Reflections on the Lovely Lady Christabel

Lorrie Millington: Lady Christabel (1983)

 

 

I.

 

I have to admit, my knowledge of the English Romantic poet Coleridge is fairly limited; I know he was pals with Wordsworth; I know he helped introduce the English-speaking world to German idealism; and I know he was fond of opium. 

 

If pushed, I suppose I would also admit to knowing he was an influential literary critic and dreamed at one time of establishing an egalitarian community on pantisocratic lines. 

 

Oh, and I know of course that he's the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Kubla Khan (completed in 1797, but not published until 1816). 

 

However, it's the long narrative poem Christabel that fascinates me at the moment and which I would like to briefly reflect on here ... 

 

II.

 

Christabel consists of two parts; the first writen in 1797 and the second in 1800. [1]

 

The story concerns a central female character - Christabel - who one day goes into the woods to pray by a large oak tree. There, she encounters a strange young woman named Geraldine, who claims to have been abducted from her home by men on horseback. 

Sympathetic to Geraldine's plight, she takes her home with her and they spend the night together, sharing a bed (this despite a number of supernatural signs that Christabel might have been well-advised to take as warnings). 

Whilst Christabel remains somewhat enchanted by Geraldine, she gradually begins to realise the latter's malign (possibly inhuman) nature. Her father, however, is completely enthralled by the latter and orders a grand procession to celebrate her rescue.

 

Somewhat frustratingly, that's where the (unfinished) poem stops; it appears that Coleridge couldn't quite make up his mind about how to end it.    

 

III.

 

This poem appeals to me for its queer gothic character, founded upon a number of perverse and supernatural elements, and I'm not surprised to learn that Shelley and Byron were both obsessed with Christabel. If it gave the former nightmares, the latter was delighted by its sapphic undertones (the relationship between Christabel and Geraldine is implicitly sexual).   

 

Other writers who have fallen under the poem's spell include Edgar Allan Poe [2], Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu [3], Renée Vivien [4], and A.S. Byatt, who names a fictional romantic poet Christabel in her award-winning novel Possession (1990).  

 

Unsurprisingly, Christabel also became favourite reading amongst feminists; the suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, for example, named her daughter in honour of the poem's eponymous heroine (though she might have been more appropriately named Geraldine in my view) [5].   

 

 

IV.

Finally, a brief note on the image used to illustrate this post ...

Initially, I was going to reproduce Julia Margaret Cameron's 1866 photograph named after Coleridge's poem and depicting the titular character [6]. 

But then I remembered that in an old photo album kept in a box in the attic, I still had a picture sent to me by the artist, model, dancer, and writer Lorrie Millington [7] over forty years ago, of a mannequin named Lady Christabel with whom she shared a house in Leeds. 

 

In the summer of 1984, I began writing a 20,000 word novella entitled 'The Girl in the Mystery Castle', about Miss Millington and her relationship with the lovely Lady Christabel and it has always been my intention to one day complete this tale.

 

However, as this now seems very unlikely, I have decided to share the photo here ...

 

If one looks closely enough, one will see that Christabel is wearing a wig that has been braided pirate style and has an Apache war stripe painted across her nose, the reason being that Lorrie and I were both Ant People back in the early-mid '80s.   

 

Notes

 

[1] Coleridge planned on adding three further parts, but these were never completed. The work was published in a pamphlet in 1816, alongside Kubla Khan and another poem, The Pains of Sleep (written 1803). Christabel can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here. 

 

[2] Poe's poem 'The Sleeper' (1831) is said to be inspired by Christabel. It can be read on the Poetry Foundation website: click here.

 

[3] Le Fanu based the character of Mircalla, the Countess Karnstein, on Geraldine. See my post of 13 April 2020 on the topic of vampiric lesbianism in which I discuss Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872): click here.  

[4] Vivien's 1904 novel L'Etre Double, a lesbian romance, was also inspired by Coleridge's poem Christabel. See my post of 9 October 2013 in praise of sapphic decadence in which I discuss the work of Renée Vivien: click here.

 

[5] I'm not a fan of the militant idealism and the terrorist tactics advocated by Pankhurst, which invariably collapse into the black hole of fascism. See the post dated 17 February 2024 on suffragettes and the BUF: click here. 

 

[6] For more details and to view the photograph, please visit the Met Museum website: click here. And for a post dated 23 June 2023 written with reference to Cameron's photography, click here.  

 

[7] For a post dated 18 April 2015 written in memory of Lorrie Millington, click here.

Vampiric Lesbianism 2: Dracula's Cinematic Daughters

Gloria Holden as as Countess Marya Zaleska in Dracula's Daughter (1936)

Ingrid Pitt as Mircalla Karnstein (aka Carmilla) in The Vampire Lovers (1970)

Catherine Deneuve as Miriam Blaylock in The Hunger (1983)

Although the pale-skinned, (usually) dark-haired figure of the sapphic vampire - or, if you prefer, vampiric lesbian - first emerged in its modern form in a short novel written by an Irishman in 1872, it established itself as a popular and pervy cinematic trope in the twentieth-century ...

Vampyr (dir. Carl Theodore Dreyer, 1932)

Danish director Carl Theodore Dreyer was the first to (loosely) adapt Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla for the big screen in his 1932 film Vampyr. Regrettably, however, he chose to ignore the lesbian aspects of the work, although he did succeed in making a controversial film full of disorienting visual effects (one that was hated by most critics and audiences at the time, but which is now considered far more positively).


