Of Carmilla’s soothing lullabies, Laura says, ‘I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. I had no distinct thoughts about her while such scenes lasted, but I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence’ (Ryan, 1994: 90). In a way, the author describes nothing other than sexual awakening, but the excitement is tumultuous because it is uncanny: as the horror pushes through the unconscious, Laura becomes familiar with a desire that has lain dormant within her and yet, that is destabilising in its forceful surfacing.
This immense, disturbing power is what is mostly relevant when Carmilla is analysed as the vital literary ancestor to Dracula and when the vampire stories that followed these two tales are analysed as parts of an ever-evolving whole. While Polidori ends his tale on the high note of an epiphany (‘Lord Ruthven had disappeared, and Aubrey’s sister had glutted the thirst of a VAMPYRE!’ [Ryan, 1994: 24]), Le Fanu concludes his novella with the melancholic, languid suggestion that, despite the dreadful denouement, Carmilla is very much missed (‘to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to my memory with ambiguous alternations […] and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door’ [Ryan, 1994: 137]).
The dual disquieting nuance here (which was not present in The Vampyre) is one that shall return much later in horror tales and movies apparently as unrelated as Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker’s Dracula and The Silence of The Lambs: we do not want to wake up from the nightmare because the parallel reality, however gruesome, is preferable to our own potential destiny. What comes as a form of consolation to humans is the implication that there is a possibility of life after death, regardless of how hellish it may turn out to be.
In a sense, this is Carmilla’s legacy: not merely the psychoanalytic suggestion that humans are imperfect beings likely to be seduced by their own nightmares but especially the promise that a Dantesque afterlife is immensely more preferable than stepping into eternal oblivion. Carmilla’s chilling episodes, unforgettable for their eeriness and for their blend of other-worldly innocence and violence on the cusp of tearing through purity, are crowned by a far more disconcerting conclusion: the existence of a spectral desire for Carmilla, epitomised by Laura’s expectant hope that she may still be lightly stepping by the drawing-room door. It is therefore the complex (obscene, surprising and aberrant) relation between Carmilla’s power and Laura’s desire that becomes the springboard for Dracula, where the relationships between the Count, his concubines, Jonathan, Lucy and Mina are multi-faceted and originate a surprisingly effective new narrative.
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