Carmilla - J Sheridan Le Fanu

 Carmilla - J Sheridan Le Fanu

Carmilla is probably Le Fanu’s most famous work. It is one of the most famous vampire tales to be published before Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Given that Stoker’s The Judge’s House is strongly influenced by An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street, it is highly likely that Carmilla was an influence on Stoker’s novel. If you read Le Fanu’s novella, you will, no doubt, recognise elements of vampire lore that make their way into Dracula. 

Much is made of the female vampire and female victim in Le Fanu’s novella, though the reader should be careful not to see Carmilla as a queer heroine. The 19th century vampire is plainly villainous. The sexual subtext of Dracula has been convincingly explained as a metaphor for sexually transmitted disease. The ruthless aristocratic Dracula preys on young women, who are destroyed by the consequences of yielding to his power. Carmilla’s victims are female; Le Fanu makes Carmilla’s desire plain (and ugly); and even though Laura survives, she never truly recovers from the harm that Carmilla did. The 19th century vampire is a moral warning. If Carmilla is a lesbian, she is the caricature of an adult woman destroying the lives of girls through her perverse desires. The erotic tension between the forbidden and desire is clearly present in the work, however, as Roy Ward Baker understood, and exploited, in Hammer’s The Vampire Lovers. Baker’s 1970 film, though, belongs to a radically different world.

The first part of Carmilla appeared in the December 1871 edition of the short-lived magazine The Dark Blue. After the serialization was complete, the novella was collected with other Martin Hesselius stories later in 1872 in In a Glass Darkly. It was to be his last major work. He died in February 1873, aged 58. 

In all honesty, Carmilla is most interesting for its place in vampire history. Some elements of the story are never fully realised. For example, the strange contrivance of the coach crash that brings Carmilla into the story leaves a number of questions unanswered by the story’s end. The peculiar and unnecessary (and unsuccessful) device of disguising Carmilla’s history through the use of anagrams may have seemed less trite in 1872 than it does now. The final pursuit with its peculiar coincidences is not quite an example of Deus ex Machina. No doubt the problems weakening the story arise from its publication as a serial. The story has strengths. Le Fanu’s descriptive powers and his ability to build atmosphere in his set pieces are as sharp as in his shorter works. It also has the advantage of being quicker to read than Dracula.