[Editorial] The Complicated History of the Lesbian Vampire

“You will think me cruel, very selfish, but love is always selfish.” — Carmilla, Sheridan LeFanu, 1872

There is perhaps no monster in our western glossary of beasts more adaptable and ready to be an allegory than the vampire. Over centuries they’ve moved from primal undead corpses to impossibly beautiful lovers. They’ve been demons and animals, they’ve been teen heartthrobs and bad boys, they’ve been metaphors for our worst nature and Byronic heroes. They have also, on occasion, been lesbians. 

Sheridan LeFanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla lives in the shadow of the much more famous Dracula by Bram Stoker, but it actually predates that story by over 20 years. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence to suggest Stoker took many of his now commonplace vampire tropes from what he read in LeFanu’s story: the vampire as European nobility, the vampire hunter saving the day, the young maid suffering sexual advances from the vampire, sleepwalking as it relates to vampiric control, and the combination of Gothic horror and mystery story. 

The novella takes place in the Austrian territory of Styria where our protagonist Laura is staying with her father. One day, a seemingly ill young woman comes to stay with them while she recovers. Laura and the young woman, Carmilla, start an intense companionship that, in the night, seems to become sexual and even supernatural. As Carmilla’s strength returns, Laura’s wanes. It becomes clear that Carmilla is a vampire said to live in the area, several centuries old, and feeding on Laura both emotionally and physically. Only when vampire expert and hunter, Baron Vordenberg, locates Carmilla’s tomb and drives a stake through her heart does the parasitism end. 

On paper, it sounds like LeFanu is certainly making some kind of statement about female sexuality and, specifically, sapphic attachments between women. But, a closer study reveals a murkier picture. LeFanu’s protagonist, Laura, has come to be seen as a representation of Victorian women: lively, capable, and incredibly stifled by the bumbling men of her time. In fact, LeFanu goes out of his way to paint the men who surround Laura—her father, Baron Vordenberg—as rather distracted, unhelpful, and even a hindrance to her. Meanwhile, with Carmilla, she shares an intense bond and a strange commingling of attraction and repulsion. While it’s easy to read the story as LeFanu condemning sapphic relationships between women and female sexuality in general, it seems more nuanced than that. Carmilla has come to represent temptation itself, the dark side of human nature and human desire. Something the men in Laura’s life insist is evil but that Laura herself has a much more complicated relationship with. And, in the end, Laura never fully recovers from the events of the book, suggesting a loss of innocence and coming of age. These are the kinds of stories women didn’t have in LeFanu’s time. 

Since the original novella, Carmilla has popped up all over vampire media: Castlevania, Doctor Who, True Blood, The Mortal Instruments. She has been the star of her own adaptations in books, TV, and film. Perhaps the most recognizable piece of media to feature the character and her story is the Canadian web series Carmilla, starring Elisa Bauman as Laura and Natasha Negovanlis as the title character. Writer Jordan Hall reimagines the novella in a college dorm, portraying Laura and Carmilla as freshman roommates on a Nightvale-inspired campus run by a vampire cabal and other dark creatures. With several queer creatives both in front of and behind the camera along with a host of queer characters, the adaptation did more than modernizing the setting. It modernized the out-of-date commentary on queerness and feminity. Further, it contended with its own legacy in the indie-film adaptation The Carmilla Movie in a rather trippy way where the antagonist Elle Sheridan (Dominque Provost-Chalkey) represents the “Laura” of the original novella, resentful of the life she could not have.

What Carmilla and the many adaptations of the story ultimately tell us is that sexuality and how the queer community responds to its portrayal in media is not a monolith. Many find the original story incredibly damaging for queer women’s representation in culture. Others have found that LeFanu was giving female sexuality the ability to shine in a way it had not before. There’s no right answer in how to respond to it. But the many adaptations over the years give each new generation the ability to see layers, add to the mythos, and give one of literature’s most overlooked and misunderstood villains a chance to shine. 

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