Dracula's Daughter (dir. Lambert Hillyer, 1936)

It was Dracula's Daughter that gave moviegoers the first hints of lesbianism in a vampire film - despite the Hays Code! In one particularly memorable scene, the title character, played by the English-born actress Gloria Holden, preys upon an attractive innocent she has invited to her home under the pretence of wanting to use her as a model for a painting. As the young girl starts to strip, the Countess moves in for the kill. Universal even played up this aspect of the film in some of their original advertising, using the tag line: Save the women of London from Dracula's Daughter!


Blood and Roses (dir. Roger Vadim, 1960)

Roger Vadim's take on the story of Carmilla, entitled Et mourir de plaisir (1960) - released in the English-speaking world as Blood and Roses - shifts the action to modern Italy and plunges us into the midnight zone beyond the grasp of reason. Starring the lovely Danish actress Annette Strøyberg, the film cheerfully explores (and exploits) the erotic aspects of Le Fanu's novella (although most of the queer sexual content was cut for its US release). It perhaps should've been subtitled Et Dieu… créa la lesbienne.


The Vampire Lovers (dir. Roy Ward Baker, 1970)

Perhaps my favourite film of this genre is The Vampire Lovers (1970), a typically camp and raunchy Hammer Films production, starring Ingrid Pitt in the lead role (an actress whose very name evokes pleasurable memories amongst those of a certain generation) and Madeline Smith as her nubile lover-cum-victim (the fact that Peter Cushing and George Cole are also in the cast is hardly here-or-there). It was the first (and arguably best) in a series of lesbian vampire flicks from the Hammer studios known as the Karnstein Trilogy.      


The Hunger (dir. Tony Scott, 1983)

A cult favourite amongst goths as well as lesbians, The Hunger is an erotic horror starring Catherine Deneuve as the incredibly ancient (but still sexy, stylish and sophisticated) vampire, Miriam Blaylock, and Susan Sarandon as Dr. Sarah Roberts, a gerontologist who falls under her spell, even though she's slightly repulsed at the thought of drinking blood in order to gain immortality. Obviously wanting to love the film, but not quite able to do so, Camille Paglia regards The Hunger as a failed masterpiece that mistakenly focuses on violence rather than sex, thus making it a little crude and pedestrian in places.*     


Whether these films help or hinder the rights of non-fictional (and non-vampiric) women - particularly those outside of the heterosexual mainstream - is debatable; they tend to suggest, for example, that lesbianism is the result of a corruptive and malign influence and it's pretty clear that they were not made primarily for the enjoyment of gay women, but, rather, for a straight male audience excited by the thought of girl-on-girl action and a bit of bloodshed.

However, it's also clear that there are many women - gay, straight, queer and trans - who identify with mysterious and powerful undead figures such as Dracula's daughter and find something strangely liberating in the aesthetics of evil.           

* See: Camille Paglia, Sexual Personae, (Yale University Press, 1990), p. 268.

For a trailer to Dracula's Daughter (1936), click here.

For a trailer to Blood and Roses (1960), click here.

For a trailer to The Vampire Lovers (1970), click here.

For a trailer to The Hunger (1983), click here.

For part one of this post on vampiric lesbianism, with reference to Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872), click here.

Vampiric Lesbianism 1: Carmilla (How Beautiful She Looked in the Moonlight!)

Illustration by David Henry Friston 

for Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872)

I. 

19th-century Irish writer Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu may not today be a household name, but the fact remains his ghost stories and horror books were central to the development of queer gothic fiction in the Victorian era and he is rightly celebrated within lesbian circles for his novella Carmilla (1872); a romantic tale of the relationship between the title character, the alluring Countess Karnstein - who happens to be a vampire - and the young female narrator, Laura:

"Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, 'You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever'."  [1]

It's not exactly D. H. Lawrence, but, like many others who grew up watching Hammer horror films, I can't resist a bit of fantasy lesbianism of this kind; i.e., what might be described as sapphism with added bite and often involving the seduction of (presumably) heterosexual young women by predatory lesbian vampires.    

II.

Carmilla, it is interesting to note, pre-dates Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) by a quarter of a century and the latter admitted his indebtedness to Le Fanu - as have many later writers, though, of course, Le Fanu himself drew upon several earlier works, thereby demonstrating the intertextual nature of literature in which ideas, like vampires, feed off other ideas, in a perverse and unholy orgy of inspiration and bloodsucking.  

Having said that, I think we can concede that the character of Carmilla is the prototype for a legion of vampiric lesbians; she selects exclusively young and pretty female victims and isn't adverse to becoming emotionally (and, if given half-a-chance, sexually) involved with those she puts the bite on; she has a powerful physical presence that many find irresistable; she is able to change human form into that of an animal (in her case, a large black cat); she sleeps in a coffin; she can only be killed with a stake through the heart, etc.   

Whether this work - and others like it - help or hinder the rights of lesbians living in the real world who don't happen to have the charms, fangs, and supernatural powers of Carmilla, is debatable. But I can cerainly understand why many women have embraced the latter and bought into the darkly romantic ideas of vampirism and satanism that flourished in the late 19th-century Decadent movement - there is something strangely empowering in the aesthetics of evil and in openly declaring oneself against nature.   

However, there's also a downside to reactivating all the old stereotypes to do with both femininity and homosexuality. It's certainly worth remembering that the perverse lesbian given to us by poets such as Baudelaire and Swinburne and belonging to the (male) pornographic imagination, is shaped by desire but marked by misogyny and homophobia. 

In other words, I'm not entirely convinced that the fictional figure of Carmilla the vampire - or even the utopian politics of Renée Vivien embodied within her Sapphic verse - is enough to counter the profound fear and loathing for otherness that characterises morally and sexually straight society.  

Notes

[1] Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla, (1875), chapter IV.

The above work is available to read as an ebook thanks to Project Gutenberg: click here.

To read part two of this post - on Dracula's cinematic daughters - click here.