Carmilla: A Critical Edition

Introduction: Meet Carmilla

xvii Introduction Meet Carmilla K AT H L E E N COST E L L O -SU L L I VA N First serialized in the journal The Dark Blue and published shortly thereafter in the short story collection In a Glass Darkly, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 vampire tale is in many ways the overlooked older sister of Bram Stoker’s later and more acclaimed work Dracula.1 Despite its acknowledged influence on the later text and its recognition as “the first really successful vampire story,” Carmilla is sometimes discounted as a minor work (Geary 1999, 19). This is because Le Fanu himself is often dismissed as a comparatively minor writer or pigeon-holed as a representative of the sensational/gothic subgenres, or because Stoker’s later text purportedly better exemplifies what one typically seeks in a vampire tale.2 Yet Carmilla has nonetheless remained on the critical radar, repeatedly drawing attention and analysis. Of course, the story’s very 1. For a reading that situates Dracula as a direct response to Carmilla, see Signorotti 1996. For another nod to the earlier tale’s influence on Stoker, see Miller 2006, esp. 7–8, 13. 2. Benson Saler and Charles A. Ziegler argue that Dracula is “more prototypical than Carmilla because its narrative features conform fully to the general structure of widely encountered monster-slaying stories whereas that is not the case for Carmilla” (2005, 220). xviii I N T R O D U C T I O N nature as a vampire tale alone generates interest, accounting for its frequent inclusion as an early example of the form in British fiction,3 but Carmilla has proven to have far more to offer than merely its vampiric credentials. The story’s potential as a political and/or cultural metaphor, its psychological resonances, its representations of gender and sexuality, and its unusual aesthetic and narrative characteristics, to name only a few areas of interest, repeatedly invite literary criticism, forcing scholars to return to this short, complex work again and again. This introduction traces the major movements of that critical history. It is, of course, as a vampire tale that Carmilla originally provoked such pointed interest. Beyond its significance purely as a sensational or entertaining figure in literature, the vampire fed a variety of metaphorical hungers in the wider Victorian literary imagination. According to Robert F. Geary, the increasing popularity of vampires (and of other supernatural creatures and events) from the mid–nineteenth century on can be read as signaling Victorian uncertainty in the face of a more scientific, less religious, and therefore less mysterious world: The specter of a chilling, purposeless materialism confronted many whose view of humanity and the world no longer was dictated by Christian doctrines. . . . [I]n this climate ghostly supernatural entities were for many no longer embarrassing reminders of dangerous superstitions; instead, the specters and weird events, now thoroughly detached from a Christian context, served as a refuge, if only a clandestine one, from the dominant materialistic scientism. (Geary 1999, 22) Vampires’ supernatural characteristics offered an oasis of mystery in a sea of increasing enlightenment and yet, uncannily, also a corresponding sense of disillusionment. In this respect, the traditional combination of a vampire’s simultaneous magnetism and repulsiveness 3. For example, Carmilla was included in a New Riverside edition entitled Three Vampire Tales, where it was referenced as one of “three classic representations of the vampire” (Williams 2003, back cover). Introduction xix arguably parallels the mixed feelings experienced by its Victorian contemporaries, who, even while reveling in their accomplishments and scientific breakthroughs, mourned the perceived loss of mystery and wonder that science and materialism were thought to bring. The aggressive foregrounding in Carmilla of the sciences—represented, for example, through Laura’s father and references to contemporary figures such as natural scientist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon—alongside the supernatural certainly suggests an engagement with such tensions in the novel.4 A similarly characteristic usage of the vampire by Victorians often investigated in Carmilla is the engagement with contemporary new discoveries in psychology and the social sciences. Hung-Jung Lee has argued that “Carmilla . . . expresses an increasing fear toward the end of the [nineteenth] century that . . . classifications [differentiating “men from women, ‘civilized’ Europeans from ‘primitive’ natives, moral individuals from corrupt ones”] could easily break down, or turn out to be ineffectual” and that the text thus ultimately frets over “the limits of the...