Essay by Natalia Mohar
Art by Alex Hoang
Monstrosity can be defined as “[s]omething repulsively unnatural, an abomination; a thing which is outrageously or offensively wrong” (OED, monstrosity 2a), but how does something come to be considered so abnormal and wrong as to become monstrous? Jack Halberstam claims that “[t]he monster functions as a monster … when it is able to condense as many fear-producing traits as possible into one body” and “be everything the human is not” (21, 22). However, in Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 Gothic novella, the essence of the eponymous vampire’s monstrosity does not necessarily correspond to Halberstam’s concept of the monster as “the perfect figure for negative identity” (22; emphasis added). Rather, Carmilla is monstrous because she both defies and conforms to societal expectations in a liminal state, blurring the line between supposedly fixed dichotomies such as male/female, human/animal, and life/death. Carmilla’s multifaceted liminality drives her monstrosity throughout the text, evoking repulsion and horror by unsettling Victorian notions of what is natural and right.
As a female displaying masculine traits and same-sex desire, Carmilla embodies a queer form of liminality that contributes to her being perceived as unnatural from a heteronormative perspective. The narrator Laura notes how Carmilla’s ways are “girlish” most of the time (Le Fanu 30), except when she breaks out into “mysterious moods” and gazes at her female companion with what seems to be “the ardour of a lover” (29, 30). Laura cannot understand this ‘conflicting’ behaviour and attempts to “form any satisfactory theory” that might reconcile Carmilla’s feminine appearance with her masculine passion and desire (30). First, she wonders if Carmilla’s “momentary breaking out of suppressed instinct and emotion” could be explained by “brief visitations of insanity” (30). By linking queer behaviour with psychopathy, Laura’s theory reflects how Western medicine began to pathologize “anyone who was not clearly heterosexual and who did not clearly ascribe to a strictly masculine or strictly feminine demeanour” in the nineteenth century (Thomas 142). Second, Laura questions if Carmilla is really “a boyish lover” seeking to court Laura while masquerading as a girl (Le Fanu 30), exemplifying how “same-sex desire often gets mapped back onto the heterosexual paradigm” (Thomas 149). In any case, whether Laura attributes Carmilla’s queerness to mental illness or deception, she believes it is abnormal. Thus, while adoring Carmilla when she behaves in a traditionally feminine and heterosexual manner, Laura also feels “fear and disgust” developing into “abhorrence” when Carmilla defies societal expectations as a liminal figure (Le Fanu 29). This revulsion at the ‘unnatural’ behaviour exhibited by Carmilla demonstrates how queer transgressions contribute to the formation of Carmilla’s monstrosity.
Furthermore, Carmilla’s queerness evokes anxiety by undermining the heteronormativity foundational to Victorian society, calling into question how natural it truly is. Amanda Paxton argues that in Carmilla, “the vampire’s spread and proliferation involves only female bodies” in a parasitic form of “parthenogenesis” that obviates the need for “male involvement” (177). Not only does Carmilla not need males to sustain and replicate herself, but she also takes on their role. For instance, Carmilla’s fangs penetrate Laura’s breast to extract her blood in a manner comparable to “sexual penetration” (Le Fanu 46; Hughes 194). The suggestion of the female vampire’s fangs performing a phallic function on another female is taboo because it disrupts traditional gender roles and implies homosexuality. While Carmilla’s implicit queer identity is not proven to be morally right (because she ultimately harms her partner/prey), it may nonetheless be more natural than Victorian society would care to admit, as sexual diversity exists in nature. For example, the Egyptian mongoose—an animal the Irish author of Carmilla may have been aware of since Dublin Zoo reportedly purchased a pair in 1862 (Paxton 177)—is recognized as being “both male and female in the same individual” (qtd. in Paxton 177). By resembling natural liminal organisms that defy a heteronormative belief in the gender binary and heterosexuality, Carmilla unsettles social norms and becomes monstrous.
The comparison to the Egyptian mongoose reflects another aspect of Carmilla’s monstrosity: the seemingly incongruous combination of her human form and beastly traits. For instance, the hunchback points out that Carmilla, an otherwise “beautiful young lady,” has “the tooth of a fish” (Le Fanu 35). It is not only the appearance but also the use of this tooth or fang that makes it animalistic, as Paxton notes that it serves a similar purpose as the ichneumon wasp’s ovipositor (174), infecting its prey “at the moment of penetration” and leaving it “without any defense against the subsequent, prolonged parasitic assault” (175). Moreover, Carmilla behaves like this wasp’s parasitic larva; as Paxton illustrates, Carmilla’s mother (the metaphorical wasp) deposits Carmilla (the wasp larva) in Laura’s schloss (the caterpillar larva) so she can feed on the “lifeblood” of her defenseless host (174). The parallel between Carmilla and the ichneumon wasp larva is strengthened when Carmilla remarks that “[g]irls are caterpillars” and that there exist “grubs and larvae … with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure” (Le Fanu 37). Like a parasitic larva, Carmilla’s nature compels her to deplete Laura, the metaphorical caterpillar, of life. Thus, Carmilla possesses animalistic traits that her human appearance largely camouflages, allowing her to go undetected even as she poses a threat to the people around her.
