Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire story, “Carmilla,” published in 1872, was written almost a century after the earliest text considered here, and was also, unlike the other three texts, produced by a male author. In addition, the genre, part horror, part romance, and entirely gothic, is
dissimilar to the parody, realist novel, and künstlerroman explored heretofore. Nevertheless, the expectations regarding physical touch do not differ. It was also chosen because the novella includes more touching scenes between women than most. Indeed, critic Ellen Stockstill, in “Vampires and Panic in ‘Carmilla,’” writes that Carmilla and Laura “touch each other a lot - more than is usually appropriate in the heteronormative marriage plots that many Victorian love stories follow” (Stockstill 51). Stockstill is correct. In the short story, nearly two dozen such scenes occur, and those scenes are also marked by their aggressive physicality. To be sure, as a ghost story, it is no surprise that physicality should be marked and that everyday elements should become extraordinary in order to heighten the readers’ reactions. The genre, like sensationalist fiction, demands it. The many scenes of touch are all the more complex, however, because, as Faderman notes, “in 1872 . . . it was still conceivable that, aside from Carmilla's most
framework of romantic friendship” (288-9); thus, the many scenes of excessive affection seem to have a basis, and yet are uncomfortably strong nevertheless. But Laura’s ambivalent response to Carmilla’s aggressive emotional expression (noted by critic Arthur H. Nethercot as far back as 1949) helps to delineate both acceptable and unacceptable physical expression in Victorian culture.
Set in a border town in Austria, the teenage Laura is born of an English father and Styrian mother. Helping to raise her are Madame Perrodon, “a native of Berne” who speaks “French and broken English” (Le Fanu 6) and Mademoiselle De Lefontaine, a “finishing governess” who “spoke French and German” (6). The end result is a conglomeration, a “Babel” (6), a border- land of cultures and identities, which is compounded by the fact that the home of Laura and her father is located on the border of Austria and Hungary. Nonetheless, with her mother long since deceased, Laura and her father share a number of English customs. As Stockstill notes, “Laura and her father intentionally speak English, read Shakespeare, and have tea in the English way, refusing to adopt the language and culture of their neighbors” (49). Thus, though only half English by blood, Laura becomes the representative figure of young English womanhood in the story, and the mysterious Carmilla a representative of the Other, the non-English. Indeed, Laura emphasizes this fact when she writes that “I gathered from . . . chance hints that her native country was much more remote than I had at first fancied” (Le Fanu 31). Carmilla’s habitus is making itself felt to Laura as that which is remote, distant, strange, and different.
In the story, when Carmilla arrives under strange circumstances following a carriage accident, Laura and her father welcome the newcomer into their home at Carmilla’s mother’s request. But Laura has met Carmilla before, in a “dream,” when Laura was only a child. Their intimate physicality first appears in this “dream,” when Laura sees a,
very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. . . . She caressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. (7)
From the very beginning of the tale, then, the reader learns that Carmilla’s touch is both soothing and dangerous, welcomed and rejected. The same will be true when Carmilla and Laura meet again, when Laura is a teenager, and she recognizes in her strange houseguest that “very pretty face” from her dream. Why is Carmilla’s touch so ambiguous? At the literal level, Carmilla is a predator who soothes her victims into complacency before feasting upon them. But
symbolically, Carmilla is also transgressing English expectations regarding physical touch, which makes her physicality – a pleasant gesture of intimacy when appropriately deployed, according to English standards – into something suspicious and fear-provoking. Critics Willian Veeder and Arthur H. Nethercot claim respectively, for example, that “even the freedom allowed to, say, female cousins would not condone the intense physicality of Carmilla’s advances” (210), and “there is something basically sinister in the sweetness and friendliness of . . . Carmilla. [She is] so desirous of establishing physical contact . . . that suspicion is immediately aroused” (35). According to English standards, as chapter one of this work showed, Laura must show herself to be loving and warm-hearted to merit the distinction of the ideal feminine young woman, and this is easily done through the deployment of touch. At the same time, when that affection does not attend to the tacit rules of touch – because it is not gentle, restrained, or infrequent – Laura must reject it or risk losing her status as a proper middle-class English woman. This is exactly the
dynamic which ensues in the course of the text, and helps to explain the ambivalence surrounding Carmilla’s affectionate physicality.
Initially, Laura shows her warm-heartedness by initiating affectionate touch with
Carmilla. Coming into Carmilla’s room just after her accident, Laura writes, “I took her hand as I spoke. . . . She pressed my hand, she laid hers upon it, and her eyes glowed, as, looking hastily into mine, she smiled again, and blushed” (23-4). The two girls appear to be about the same age. Reading status otherwise is difficult since Carmilla is under strict orders from her mother not to communicate anything regarding her family or background, but the fact that Carmilla and her mother were traveling in a carriage suggest that Carmilla is certainly not of the lower classes (15- 8). Camilla has just been in a traumatic accident when her carriage overturned, however, so Laura’s warm greeting to her new houseguest, taking her hands because, as she writes, “the situation made me eloquent, and even bold” (23), is appropriate. But Carmilla quickly heightens the intensity of the moment, when “She held [Laura] close in her pretty arms for a moment and whispered in [her] ear, ‘Good night, darling, it is very hard to part with you, but good night’” (25). The two young women have only been introduced within hours, so while exigent circumstances might allow Laura to grasp the hand of a prospective new friend, Carmilla’s response – embracing Laura, and whispering passionate endearments in her ear – is suspiciously intense.
Still, their touches in some ways seem to follow a course common to romantic friends. Laura loves to take down Carmilla’s “wonderful” and “magnificent” hair, “fold and braid it, and spread it out and play with it” (27). Carmilla, in turn, “used to place her pretty arms about [Laura’s] neck . . . laying her cheek to [Laura’s] (29). Such gestures have a pretty innocence and warmth: the hair, the cheeks, and the arms are not distinctively erogenous zones, and so these
touches between friends are constituted by the requisite distance and restraint expected of friends.
But Laura quickly recognizes that something is not right. She states that Carmilla would “press me more closely in her trembling embrace, and her lips in soft kisses gently glow upon my cheek” and that “from these foolish embraces . . . I used to wish to extricate myself” (29). In other words, while Laura maintains a gentle touch and a respectful distance of sorts in her
affectionate touch – grasping a hand, braiding the hair – Carmilla reciprocates not in kind, but by decreasing the distance between the two as when she presses Laura “more closely in her
trembling embrace,” and introducing lips and glowing kisses, by no means as innocuous as hands and hair. Her touches are distinctively unrestrained. The otherness of Carmilla, in literal terms her vampirism, but also her different cultural upbringing, are playing out in her bodily hexis, and Laura, raised according to a different code, is disturbed by the unfamiliarity, the unpredictability. She thinks of her friend as “strange” (29) and “strove in vain to form any satisfactory theory” of Carmilla’s “extraordinary manifestations” (30). Laura seeks to mitigate her agitation at the differences her friend exhibits by explaining and justifying Carmilla’s unusual behavior which, she says, “embarrassed, and even frightened me” (42).
Baron Vordenburg, who eventually destroys Carmilla, tells Laura and her father that “one sign of the vampire is the power of the hand” (96). He states that their hands are extremely powerful, and leave a numbness where they have grasped a human. But Carmilla’s hands also have the power to signify her otherness more symbolically. Her grasping, trembling embraces show her to be unpredictable, and ultimately dangerous, long before Laura learns that Carmilla is
a vampire. In this way, the text of “Carmilla” presents the unrestrained hand as dangerous to social order and to the well-bred and civilized classes.35