The Lady, the Lore, the Legend - Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (Review)

 A/N: This review contains spoilers for Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu. This is your spoiler warning.

If you are a 90s or early 00s kid, you’ve probably lived through Twilight causing an explosion of vampire related literature and films to become a staple of mainstream media. And if you haven’t despite being born in the said era, have you been living in a forest? (Please send me deets on where and how. I'd like to join you. Unless you're in a cult.) 

And like every Mass-extinction on earth, vampire fiction often makes a cyclical comeback every hundred years or so. The one before Twilight that everyone looks at as the ‘origin’ of Vampire fiction was Dracula by Bram Stoker. 

But what if I told you that there was a sapphic, seductive vampire book published a few years before that reads like the source material for how heteronormative and basic Dracula is? 

Enter, Carmilla. 

Seductress, predator and walking red-flag. 

And our narrator, Laura. Plain Jane, rich-kid with no awareness who leads to Carmilla’s untimely demise.

Yes, the story is one of caution about falling for temptresses and uncouth desires. About how beautiful things are dangerous and not meant to be messed with but to me Carmilla was the moment. The lady, the lore and the legend. She should’ve been the one to walk away with zero repercussions but I guess the idea of a blood-sucking monster being the main lead is one of the twenty-first century.

Carmilla written by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu is the story of an English girl living in a schloss with her father and their two governesses- Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine (and a host of maids and manservants that she doesn’t deem important enough to mention) in the middle of the woods of Austria. Her father is a retired government employee and the owner of the feudal land they live on and her mother’s been dead forever. She’s a brat but a rather lonely one, so it’s hard to judge her too much for the lack of social awareness and people skills.

After her sleepover with their nearest neighbor- General Spielsdorf’s niece gets canceled on account of the young lady’s death, Laura decides to find herself a new playdate. The playdate just happens to crash into Laura’s front lawn with her mother on the same day that they receive word from the General. Like of course, it’s a happy coincidence. Serendipity, if you appreciate whimsy. 

Carmilla arrives with a bang and a mother who decides that it would be lovely to have a strange family living in a castle, in the middle of nowhere, host her young, beautiful daughter until she can come back from her three-month long business trip. Right. Because that’s what you do when you can’t afford child care. 

Laura immediately falls in love with the idea of having a new friend to play with and insists that Carmilla be invited and her father agrees, no questions asked. And thus begins the seduction of Laura- with sweet talk, charm and beautiful wiles. Carmilla quickly integrates herself into the household and becomes a familiar face that everyone adores. 

Soon young women start dying in the area from an invisible plague. While for us it’s pretty obvious how the story goes, I can imagine how exciting it was for readers from the 19th century. The flirty Carmilla sings praises of Laura’s beauty and makes vows to die with her. She is a walking red-flag who gaslights everyone around her with her charm and Laura is just blind, gay and in denial about it all. This honestly is a perfect example of how pretty privilege has always been a part of our society because no one questions Carmilla ever. 

How can a beautiful and fair lady be a monster after all?

Laura, who narrates the story, mentions multiple freaky incidents where Carmilla appears in her room and disappears from her own despite the door being locked. How she has sharp teeth and is quick to anger when someone talks about it. How they find an old painting of the Countess Mircalla who looks just like Carmilla which had initially belonged to Laura’s ancestors. And surprisingly none of these raise any alarms in the household.

It’s not until Laura has a nightmare about something biting her and her health rapidly declining that her father takes notice and the story reaches a heady climax. I know it’s a predictable plot for all of us who grew up reading vampire fiction or any creature fiction at all. But I felt that knowing the plot didn’t make me like the story any less. It was atmospheric and such a romp to be honest. The naïveté of the characters and the unexpectedly sapphic and bewitching character of Carmilla brought me great joy.

I understand that the whole point of the book is to inspire horror within its Gothic setting and isolation from the world, and all I really wanted was a gay romance so just let me be. Reading classics and Gothic fiction should be fun, not tedious and this was a perfect way to dip into the genre due to its accessible language and shorter length. If you’d like a light read with a fruity vampire in an Austrian castle, I highly recommend this book. And if you’re boring and want to stick to heteronormative bloodsucking human mosquitoes, wait until I read and review Dracula.

Here are some of my favourite lines from the book.

here we had our tea, for with his usual patriotic leanings he insisted that the national beverage should make its appearance regularly with our coffee and chocolate.
(English people have honestly been drinking tea forever. I still don’t get why people like boiled leaf juice.)

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.”
(Carmilla has major 19th century rizz. She waxes poetry and bats her eyelashes and we live for it.)

“You are afraid to die?” 
“Yes, every one is.” 
“But to die as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together.”
(I mean the red flags are everywhere and Laura is just colorblind.)

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.” 
How beautiful she looked in the moonlight.
(De-nial is a river in Egypt and Laura is gay.)

Her soft cheek was glowing against mine. “Darling, darling,” she murmured, “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so.” 
(So gay.)

But I am under vows, no nun half so awfully, and I dare not tell my story yet, even to you. The time is very near when you shall know everything. You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me and still come with me. and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.
(I loved how transparent Carmilla often is and how blockheaded everyone else is)

Thus fortifed I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exits and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths.
(Such a beautiful sentence, right?)

“And what do you think the charm is?” said I. 
“It has been fumigated or immersed in some drug, and is an antidote against the malaria,” she answered. 
“Then it acts only on the body?” 
“Certainly; you don’t suppose that evil spirits are frightened by bits of ribbon, or the perfumes of a druggist’s shop? No, these complaints, wandering in the air, begin by trying the nerves, and so infect the brain, but before they can seize upon you, the antidote repels them. That I am sure is what the charm has done for us. It is nothing magical, it is simply natural.”
(Malaria. So ironic because technically a vampire is just a giant mosquito right?)

A/N: Welcome to my vampire era. 

Thank you for reading the first installment in the series where I read and review feminist Vampire fiction for fun. I spent a chunk of last year reading seriously and having moral dilemmas so I figured that I deserve a break. I have a list of vampire fiction that I’ve always wanted to read but they didn’t fit into any of my plans. So I changed my plans. 

For anyone who’d like to pick up Carmilla, it’s freely available in the public domain as a Project Gutenberg ebook and also as an audiobook on LibriVox. I listened to the version narrated by Elizabeth Klett and it was amazing. Highly recommend.

(Yes, I haven't finished reading Celestial Bodies. Yes, I will read it and and write a post. It's just a depressing book and I need some time!)