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.

In Praise of Sapphic Decadence

Renée Vivien (1877-1909): The Muse of the Violets

The perverse lesbian was a central figure within decadent literature. An object of endless fascination for writers such as Baudelaire and Swinburne, she might almost be thought of as nothing other than a figure of the male porno-poetic imagination; i.e., a creature of artifice and obscenity shaped by and within desire on the one hand and fear and loathing on the other.    

But perhaps she appears most beautifully - and most controversially - in the work of expatriate English poet and female dandy-bohemian Renée Vivien. 

In Vivien's text, if the lesbian remains a species of fleur du mal very much marked by the misogyny and homophobia that runs through the work of the above male authors, she is, at the same time, radically and paradoxically reconfigured through "a utopian politics of Sapphic revival" and in this way provides a more affirmative and naturalistic (though no less fictional) conception of liberated female sexuality. In other words, "Vivien's decadent Sapphist is a shimmering, negative embodiment of the utopian possibility contained within a modern world in decline".

- See Elisa Glick, Materializing Queer Desire, (SUNY Press, 2009), p. 12.

This negative dialectics which finds value - even hope - in decadence will remind some readers of Adorno and others of Nietzsche. The point is that sickness, corruption, and perversity often serve to advance us as a species and a culture; that we need our decadent individuals (including alcoholic, anorexic, suicidal, sadomasochistic, lesbian poets like Renée Vivien) and not merely those healthy-living normal types who eat breakfast, go to the gym, work hard and preserve the status quo.