Carmilla Part 2

Good Evening everyone,

This book was very good. This book “Carmilla” was very interesting to read because this is one of my first vampire novels to actually breakdown and read one fully instead of skimming the back and putting it back on the bookshelf. “Carmilla” was new to me because I now the basic things about vampires like garlic, sun-light, being immortal, etc., but “Carmilla actually went into further details than usual stories about vampires. For this blog, I am going to talk about the essay “The Vampire in the House: Hysteria, Female Sexuality, and Female Knowledge in Le fanu's 'Carmilla.” By Tamar Heller. Then go on about the book.

The essay “The Vampire in the House” is was a very 'intriguing' piece of writing to read. To start off, I would say that this essay was very hard to read because I could barely follow it. Yet when you catch on to what they are talking about then you understand what they are talking about. For example:

“One may ask, of course, whether a genteel young Victorian girl could have recognized homoeroticism if she had seen it. (Queen Victoria, after all, reportedly refused to believe that such a thing existed.) “Carmilla” still predates the emergence of a clearly defined category of lesbianism by several decades. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering, as Sara Putzell-Korab reminds us, that, even in the presumed heyday of the “female world of love and ritual,” there was some anxiety about close relationships between young women. This anxiety sprang from a fear, even if as yet only partially articulated, of the sexual implications of suck friendships, while also belying a wariness about the formation of emotional bonds that might hinder a girl's entry into the world of heterosexuality (Putzell-Korab 180-85”

“Such an attempt to be a detective – as the apparently passive heroines of female Gothic try to do-threatens to decenter the authority of male medical detectives. Laura's attempt at detection is most visible in the comment where she wonders whether Carmilla is a boyish lover, but an even more revealing moment where her desire to know wars with her desire to cover up is a perplexed comment on her “trembling” response to Carmilla's “hot kisses”: “Are we related? What do you mean by all this? I remind you perhaps of some one whom you love; it you must not, I hate it; I don't know you-I don't know myself when you look and talk so (292).

These two examples are telling about the story Carmilla in the relations to lesbianism. One strong point in this novel is lesbianism. Carmilla and Laura in this story seem to have a “connection” and Laura thinks that she might be in love with Carmilla yet, it turns out that Carmilla is actually a vampire and was drinking/sucking Laura's blood almost every night hence the drained feeling of Laura in the morning and to Carmilla, Laura was just another person that she could victimize.

In the ending of this book is very good. At the end, 'Carmilla' now known as 'Mircalla' has finally 'died'. This book overall would be a 9 out of 10 because of the ;dfakdalfd in this novel This book overall would be a 9 out of 10 because of the foreshadowing in this novel. During the book, the novel gave off that something was going to happen and that something was wrong with Carmilla because of her unusual habits like sleeping most hours of the day, etc.

--Sharon