The Original Female Vampire: Carmilla and the Culture That Both Loves and Loathes Her

Words: Honora Quinn

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Vampires are back and in a big, big way. From the recent TikTokification of Twilight to the mockumentary hijinks of What We Do In The Shadows, to the small screen return of Anne Rice’s Interview with A Vampire, vampires are now more deeply ingrained than ever in the pop culture canon. 

Vampires, in popular culture’s view, are no longer the historical demons that bump in the night and steal away virginal girls. Now, they are the kinds of characters that pack theaters and fill the press, now more akin to pop culture gods. And at the center of it all, presiding over the cacophony of the culture a la Rachel McAdams’ Regina George in Mean Girls is Carmilla.

The Mother of Vampires herself, Carmilla has barely left the cultural narrative in the over 150 years since J. Sheridan Le Fanu first released the eponymous novella and has influenced countless other works of supernatural media. Carmilla is an early queer text. In it, readers follow a young woman, Laura, as she battles her ‘temptation’, i.e. her growing attachment and attraction, to Carmilla, a mysterious young woman who is later revealed to be a vampire. Through a series of letters, the story follows how a friendship formed between the women in the isolation of Laura’s palatial residence, and, later, how that friendship evolves into something explicitly more. However Le Fanu is clear that this relationship should be viewed as a monstrous one, painting the blatant queer desire as villainous and demonic. But now times have changed, and queer writers are able to tell their own stories and give queer characters the happy endings they’ve been owed for centuries, do we still need Carmilla? Has she overstayed her cultural welcome, and could we save her even if we tried? 
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In Bury Your Gays: History, Usage and Context, author Haley Hulan traces the origins of ‘Bury Your Gays’/’Dead Lesbian Syndrome’ from classic literature all the way to television in the 21st century. Carmilla, despite not being one of the featured pieces of media in Hulan’s work, is an additional literary stepping stone when approaching these dangerous tropes, as it predates the earliest work on the list (The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde) by 18 years. 

Hulan’s paper references The 100, a YA dystopian book series turned television series, plus a major relationship in The 100 between two women, Clarke and Lexa. In this universe, human life has seemingly been wiped out on Earth with the few survivors living in a space station circling the planet. Once the titular 100, led by Clarke, arrive planeside they learn that humanity is not truly gone in the form of the ‘Grounders’ whose military strategist is Lexa.  

Clarke and Lexa have numerous parallels to Carmilla and Laura, the most significant being the tragic ending. Clarke, like Laura is the protagonist, and Lexa, like Carmilla, is a powerful and dangerous outsider. In the end, the protagonist must live – at least live long enough to fulfil their role in the plot – and the other must die. 

The respective deaths of Lexa and Carmilla are ‘spectacles’ as Hulan outlines. Lexa catches a stray bullet meant for Clarke, and Carmilla is impaled into the bottom of a coffin – and in a way her death is saving Laura too. Both methods of death have phallic connotations and are used in the stories to ‘set the protagonists free’ from ‘unnatural’ desires while putting the women back in their place under the patriarchy. 

Now, when it first came out, most that read Carmilla would have just disregarded it as an odd work of fiction. Le Fanu was just telling another installment of Dr Hesselius’ bizarre adventures, his aim was to entertain even at the cost of the poor representation.

In The 100, however, 150 years later, Lexa’s death sparked backlash. The fan community came together to mourn this fictional death and lay the groundwork for actual change in media going forward in regards to queer characters and stories (and allowing queer creators to take charge behind the scenes). While far from a gothic retelling, Lexa and Clarke are cut from the same cloth as Carmilla and Laura. They are all victims of the plot, women whose very destruction came at the hands of men, both in universes, and as a result of the actions of the male creatives behind the works.

“They are all victims of the plot, women whose very destruction came at the hands of men, both in universes, and as a result of the actions of the male creatives behind the works.”

It is impossible to write a story that can stand the test of time. Despite the writers’ intentions, society and life will change in ways inconceivable to the creators. To be a work of art is to be a capture of the time that created you, regardless of setting in space and time. Le Fanu’s intention was to write a monster story, not one of queer love. And yet, Carmilla will continue to persevere despite its faults because future writers can learn from them, and improve upon the concepts. It is Carmilla’s (and Carmilla’s) imperfections that create the urge to set things right, to retell the story and give it a different ending. Its poor treatment of its queer subjects is perhaps the only reason why readers keep dragging it further and further into the future.

But unfortunately, Carmilla without that tragedy is forgettable, just another story that slowly ages into obscurity (how many of Le Fanu’s other Dr. Hesselius stories can you name?). It is because the story was forced into a man’s hands that people want to give Laura her voice back, and it is both characters’ deaths that cause the more optimistic rewrites. We will never be able to save Carmilla – Le Fanu doomed her from the moment she appeared on the page. But that doesn’t mean readers will stop trying, and that Carmilla and Laura don’t deserve a better ending.