Mircalla, Millarca, Carmilla
First, a quick thank you to those who reached out after this post to either reassure me that they would continue to subscribe even if I posted less or who switched to a paid subscription. I deeply appreciate it. I was also scolded by some of you, who suggested I ought to have let people know the amount that I would need in order to keep posting as regularly, and encouraged them to subscribe so: The bare minimum I would need to bring in per month to keep on the posting schedule I’m on is $250. This would mean more than doubling my current paid subscribers. If you’d like to switch to a paid subscription, believe me, I’d be grateful, but I do also understand if that’s not possible. Without meeting that minimum, I am going to allow myself to reduce my posting schedule and offer one free and one paid post per month.
And now, vampires.
When I was a kid, vampires were definitely my favorite traditional Halloween monster. A lot of that, honestly, was the cape. If I was going to dress up as something, I absolutely wanted my costume to include a glorious, swoopy cape. (I never actually did dress up as a vampire, but I was the Phantom of the Opera in eighth grade, see “glorious, swoopy cape” supra.)
The popularity of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and other vampire novels only deepened this love. One of my high school English teachers called my friend Nora and I the vampire twins, partially because we wrote so much vampire fiction for our journal entries, and I remember refusing to watch the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie because I didn’t want to watch a movie where the slayer was the hero.
So of course, of course I loved Dracula. Both the gorgeous Francis Ford Coppola movie, and also Bram Stoker’s novel. I’m a sucker (haha) for an epistolary novel anyway, but an epistolary novel with vampires?! Best thing ever.
And then there was Carmilla. Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella was published before Dracula (1872 and 1897, respectively), though John Polidori’s short story, “The Vampyre” which came out of the same contest at the Villa Diodati that produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, was published in 1819, and so predates them both.
Carmilla is the story of the lonely and isolated Laura, tucked away deep in the Austrian forest, and the beautiful and unexpected guest, Carmilla, who is invited to stay with her. In the way of these things, shortly after Carmilla’s arrival, other young and beautiful women (always women) who live near the castle begin falling prey to a mysterious illness, in which weakness and languor is soon followed by death.
Laura’s seduction takes longer, but it lets us see why one might well hope to fall prey to a vampire: “Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion, in which my senses left me and I became unconscious.”
Ahem.
There’s an incident in the novella, very early on, that for me, is perhaps the most genuinely unnerving ones in the story. I won’t go into details here, because if you haven’t read the novella, you deserve to come to this unspoiled, but Laura says of it: “I was not frightened, for I was one of those happy children who are studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, of fairy tales, and of all such lore that makes us cover up our heads when the door cracks suddenly[.]”
It’s hard at this point – if not impossible – to write a modern-set novel where people don’t know what the monster is. We know what vampires are, what they do, what their rules are. We know that so well that it was one of the points of scandal when Twilight first came out – everyone knows vampires don’t sparkle! Writing a protagonist at this point in time who goes through what Laura does and doesn’t think “hmm, maybe… a vampire?” would be ridiculous. Even as a modern reader who might somehow read the book unaware of what it was about, the signs are so clearly marked that there is no sense of reading to solve that particular mystery.
And to be clear, there are characters in Carmilla who know what vampires are, and how to defeat them. The book gives a sense that they have been researched and studied – there are extant texts on the subject. There is even a correction of the existing mythology from a wiser Laura at the end of the book: “I may mention, in passing, that the deadly pallor attributed to that sort of revenants is a mere melodramatic fiction.” I admit, I grinned when I read that.
But I do wonder, as a writer, what the reading experience would have been like for Le Fanu’s original audience was. People who didn’t grow up with vampires on their cereal boxes and on their children’s television shows. Where there readers who were as shocked as Laura to learn what was going on? Who were horrified to learn what the beautiful Carmilla truly was? Was the revelation part of the pleasure of the text?
I don’t remember exactly when I first read Carmilla – late high school? Early college? Somewhere in there. I definitely knew what vampires were. There was no surprise for me in terms of Carmilla’s nature – I was reading the book because it was a vampire story. And I didn’t need that revelation to enjoy the book. Which is also something I want to think about, now, as a writer. There’s so much sense that if you’re going to revisit these common monsters, these well-known story types, that you have to do something new with them. That you have to subvert the tropes or wink at them – that there must be some sort of shock to appeal to the reader. But maybe that’s not the case at all. Maybe we might know very well what we’re opening the door to, and still choose to invite them in.
All quotations above are taken from the Pushkin Press edition of Carmilla. The link is an affiliate link, so if you order the book through it, I may receive a small amount of money.