Carmilla

Summary

Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died. Laura begins with a memory from the age of six: a beautiful young woman appeared beside her bed and she woke with the sensation of two needles piercing her breast, though the household found nothing. Twelve years later her father receives a grieving letter from his friend General Spielsdorf, whose niece and ward Bertha Rheinfeldt has died mysteriously. That same evening a carriage overturns near the castle; a commanding lady in black leaves her apparently injured daughter in their care and drives off on urgent business, promising to return in three months. The girl, Carmilla, is the face Laura saw in her childhood dream, and she claims to have dreamed of Laura too. Carmilla is lovely, languid and affectionate, sleeps until afternoon, never joins family prayers, refuses to say anything about her family, and alternates between listlessness and passionate declarations of devotion to Laura that both attract and repel her. Peasant girls in the district fall ill and die after dreams of being seized by the throat; Carmilla flies into a fit when a funeral hymn passes and drives off a hunchbacked peddler who notices her pointed tooth. A restored portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, dated 1698, proves to be Carmilla's exact likeness, and Carmilla says she is descended from the Karnsteins. Laura then dreams of a great black cat-like beast and feels a stinging at her breast; she grows pale and melancholy, and the family doctor finds a small blue mark below her throat and orders that she never be left alone. On a journey toward the ruined village of Karnstein, Laura and her father meet the General, who tells how a girl called Millarca, entrusted to him by a mysterious countess at a masked ball, drained Bertha's life in the same way, and how a physician from Gratz advised him to seek a clergyman and a learned man. In the ruined chapel the General attacks Carmilla with a woodman's hatchet when she appears, and she vanishes. The eccentric scholar Baron Vordenburg, descended from the Moravian nobleman who once hid the countess's tomb, locates the grave. An imperial commission opens it, finds the body fresh and lying in blood, drives a stake through the heart, strikes off the head and burns the remains. Laura closes by saying that she still sometimes starts, fancying she hears Carmilla's step at the drawing-room door. The tale was serialized in The Dark Blue in 1871-72 and collected in In a Glass Darkly in 1872.

Plot or Argument

• Prologue and Chapters I-II: an early fright and a guest

  The editor introduces the case from Doctor Hesselius's papers. Laura recalls the childhood visitor and the prick at her breast, learns of Bertha Rheinfeldt's death, and witnesses the carriage accident that leaves Carmilla at the schloss.

• Chapters III-IV: comparing notes and Carmilla's habits

  The girls discover that each dreamed of the other; Carmilla's languor, secrecy about her family, ardent speeches and refusal of prayer emerge, while peasant deaths and a funeral hymn provoke a strange fit.

• Chapters V-VI: a wonderful likeness and a strange agony

  The restored portrait of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (1698), matches Carmilla exactly. Carmilla speaks of a cruel love that nearly killed her, and Laura begins to have night visitations.

• Chapters VII-IX: descending, search and the doctor

  Laura dreams of a sooty black beast and a female figure, sinks into lassitude and melancholy, and the doctor finds the small blue mark. Carmilla disappears from her locked room one night and reappears unable to explain how.

• Chapters X-XIV: the General's story

  General Spielsdorf, aged by grief, recounts the masked ball, the countess who left her daughter Millarca with him, Bertha's decline, the quarrel of physicians and the Gratz doctor's sealed letter, and his watch that caught a black creature at her throat.

• Chapters XV-XVI: ordeal, execution and conclusion

  In the Karnstein chapel the General recognizes Carmilla and strikes at her; Baron Vordenburg finds the hidden tomb; the official exhumation and destruction of the vampire follow; Vordenburg explains the lore of vampires and his ancestor's concealment of the grave, and Laura describes her lingering memories.

Characters

• Laura, narrator

  A lonely, imaginative young woman in a remote Styrian castle who is drawn to Carmilla and slowly weakened by her.

• Carmilla (Mircalla, Countess Karnstein; also Millarca), the vampire

  A beautiful, languid girl whose anagrammatic names conceal a countess dead since the late seventeenth century.

