The Hidden Vampiric Legacy of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”
When people talk about early literary vampires, Bram Stoker’s magnum opus Dracula inevitably dominates the conversation. Some more informed scholars might also toss John Polidori’s Lord Ruthven, the first real bloodsucker to grace the page and an un-subtle avatar for Lord Byron, into the mix. But a surprisingly infrequent visitor to the debate is J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s lonely blood countess Carmilla.
Is this because Carmilla is the only lady at our founders table? Is it because the narrative has slightly distracting overtones of adolescent male fantasy? Or, it could be that “Carmilla” came from a small coastal nation still deeply entrenched in the yoke of the British (the latter being the country that birthed Polidori’s The Vampire and—sacrilege!—Bram Stoker’s Dracula).
Whatever the reason, “Carmilla” didn’t get a lot of attention until around the late twentieth century, when Angela Carter introduced her blood-soaked fairy tales to the literary canon. Which is a shame, because it’s such an important piece of the broader puzzle that makes up supernatural fiction.
“Carmilla” begins in retrospect. The narrator looks back on a formative experience, which she has compiled through a mix of unreliable memories and witness accounts. This nested narrative would become a favorite of TV writers a century later. There’s a sense that the storyteller, who is later revealed to be Laura, the protagonist, is still trying to make sense of these events years later. Although the story follows a familiar hero-and-villain format, it’s not simply good versus evil—and it’s perhaps this thoughtful ambiguity that makes the story so enduring.
The novella opens with exposition describing Laura’s comfortable yet lonely life with her widowed father in their secluded Austrian manor. (Keep this in mind—it’ll be important later.) The inciting incident is subtle, easy to miss: they learn that a visit from her father’s friend and his niece has been canceled, because his niece has died from a mysterious illness. (Oh, and the dead girl’s name is Bertha Rheinfeldt, a surname suspiciously close to to Stoker’s Renfield.)
This little inconvenience accomplishes two things: it introduces the first hint of the supernatural, an unexplainable death; and, it removes the female companionship Laura had so been looking forward to, leaving a perfectly shaped gap for the arrival of… well, you can probably guess who.
The titular Carmilla arrives in a typical penny-dreadful twist of fate: she and her mother are traveling by carriage near Laura’s home when their carriage suddenly crashes, leaving them stranded. Laura’s father generously offers to take the girl in while the mother continues onward.
Laura, naturally, is thrilled. There’s only so long a young woman and her well-intentioned father can live alone together in isolation before they start to drive each other batty.
So Laura and Carmilla become the best of friends. And even if Carmilla is a little secretive and a little emotionally intense, and even if she goes into apoplectic fits when she hears a priest reciting hymns, well… Laura’s just happy she finally has a friend her own age.
The nature of their friendship has fascinated literary scholars for generations. The sexual tension between them isn’t subtle, though how far it progresses is left open to interpretation. Carmilla openly professes her passionate love, something Laura finds more confusing than anything else. Laura, and indeed Le Fanu’s readers, were raised in a society that valued heteronormativity and religious service—two things Carmilla stands in sharp contrast against.
Reflecting on her complicated feelings for Carmilla, Laura writes,
I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thought about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling.
This complex exploration of same-sex attraction, positioned against a tendency towards the social norm, was remarkably ahead of its time. Both protagonist and author acknowledge that there are no easy answers.
Of course, it’s impossible to ignore the way this queer awakening was wrapped up in a metaphor of monstrosity, and how that same awakening was presented in parallel to religious deviance. In this world, to profess erotic love for another woman is to be removed from the church and everything it stands for, and to hunger for it is to destroy that love in the process.
Inevitably, Laura starts exhibiting the same illness that killed Bertha Renfield—I mean, Rheinfeldt—and other women in nearby towns. Gothic writers are no strangers to the idea of love as a vampiric force, siphoning off the joy of life from its unwitting victim. This idea would much later be highlighted in Alice Hoffman’s novel Practical Magic, in which women starved for love become shadows of their former selves.
There’s a certain tragedy to Carmilla in that she can’t show affection without harming those she loves most. We never get to see Carmilla’s perspective—the novella is written from the point of view of Laura, a sheltered innocent with limited capacity to truly understand Carmilla’s motives or desires—but her crimes are not a product of malevolence, or even of ambivalent animal instinct. She feels everything intensely, existing in the intermingled intersection of lust and loneliness and withdrawal that would go on to become a cornerstone of vampire literature.
