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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

Verified Quotes

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.

• 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.

• Chapter VII, Descending

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.