• Laura's father, master of the schloss

  A kindly, rational English gentleman, formerly in Austrian service, who welcomes Carmilla and later joins the hunt for her tomb.

• General Spielsdorf, bereaved guardian

  An old soldier and friend of Laura's father whose ward Bertha died after a stay by a girl called Millarca.

• Bertha Rheinfeldt, the General's niece and ward

  An earlier victim, whose illness and death foreshadow Laura's.

• Madame Perrodon and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, governess and finishing governess

  Laura's good-natured Swiss and French companions, who provide everyday chatter and witness the household's alarms.

• Doctor Spielsberg, physician

  The local doctor who examines Laura, finds the mark below her throat and orders that she be watched constantly.

• Baron Vordenburg, scholar of vampires

  An odd, learned man whose ancestor concealed Mircalla's tomb and who uses his ancestor's papers to locate it.

• Doctor Hesselius, frame figure

  A physician whose case papers, according to the prologue, preserved Laura's narrative.

Lessons

• Evil that comes as a friend

  Carmilla arrives not as a monster but as a lonely, charming guest whom Laura longs to befriend. Le Fanu's horror lies in the slow recognition that affection, beauty and need can mask something that consumes. The novella asks readers to notice the signs Laura overlooks because she wants a companion.

  • What signs does Carmilla give, in her first weeks at the schloss, that something is wrong?
  • Why do Laura and her household ignore or explain away these signs?
  • How does Le Fanu make Carmilla sympathetic even while she is dangerous?

• Reason, science and the limits of explanation

  Laura's father explains the peasant deaths as fever and the doctors at first treat Bertha's decline as a disease. Only the old physician from Gratz, who is ridiculed by his colleague, recognizes that no natural illness matches the symptoms. The tale stages a contest between confident rationalism and older knowledge, and lets the reader judge which proves wiser.

  • Why does the General's first physician laugh at the doctor from Gratz?
  • How does Laura's father change from the start of the story to the end?
  • Why does the doctor from Gratz insist that his letter be read in the presence of a clergyman?

• Holy things and their enemies

  Carmilla avoids family prayers, is tormented by a funeral hymn, and is finally overcome in a ruined chapel. In contrast, Laura's childhood fright is calmed when a priest teaches her a prayer in Jesus' name. Le Fanu, the son of a Church of Ireland clergyman, uses these details to frame the vampire as a spiritual as well as a physical threat.

  • What prayer did the old man in the black cassock teach Laura as a child, and why does she remember it?
  • Why do you think the funeral hymn affects Carmilla so violently?

• Memory that will not be laid to rest

  The story ends not with triumph but with Laura's admission that Carmilla still returns to her memory in two forms, the playful girl and the fiend in the church. The narrative is itself a confession written for a physician, which suggests how hard it is to put an intense and consuming attachment behind oneself.

  • Why does Laura remember Carmilla with ambiguous alternations rather than simple horror?
  • Why do you think Le Fanu tells us in the prologue that Laura has since died?

Context

Vampire stories entered English literature through eighteenth-century reports of vampire scares in the Habsburg borderlands, which scholars such as Dom Augustin Calmet collected in 1746, and through John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and the penny serial Varney the Vampire (1845-47). Le Fanu sets Carmilla in Styria, a crown land of the Austrian Empire, and borrows details from these accounts: the official commission, the exhumation of an undecayed body, the stake, beheading and burning. Victorian readers were also interested in mesmerism, sleepwalking and nervous illness, and the framing figure Doctor Hesselius treats such cases as matters for a physician of the mind and spirit.

Composition

Carmilla was first published as a serial in the London magazine The Dark Blue from December 1871 to March 1872, with illustrations by David Henry Friston and Michael Fitzgerald. Le Fanu then included it as the last of five stories in In a Glass Darkly (London: Richard Bentley, 1872), where each tale is presented as a case from the papers of Doctor Hesselius. He died in Dublin in February 1873.