When reviewing the story through a 21st-century lens, a number of questions emerge. Did “Carmilla” really inspire Bram Stoker’s Dracula, as some scholars claim? Why didn’t it receive the same open-armed reception as its counterpart, twenty-five years later? And perhaps most confusingly, why did a straight male author write an emotionally complex story about the tension between Victorian morals and female homoerotic desire?
To answer the first question, it’s important to separate conjecture from real historical data. It’s common to find people, especially online, stating that Dracula is a direct descendant of “Carmilla” because of the commonalities in subject matter and tone. But it would be just as easy to say Stoker must have copied the Victorian penny dreadful serial Varney the Vampire. Is there any proof? Not entirely—but there are some interesting coincidences.
Literary scholars are perennially fascinated by Bram Stoker’s short story “Dracula’s Guest,” which is believed to be an excerpt from Dracula that was cut from the final novel. In the story, an unnamed narrator—widely believed to be Jonathan Harker, but also suggested to be the man who would become Renfield—encounters a mausoleum containing a beautiful vampire named Countess Dolingen. Many believe this is intended to be an homage to the Countess Carmilla.
Early drafts of Dracula also took place in Styria, Austria—the exact town where Laura lives with her father in “Carmilla.” When Stoker learned of the bloody history of Vlad Tepes, he moved Dracula’s home to Transylvania. Stoker’s notes on these early plans are preserved in the Rosenbach Museum.
Another coincidence? Bram Stoker worked as a theater reviewer, starting in 1872—the year “Carmilla” was published—for The Dublin Evening Mail. And the editor of this prominent national publication?
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu.
So even if Dracula wasn’t directly drawn from “Carmilla,” it’s virtually impossible that Stoker wouldn’t have been aware of it. To say “Carmilla was the novel that inspired Dracula” is perhaps an oversimplification, but Le Fanu certainly left a mark on the young Irish writer.
Dracula arrived two and a half decades later. It was longer, written in an epistolary structure, and a much more male-dominated narrative. The eponymous creature at its heart was more monstrous, the heroes more heroic. Everyone had their role. This gives the story an accessible endurance that made it infinitely adaptable, a tireless well of easy money for Hollywood producers.
“Carmilla,” by contrast, is more character driven and emotionally complicated. It is, to put it bluntly, messy. Which is why scholars and readers are still examining it and dissecting it today.
Unlike Bram Stoker, Le Fanu didn’t leave behind a treasure trove of notes and personal correspondence to reveal the inception of his work. Much of the study surrounding “Carmilla” has been navigated through the lens of the social norms of the time, rather than what Le Fanu may have been trying to accomplish through his portrayal of queer women.
The sexual representation in “Carmilla” is one of contrasts. Female desire is demonized, yet portrayed with nuanced sensitivity and tenderness. Carmilla acts on her impulses and is punished for it; Laura, her love interest, conforms to Victorian ideals and lives to tell the tale. Carmilla’s love for other women is dramatized as contagion, yet this love is softer and more intimate than simple obsession. The entire novella seems to be a cautionary tale wrapped up in Gothic metaphor; but even in retrospect, Laura is turning over her ambiguous feelings for this woman.
Le Fanu had a particular interest in exploring psychological complexity in his fiction. Today, readers expect this complexity, even take it for granted; one-dimensional villains are rarely given airtime, and writers are challenged to come up with more and more nuanced backstories for their antagonists. But in the 19th century, the lines between good and evil were more starkly drawn.
So it’s very possible that “Carmilla” emerged simply because Le Fanu was bored with the “monster of the week” form so often seen in horror literature, and wanted to create a monster story rich with tragic humanity. And what is more tragic, more human, more monstrous than love? The sexuality in the novella humanizes the villain, even as it places her in opposition with the morals of the church. It’s both ahead of its time and of its time.
This tortured, emotionally driven vampire—an icon that would later be known as the “Byronic Vampire,” thanks to Polidori—has surpassed the more traditional creature of folklore to become one of our most culturally ingrained monsters.
For a monster, the line between love and hunger, protection and suffocation, compassion and cruelty, is ever-shifting. That has become as deeply intrinsic to a monstrous identity as any supernatural motif—and it all began in the pages of “Carmilla.”
