Review: Carmilla - Sheridan Le Fanu
The thematic predecessor to Bram Stoker's Dracula demands a certain level of respect when reading. While reading, I noticed a certain awareness in the text, and foresight to questions a future audience would ask. The format and style was highly influential, using epistolary segments at the start and end and giving a deceased person's account of a strange encounter.
The story was originally published as a serial in a magazine, The Dark Blue, in 1871, ending in 1872. This initially put me off, having no shortage of experience reading this type of book. What first came to mind was Great Expectations, which, ironically, greatly underwhelmed my expectations. But this novel was rather short, and unlike other serialised stories, it was hard to find anything that told the author was swayed by an audience's response or criticism, as was often the case for such works. Instead, I believe the more shocking aspects of the novel remained constant an true to themselves: for example the criticism of bourgeoise attitudes against the poor and disabled were vocal and unabashed. The predatory nature of vampires, feeding not only on the blood but the hospitality of their neighbours. It's presented as both natural and necessary that ancient houses and families go extinct so the new generations can evolve into caring, scientific, generous people, exemplified by the protagonist's father and his household.
It was refreshing to find such shameless critical elements in a novel born long after the heyday of Romanticism and the Gothic, when most popular works remained centred around the aristocracy and landed gentry. To find genuine monsters be made of them was outright shocking, but that's not to say it was a bare-faced Marxist text. In fact, it could be read as a simple distancing from the past, a commentary on human decency and empathy and vailed advocacy for scientific advancement. Influences and inspirations drawn from the Irish famine weren't missed, either.
Though I was surprised to some extent to see many vampire tropes in the story, the issue of thresholds was approached in a very unique way. Instead of simply standing in the doorway and using vampiric allure to be let in, the vampires orchestrated a dramatic backstory, using upper class flare and allusions to distant royalty, that ensured the protagonist's household not only felt inclined but obligated to lend three months of their hospitality to a stranger. The vampiric allure wasn't totally gone, however. Once the initial connection was made, Carmilla devolved into mysticism and Romantic allegories as she preyed on the protagonist. Her analogy about girls being as caterpillars in life, and butterflies after death, sang of a promise of elevation to a higher state, as Carmilla herself was described as very beautiful and ethereal.
I read this whole book on two 2-hour train trips, and the other people I was with would make fun of me for the faces I made. I was confused at the vampires' intentions. Did Carmilla mean to make the protagonist into a vampire as well? Or did she simply take advantage of her household's standing to prey on their subjects, then would have turned her bloodlust to her and moved on?
The ambiguousness of the vampire's ultimate goal gave rise to a feeling of displacement. The vampires don't have a name, land, or people anymore. They infiltrate society masked and under false pretenses. They are a dying breed struggling to find and keep a foothold on a rapidly changing world. Tragic, in a sense, that they were born out of the misplaced souls of suicide victims: locked in a world they initially tried to escape.
I was pleasantly surprised by what I read. The pace was swift and engaging, and it was easy to forget the chapters didn't follow one after the other in original publication. The influence of the novel is undeniable, shaping one of the most popular subgenres in literary history. Therefore, it gets a 5/5 from me.