Reception

Carmilla preceded Bram Stoker's Dracula by twenty-five years, and critics generally see its influence on Stoker, a fellow Dubliner; a chapter cut from Dracula and published after Stoker's death as Dracula's Guest (1914) is set in Styria. The novella has been adapted many times for film and stage. Critics have discussed Carmilla's intense attachment to Laura as one of the earliest portrayals of a female vampire whose attraction is directed toward another woman; others emphasize its Irish Protestant author and read the decaying aristocratic house as a picture of a declining Anglo-Irish gentry. These readings coexist, and the text itself leaves much unexplained.

Comparisons

• dracula

  Stoker's novel shares Carmilla's pattern of a vampire aristocrat from the Habsburg borderlands, a victim who weakens night by night, a learned expert who explains the lore, and an exhumation with stake and beheading; Stoker exchanges Le Fanu's single narrator for a collection of journals and letters.

• the-vampyre

  Polidori's 1819 tale created the aristocratic vampire in English fiction with Lord Ruthven; Le Fanu keeps the aristocrat but makes the vampire a young woman and moves the story into an intimate domestic setting.

• poe-tales

  Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, like Carmilla, joins an ancient decaying family, a wasting young woman and a living death in the tomb; both are told by a narrator drawn into the horror they describe.

• frankenstein

  Both tales question whether science and reason can account for what happens to the body after death, and both end with the narrator unable to escape the memory of the creature.

• the-woman-in-white

  Collins's sensation novel, published a decade earlier, shares Carmilla's mysterious young woman in white, a confined heroine and a household that fails to see danger in its midst.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• Every hint in the first chapters that Carmilla is not what she seems: her sleeping hours, her silence about her family, her reaction to prayer and hymns.
• The names Carmilla, Millarca and Mircalla, and what they have in common.
• How Laura's own feelings toward Carmilla shift between affection and fear.
• The different explanations offered by Laura's father, the doctors, the General and Baron Vordenburg.
• How the prologue and the final paragraph frame the whole story as a remembered case.

Key terms and names

Schloss

German for castle; Laura's family lives in an old fortified house in the Styrian forest.

Styria

A mountainous province of the Austrian Empire, today a state of Austria and part of Slovenia.

Anagram

A word formed by rearranging the letters of another, as Carmilla and Millarca are made from Mircalla.

Frame narrative

A story enclosed within another, as Laura's account is presented through the papers of Doctor Hesselius.

Gothic

A mode of fiction marked by ancient houses, family secrets, the supernatural and mounting dread.

Exhumation

The digging up of a buried body, carried out here by an official commission.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension How does Carmilla come to stay at Laura's home, and what promise does her mother extract?
2. Comprehension What does the restored portrait of 1698 reveal?
3. Comprehension How does Baron Vordenburg know where the tomb of Mircalla is hidden?
4. Interpretation Why does Le Fanu make Laura isolated, with no friends her own age? How does this shape her response to Carmilla?
5. Interpretation The doctor from Gratz is laughed at by his colleague but proves right. What is Le Fanu suggesting about the limits of a purely scientific outlook?
6. Interpretation Why might Le Fanu end with Laura's ambiguous memories instead of with the destruction of the vampire?
7. Big Question How can a person tell the difference between a love that gives life and a possessive attachment that consumes it?

Faith Connections

• 2 Corinthians 11:14 (Scripture)

  Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Carmilla appears as a lovely, wounded guest, and her danger lies in her attractiveness.

• Leviticus 17:11 (Scripture)

  The life of the flesh is in the blood. The vampire's theft of blood is a theft of life itself, a counterfeit of the sacrifice Carmilla mocks when she says love needs blood.

• 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 (Scripture)

  Charity seeketh not her own. Carmilla's possessive, consuming devotion is the opposite of the love Paul describes.

• Athanasius, Life of Antony (Church Fathers)

  Athanasius describes demons approaching the hermit Antony in attractive and deceptive forms and fleeing before prayer and the name of Christ. Carmilla's beauty conceals her nature, and she cannot endure prayers or hymns.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: The doctor from Gratz reasons: Bertha's symptoms match no natural disease; her life will end within days unless the cause is stopped; therefore the cause must be sought outside ordinary medicine, with the help of a clergyman and a learned man.

