Carmilla

Similar to how vampirism in Carmilla can be read as symbolic of a repression of sexuality, so too can it be a symbol of repressed violent nature. The violence comes in the form of Carmilla, who is indeed ultra-violent. Her violence goes beyond just the violence inherent in her vampiric nature. She makes cruelly violent small talk, as when she talks about having “the wretch tied up to the pump, and flogged with a cart whip, and burnt to the bones with the cattle brand!” (38).  Conversely, Laura is never able to face any violent scene that takes place in the novel. She looks away so as to avoid seeing the carriage crash that brings Carmilla into her life. Also, she is not actually at the inquisition at the end of the novel, at which Carmilla is destroyed. Instead, she uses a report of the Imperial Commission to describe the scene, saying: “It is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene” (96). Laura is entirely too timid to be able to confront such a grizzly event.

Yet, the unconscious mind finds a way to force its violence on Laura. At night, Laura locks up her room and checks around for hidden invaders. But she cannot keep at bay Carmilla’s violent attacks on her while she sleeps. Laura herself recognizes the power and force of the unconscious mind: “Thus fortified 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” (48). Laura may meticulously consciously avoid observation of any violence, yet the violence comes to her when she sleeps, whether she wants it to or not.

The parents in Carmilla are consistently portrayed as either ineffectual, in the case of the father figures, or evilly scheming, as in the case of Carmilla’s mother. Laura’s father is slow to admit what is wrong with his daughter, refusing to acknowledge that Laura is suffering from the attacks of a vampire, believing that vampirism is a mere superstition. As a result, Laura nearly dies from her affliction. The General, too, is impotent to save his niece Bertha, who actually does die. Neither Laura’s father nor the General can believe that Carmilla, whose beauty and appearance of innocence seems to infatuate them both, could be a baneful influence on their wards. It takes an outside authority figure, in the form of the Baron, to stop Carmilla’s predations. The hero of the story, then, is a bizarre outsider, and the young women of the book cannot rely on their proper authority figures to defend them from danger.

Neither Laura nor Bertha have mothers, nor any matriarchal figure in their lives. Madame and Mademoiselle are merely companions, at best, for Laura. Neither woman offers any advice or comfort to Laura. Furthermore, it is through Laura’s mother’s line that she is related to the Karnsteins, who are Carmilla’s family. Thus, Laura’s maternal line has a sinister connotation that her paternal line does not. The only mother in the novel is Carmilla’s mother, who is portrayed as unrelentingly menacing and conniving. Since Laura is actually distantly related to Carmilla, and also perhaps Carmilla’s mother, the darker aspects of Laura’s unconscious are tied to the femaleness of her being. Her mother has, in a sense, passed on to Laura the Karnstein evil.

Carmilla, as a tale, might be the creation of any of three different authors: the Laura of the story (the purported author), the mysterious Doctor Hesselius of the prologue (who is the procurer Laura’s story), or the author of the preface (who is not necessarily synonymous with the author, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu). Of course, in real life we know that the novella was written by Le Fanu. Yet within the fictive world of the novella, the story presented to us could have been tampered with, or even wholly constructed by, Hesselius and/or the prologue writer. The question arises as to how much the reader can trust the document. Was Laura real? If she was, she is no longer alive at the time of the writing of the preface, and thus cannot be consulted. Laura is certainly an unreliable narrator, as she herself seems to understand. She knows that her story is outlandish: “I am now going to tell you something so strange that it will require all your faith in my veracity to believe my story” (11). Even if Laura’s story has not been tampered with, the story could of course still be the ravings of an unwell mind. In this case, the madness of vampirism is an expression of Laura’s insane psyche. 

The conclusion of the novel is largely taken over by two new narrators: the General and the Baron. The General’s story takes up the bulk of Chapters Eleven through Fourteen, while the Baron is the main narrator of the final chapter, wherein he gives a disquisition on the nature of vampires and the particular history of the vampire Carmilla. Laura’s voice fades to the background during the climax and conclusion of the story, and Laura’s feelings and thoughts regarding Carmilla’s destruction are muted. She makes, in fact, no value judgments on the events at all, leaving that largely up to the General and the Baron. If Laura is really insane and her story made up, this leaving of the end of the story to the words of authority figures could be seen as an attempt by Laura to cover up her uncured psychological problems with an ‘official’ account. All of her issues are explained away by vampires, and not the troubling ‘vampires’ of the mind. By using these final two narrators to wrap up the story, Laura can avoid having to confront the troubles in her own psyche.