29 pages • 58 minutes read
Joseph Sheridan le FanuCarmilla
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary: “A Wonderful Likeness”
The next evening, a picture cleaner arrives at the schloss. This cleaner restores an old portrait from 1698 of a distant relative named Mircalla Karnstein. This Mircalla looks exactly like Carmilla. Carmilla and Laura then take a stroll, during which Carmilla declares her love for Laura, and says: “I live in you; and you would die for me, I love you so” (43). Laura is alarmed, confused by Carmilla’s strange words and concerned that Carmilla is physically ill.
Chapter 6 Summary: “A Very Strange Agony”
That night, Carmilla offers to leave the schloss and give Laura’s family no more problems, but Laura’s father dissuades her. Carmilla later reminisces about a ball held many years ago, which she has trouble remembering the specifics of. Laura is surprised, telling her: “You are not so old. Your first ball can hardly be forgotten yet” (47). Retiring to bed, Laura locks her room and has a dream that she says, “was the beginning of a very strange agony” (48). In the dream, a “monstrous cat” (48) springs onto her bed and she feels a “stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into [her] breast” (49). Awakening, she sees a female figure escape the room, though she finds that the door is still locked from the inside.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Descending”
Coming down to breakfast, Carmilla relates having a dream very similar to Laura’s, whereupon Laura tells her her own dream from that night. Carmilla encourages Laura to use the amulet she received from the peddler, not because it has magical powers, but because, according to her, it contains a medical antidote: “It is nothing magical, it is simply natural” (52). The amulet seems to work for Laura, though she feels a “lassitude” and “languor” that lasts through each succeeding day (53). She continues to have disquieting dreams, though they are vaguer than her dream of the monstrous cat. After three weeks of these types of dreams, though, she has a terrifying dream in which Carmilla is standing near her bed, bathed “in one great stain of blood” (55). Running to Carmilla’s room, Laura finds it is locked. Since Carmilla doesn’t answer her calls, she has a servant break down the door, only to find that Carmilla is not in the room.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Search”
The next morning the entire grounds are searched, but there is no sign of Carmilla. In the early afternoon, though, Carmilla is found in her room, and she claims she woke up in an adjoining dressing room, having no memory of leaving her bedroom. Laura’s father decides that Carmilla has simply been sleepwalking, and that it is nothing to be alarmed about.
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
In these chapters we see Laura becoming more and more infatuated with Carmilla. Although Carmilla’s strange behavior does frighten Laura, Laura feels strangely drawn to her. Furthermore, this attraction is a physical one. Laura is constantly referring to how physically attractive Carmilla is: “How beautiful she looked in the moonlight!” (43), and how “Nothing could be more beautiful than her tints” (60). Carmilla kisses Laura “silently” (43) and makes statements such as “I have been in love with no one, and never shall […] unless it should be with you” (43). Laura “ran to [Carmilla] in an ecstasy of joy; I kissed and embraced her again and again” (58). The two ladies are becoming intimately intertwined, and the nocturnal visits Laura receives from Carmilla may be interpreted as expressions of Laura’s unconsciously repressed sexual desire for Carmilla. Only at night and in dreams can Laura’s psyche admit to the attraction Carmilla holds for her as a lover. The lassitude and languor of a vampiric infection is also the lovesickness of a young woman who desires something dangerous: a lesbian love affair with a cruel and mysterious woman.