Rhetorical device: foreshadowing. Laura's childhood dream of the beautiful visitor and the two needles anticipates Carmilla's arrival and the mark the doctor finds twelve years later.

Debate: Resolved: that Laura's father was right to welcome a stranger into his home on the strength of her mother's appeal.

Memory Work

fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.

Lord hear all good prayers for us, for Jesus’ sake.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Trace the signs of Carmilla's true nature through the first six chapters. Why do Laura and her father fail to read them? Use at least three quotations or scenes.

Comparison with Dracula: Compare Carmilla with Dracula. How do the two vampires gain access to their victims, and how do the two books depict the people who resist them?

Medical Lens

Carmilla is framed as a medical case: the prologue presents it from the papers of Doctor Hesselius, Le Fanu's physician of the uncanny, and the narrative records symptoms closely. Laura's decline proceeds through nightmares of a beast and a sensation of two needles at the breast, a pleasant cold thrill, lassitude, melancholy and an acquiescent wish for death, pallor and darkened eyes. Laura's father attributes the peasant deaths to some form of fever with its accompanying fancies, a reasonable explanation for a rural epidemic in the period. The General's story stages a quarrel between a skeptical physician and an older doctor from Gratz who concludes that no natural disease fits the symptoms; at the exhumation two medical men attest to respiration and heartbeat in the corpse, echoing the medical commissions sent to investigate eighteenth-century Habsburg vampire reports. Carmilla's own fits, described as convulsive and as hysteria, and her nightly somnambulism are given in the vocabulary of Victorian nervous medicine. Vordenburg's lore that a suicide can become a vampire reflects old European burial customs for suicides. Modern readers sometimes interpret Laura's illness as anemia or a wasting disease; such readings are interpretive and the text presents a supernatural cause.

• Chapter I, An Early Fright

  The six-year-old Laura wakes with a sensation as of two needles piercing her breast; the household searches the room and a doctor and priest attend her.

  Dreams Nightmares Vampirism Blood
• Chapter IV, Her Habits—A Saunter

  Laura reports the deaths of peasant women after dreams of being seized by the throat; her father attributes such fancies to fever; Carmilla suffers a convulsive fit at the funeral hymn.

  Fever Infection Hysteria
• Chapter VII, Descending

  Laura describes weeks of lassitude, languor, melancholy and pallor, and a gentle, not unwelcome sense of slowly sinking toward death.

  Melancholia Depression Sleep Insomnia
• Chapter IX, The Doctor

  Doctor Spielsberg questions Laura about the needle-like sensation and the feeling of strangulation, finds a small blue spot below her throat, and orders that she never be left alone.

  Physicians Doctors
• Chapter XIV, The Meeting

  The General's first physician ridicules the doctor from Gratz, who declares that no natural disease exhibits Bertha's symptoms and sends a sealed letter to be read before a clergyman.

  Physicians Doctors Death Dying
• Chapters XV-XVI

  Two medical men attest to breathing and heartbeat in the exhumed body; Vordenburg explains that a suicide may become a vampire and that the vampire's strength sustains itself on living blood.

  Physicians Doctors Suicide Vampirism Blood

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write Doctor Hesselius's case note on Laura's narrative, in the voice of a Victorian physician trying to account for what he has read.

• Dialogue

  Write the conversation between the General's two physicians after the old doctor from Gratz leaves, as each defends his view of the case.

• Essay

  Compare the vampire hunters in Carmilla and Dracula: what role do physicians, scholars and clergy play in each, and why?

• Poetry

  Write a poem in Laura's voice, years later, about the step she still imagines at the drawing-room door.

Further Reading

• In a Glass Darkly, J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  The 1872 collection in which Carmilla appeared alongside Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle and The Room in the Dragon Volant.

• Uncle Silas, J. Sheridan Le Fanu

  Le Fanu's 1864 novel of a young heiress in danger in a decaying house.

• Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland, W. J. McCormack

• Dracula's Guest, Bram Stoker

  Stoker's posthumously published story, set in Styria, often linked to Carmilla.