, the last image that is recalled is the one of Carmilla in the "ruined church" -- a metaphor perhaps for the Church which stands today on troubled footing, having had to close a number of doors all over the world and being challenged on a number of social doctrines. Shall Carmilla the femme fatale/feminist prototype emerge from the "ruined church" victorious? The novel suggests that such just might be the case, as it closes with Laura wondering whether she hears Carmilla approaching down the hall.

Thus, the fear that Victorian Age has of Carmilla is that she is more powerful, ultimately, than the patriarchs who head the era. Their "juridical systems" prohibit the license that Carmilla takes -- and the lethality of her license is what they condemn: the awakening of female sexuality, of lesbianism, is something that must be suppressed or eradicated fully. And yet the novel suggests that the eradication process while desirable is not effective. Laura still possesses the longings that Carmilla awakened in her, and while she sleeps better at night, having suffered none of the disturbances that plagued her during Carmilla's visits, she finds herself musing on the sweet presence that was Carmilla and the touch that she gave and the sensations they aroused.

It is clear that Carmilla seduces through affection and sensual caresses. She preys upon the lonely and isolated and enters their hearts through displays of piety and tenderness. Yet, when she bites, she poisons, drawing life from her victims, in whose blood she sleeps inside her coffin.

What is unique about Carmilla is that her method of seduction is so innocent and unlike other femme fatales. It is almost as if the death/suffering of her victims as an unwanted or undesired after effect -- something she has no control over. Fanu depicts her in such a way, too, that the guile she uses to manipulate her way into Laura's life is not born in malice but rather in a stream of self-preservation. She has to feed to live, yet her nurturing, affectionate embraces are real -- not affected. That is one perspective, and certainly one that defends the character more than a Victorian reader would have likely done. Nonetheless, Carmilla as a femme fatale is not the same sort of seductress that the type usually conjures -- perhaps because her object is not a man but a woman. What is interesting is that because the object of seduction is a woman, it appears that the method of seduction is more feminine, gentler, softer, more affectionate, based more on compassion for the suffering of the lonely girl than on the promise of forbidden pleasure that is usually associated with the femme fatale. Carmilla to Laura is not a forbidden pleasure but rather a friend who brings with her friendship that enchantment of sex. She awakens in Laura such feelings that she has never experienced.

The fear is that Carmilla's deviance will spread within the patriarchal realm -- vampires will beget vampires, and as researchers have shown, sexuality and gender are norms that are learned, as is the generational acceptance or rejection of homosexuality and lesbianism: Calzo states that the more one is exposed to bisexuality as a norm the more one is compelled to accept it (280). Likewise Bonds-Raacke's findings suggest that cultivation theory supports the notion that the Victorian fear of contagion (from libertinism) is not unfounded: "those recalling a positive portrayal later showed a more positive attitude toward" homosexuals and lesbians after exposure to such characters in media (10). Also, studies by Werner-Wilson show that "risky sexual behavior" can be learned if the influence is of a particularly intimate source (303).