Like other literary vampires, Carmilla also possesses the ability to shapeshift, which further unsettles the demarcation between the human and the animal. This blurred line was particularly relevant in the nineteenth century when factors such as the publication of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and discourse on animal rights animalized humans and humanized animals (Ortiz-Robles 16), prompting a reconsideration of the human/animal binary. Mario Ortiz-Robles argues that the monster in late Victorian Gothic fiction “comes to occupy that indeterminate zone or border created between the human and the animal” (11). Carmilla embodies this indeterminate state through not only her animalistic traits, as previously explained, but also how she transforms into different beasts throughout the text. For example, she appears in Laura’s ‘dream’ as “a sooty-black animal” resembling “a monstrous cat” that paces like “a beast in a cage” (Le Fanu 46). When Carmilla/Millarca feeds on Bertha, General Spielsdorf witnesses her take the form of “a large black object, very ill-defined” that swells “into a great, palpitating mass” like a leech (86-87). These beastly forms terrify Laura and General Spielsdorf, and Carmilla promptly transforms back into her ‘human’ form in both instances. However, the external indication of her humanity—rather than being reassuring, which would imply that Carmilla’s animality is what makes her monstrous—is all the more disturbing because it drastically blurs the line dividing the human and the animal. In other words, applying Ortiz-Robles’ concept of the gothic monster to Carmilla, she becomes “monstrous through transformative processes” such as “human/animal metamorphoses” (11). Carmilla’s lack of a fixed form evokes repulsion and horror, especially in the context of a society already struggling with the increasingly ambiguous distinction between humans and animals.
Even in her ‘human’ form, Carmilla is still monstrously liminal because, as a vampire, she straddles the boundary between life and death, transgressing and hence exposing the limitations of what are perceived to be immutable laws governing the nature of existence. Carmilla, as Countess Mircalla, has supposedly lain buried in a coffin for a century and a half, yet when her ‘corpse’ is exhumed, it is still “tinted with the warmth of life,” emits “no cadaverous smell,” and has “a faint but appreciable respiration” with “a corresponding action of the heart” (Le Fanu 92). Carmilla’s resemblance to a living person in death evokes terror because it allows her to lurk among and continue to prey on the living undetected. Additionally, her ambiguous existence reflects nineteenth-century discourse on the nature of life and death. For instance, the philosopher George Henry Lewes argued that there is no clear way to differentiate “what is living and what is dead” because “matter (chemically conceived) cannot be properly considered ‘dead’” (Smith 162). Therefore, while Carmilla’s liminality as the undead may be uncanny, it does not seem to be wholly unnatural. Le Fanu’s text echoes this philosophical and scientific uncertainty when the doctor visiting Laura’s schloss remarks that “life and death are mysterious states” of which “we know little” (Le Fanu 37). The ambiguity about what, if anything, separates the living from the dead also speaks to the fear of premature burials. The horrific possibility of mistaking the living for the dead is implied when Carmilla’s ‘corpse’ is pierced through the heart and “utter[s] a piercing shriek” as if it were “a living person in the last agony” (92; emphasis added). Although Carmilla is presented as an undead vampire, this indication of life and her healthy appearance nevertheless cast doubt on the righteousness of her execution. Thus, Carmilla’s liminality is disturbing because it highlights the limited ability of Victorian science and medicine to understand life and death, suggesting the potential consequences arising from this uncertainty.
Carmilla evokes terror by transgressing valued boundaries demarcating the ‘normal’ from the queer, animal, and lifeless other. At the same time, she embodies aspects of the cisgender, heterosexual, human, and living that allow her to blend in, rendering her an imperceptible (and hence even more horrifying) threat to social order. It is not simply her otherness but her liminality that makes Carmilla monstrous. Through her indeterminate nature, Le Fanu’s Gothic novella explores the dubiousness of the binaries underlying Victorian society’s conservative ideals, raising the question of whether the liminal monster is truly unnatural and wrong, an uncertainty reflected in Laura’s ambiguous memories of and feelings toward Carmilla.
Works Cited
Halberstam, Jack. “Parasites and Perverts: An Introduction to Gothic Monstrosity.” Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Duke University Press, 1995, pp. 1-27. Duke University Press, doi.org/10.1215/9780822398073-001.
Hughes, William. “Victorian Medicine and the Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 186-201.
Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan. Carmilla: A Critical Edition, edited by Kathleen Costello-Sullivan, Syracuse University Press, 2013. Project MUSE, muse.jhu.edu/book/27101.
“Monstrosity, N., Sense 2.a.” Oxford English Dictionary (OED), Oxford UP, March 2024, doi.org/10.1093/OED/8906413205. Accessed 24 June 2024.
Ortiz-Robles, Mario. “Liminanimal: The Monster in Late Victorian Gothic Fiction.” European Journal of English Studies, vol. 19, no. 1, 2015, pp. 10-23, doi:10.1080/13825577.2015.1004922.
Paxton, Amanda. “Mothering by Other Means: Parasitism and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 28, no. 1, 2021, pp. 166-185, doi.org/10.1093/isle/isz119.
Smith, Andrew. “Victorian Gothic Death.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 156-169.
Thomas, Ardel. “Queer Victorian Gothic.” The Victorian Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion, edited by Andrew Smith and William Hughes, Edinburgh University Press, 2012, pp. 142-155.