Her Habits- A Saunter

Abby Murphy

Aspects of Horror and the Fantastic in Carmilla

Out of the all short stories that fall under the horror genre, one of the more renown works is Joseph Sheridan La Fanu’s, Carmilla. This short story contains everything that defines a classic horror tale. One can even extrapolate further to classify Carmilla as art-horror. It first helps to look at what defines a written work as art- horror.

Noel Carroll states that art-horror is, “ identified as narratives and/or images predicted on raising the affect or horror in audiences.” Carroll then goes on to stress that horror is primarily emotion based. Horror is evoked by two emotions-fear and disgust. Horror is induced in short stories and novels when something unnatural invades our natural world. This can be typified by the presence of a monster of some sort -vampire, werewolf, etc. Not only must there be a monster, the monster must make the main character(and consequently the audience) feel revolt and disgust. This entity tends to be a violation against nature and soon comes to represent the battle that exists between good and evil. The monster also tends to go against social boundaries and is associated with being impure and unclean. The typical human response to such a creature is physical agitation( tension, cringing, shuddering, recoiling, paralysis, nausea, and sometimes screaming). This physical agitation then gets translated into an emotional state(horror). As an audience, we might be aware that what we are reading is fictional, yet we easily come to view the protagonist under threat of the monster as someone worth identifying with. Art-horror tends to bring out biological responses that not only stem from the need for self-preservation, but the need for preservation of our fellow man too.

Carmilla, is a tale of that would have certainly been scandalous in the days of La Fanu. In a nutshell, it’s basically a story about a lesbian vampire that’s in the process of finding her next meal/lover. A girl by the name of Laura is one of the main characters. She lives in Styria with her father in a countryside castle. Little entertainment by way of visitors ever happens at her lonely, country abode. However, one day a foreign carriage crashes outside the front gates and we are introduced to Carmilla. Carmilla ends up staying at the castle for an extended period of time while her mother is off handling urgent business. Laura quickly notices that Carmilla looks an awful lot like the woman who visited her one night in her childhood nightmare. The encounter with the unknown woman was terrifying and painful, yet Laura ends up liking Carmilla off the bat. They find that they have much in common and Carmilla is of extremely beautiful countenance. Eventually, Laura begins to have strange visits in the night from something and village girls in the town are dying from an undetermined cause. The truth about Carmilla being a vampire later comes due to a friend of Laura’s father. Carmilla is then hunted down by the townspeople and staked through the heart.

Carmilla is an art-horror drama for numerous reasons. Carmilla’s character is one that causes fear, revolt, and disgust once the audience comes to realize who she is. Even before the moment of discovery, Carmilla was held in suspect just because of the mere fact that she looked like the woman who visited Laura in childhood. Laura would even feel a nervous chill when she was in Carmilla’s presence and noticed that whenever she felt at her weakest, Carmilla seemed stronger. This yo-yo effect had an emotional and physical toll on Laura. Her health suffered when she was around Carmilla. Once Carmilla’s identity was revealed, Laura’s emotional outlook then proceeded to one of total disgust, fear, and horror. Carmilla does not evoke disgust based on her appearance. She had strangely beautiful facial features and knew how to verbally charm Laura. Laura would feel overcome with passion, adoration, and love whenever she was in Carmilla’s presence. They established a very close and strong bond early on in the plot. However, as we’d soon come to find out, Carmilla was a wolf in sheep’s clothing. Part of the reason why her identity remained a secret for so long is because she was able to blend in with normal people. Likewise, human beings are naturally drawn to beautiful things( exterior and interior) and Carmilla was said to be striking by all those who met her. Carmilla was at the end of the day, a perfect predator. She was able to seductively lure her victim in willingly and was met with little resistance.

Carmilla was also an unnatural creature that was infringing on the natural world. Everything about her existence violated the laws of nature. Vampires are what Carroll refers to as a type of horror fusion. Vampires are both living and dead. They must slowly extinguish the life of others in order to keep themselves living. Not only just living, but living potentially for all eternity. Unless they are stopped that is. The natural order to things is that we must age and die. Vampires go against the laws of nature by stealing the life of those that abide by natural order. Carmilla was also much worse in some ways than the typical vampire because she violated the social norms of the time. Lesbian love was frowned upon, and made her character all the more thematically forbidding. Parallels are drawn between vampires and a sexually charged atmosphere to begin with, but a lesbian vampire only enhances this image further. This is a violation against the normal sexual tendencies expected for a young woman. Sexual perversion is oftentimes associated with impurity and uncleanness. Again impurity and uncleanness, no matter the source, is part of what makes up the horror genre.

Additionally, Carmilla is a story that falls under the classification of fantastic/marvelous. The fantastic/marvelous is classified by thinking initially that there are naturalistic explanations for abnormal incidents, but towards the end of a plot there’s the conclusion that the incidents are supernatural in origin. Carmilla is not thought to be the cause of Laura’s ailments, childhood haunting, and the reason why townspeople are dying. These are all explained away by saying that there is disease and an overactive imagination to blame. The resolution of the story verifies that there is, however, a supernatural force to blame for all the town and Laura’s hardships.

In conclusion, the Carmilla tale not only typifies the art-horror and fantastic genre, it exceeds expectations by additionally being quite provocative, weird, and suspenseful. It has no true explanation at the end for why Carmilla singles out her particular victim, and it leaves open the fact that there might be are other vampires still roaming the country(Carmilla’s family, servants, ex-lovers, etc.) Horror therefore has a chance to live on in the minds of those readers most susceptible to their own imagination. The feeling of cosmic fear is perfectly maintained throughout the story and the conclusion still leaves one feeling suspended between two emotions. Relief that Carmilla met her demise, but questioning uncertainty that the story might not truly be over for long. Carmilla may be deceased, but she will live on in the imaginations of readers for years to come, making this the ultimate art-horror story.