Weekly Geeks: Old Weird – Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu

This week’s Weekly Geeks concerns itself with (as could be expected on Halloween) the weird, the spooky, and horrifying. It also asks the question: Is popular culture getting more weird lately? I chose to look at a story written in the 19th Century.

I love how the Wikipedia page on Sheridan Le Fanu just comes right out and declares that Le Fanu was “the premier ghost story writer of the nineteenth century”. Seeing as how there are so many other writers from that century who produced a great scary tale or two, this is quite a bold claim. Among my favorites from the nineteenth century Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Edgar Allen Poe, Guy du Maupassant, Lafcadio Hearn, and Sir Richard Burton.

I finally got a chance to read Carmilla recently and was very pleased to find that it lives up to its reputation. It was written by Le Fanu around 1872. The illustration above is by Michael Fitzgerald and appeared in the 1872 publication of the story in The Dark Blue. Like many vampire stories, Carmilla is set up a little like a mystery novel. The vampire lives in the midst of its victims and the characters of the story go through the five stages of grief. Those are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. OK. OK. I just made that up.

But really, I’ve studied this and people in vampire stories always go through similar stages. I’ll call them:

The Six Stages of Vampirism

1. Foreshadowing or Warning (see note a.)
2. Seduction
3. Victimization
4. Denial/Obliviousness (see note b.)
5. Discovery/Realization
6. Kill It! or Help Me! or Blarg I’m Dead (see note c.)

a. Warnings must be delivered improperly. For example, a warning might be delivered by a tongueless, scab-covered hag who jumps out of an alley and mimes a dire warning before falling under an oncoming carriage and being trampled to death.
b. Steps one through four actually form a loop that repeats until steps five and/or six occur.
c. Vampire victims usually require the intersession of a third party and may or may not ever reach step 5 themselves.

So here are the steps as they pertain to Carmilla:

1) Foreshadowing – As a young child our heroine, Laura, is haunted by a dream of a monstrous cat which turns into a beautiful woman. Laura’s father also gets an improperly delivered warning.

2) Seduction – Later in life she meets Carmilla, who looks exactly like the woman she saw in the dream. Carmilla claims to have seen Laura in a similar dream. They fall in love. I don’t know how anybody else feels about it, but to me the story of Laura and Carmilla is actually very sweet. A lot is made about how this is “The Original Vampire Lesbian Story”, but due to the time it was written in, the seduction is really more of a story about two women who become dear friends with some erotic undertones. Laura is in over her head because Carmilla is older (and is ultimately predatory.) At the same time, Carmilla seems possessed by her own ardor for Laura. They are infatuated.

3) Victimization – As Laura wastes away, Carmilla gets more and more bold, and reveals more of her true nature to Laura.

4) Denial/Obliviousness – One of my most favorite things about this story is that sometimes Carmilla will tell Laura the truth. She’ll say crazy things like (I’m paraphrasing here) “You and your blood are mine. We will lie in the same grave together.” Laura passes these moments off as emotional fits on the part of Carmilla and tries to ignore them. Meanwhile, she is having dreams about the monstrous cat again but fails to connect them to Carmilla, or to her own failing health.

Of course, we can’t go on to steps 5 and 6 without spoiling the story, so I’m going to stop there. I loved Carmilla. It is atmospheric and haunting. Le Fanu left enough unexplained that the reader is free to use their imagination to fill in details. The story also contains some delightful folk-tale conceits about vampires. Rules about vampires like how they avoid garlic, fear crosses, and can’t survive in the sun. Carmilla can walk around in the daylight but can’t bear to hear prayers, for example. She also employs rather convoluted means to secure victims. In addition, there’s something about her name that I won’t spoil here, but that I found very amusing.

Creepy Factor: 4 out of 5
Suspense Factor: 4 out of 5
Weird Erotic Tension Factor: 2 out of 5
Funny and/or Strange Factor: 3 out of 5

Final result: I love older literature. I think some may read this and find it a little dry. I found it very entertaining and plan to read more by Le Fanu this winter. As for the question about whether things are getting more or less weird, I think that popular culture tends to go through periods where things become popular. As evidenced by classics like Carmilla, horror fiction and the weird have been with us a long time, and are probably never going to go away. I think that they are going through a resurgence of popularity of late. The most concrete example I can give of that has been the expansion of the horror section at my favorite local bookstore, Powell’s.

Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu – 1872
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That was very satisfying. I’ve got a backlog of great books that I’ve read and will be posting about soon. See you next time!