Summary
Prologue
An aide to Doctor Hesselius has written a note to accompany the Doctor’s essay on the subject that this manuscript discusses. The aide will not omit anything from the manuscript, which is Hesselius’ recording of his informant’s story, or try to sum up Hesselius’ words themselves; all of this deserves to be published in full.
The aide admits he would have liked to correspond with the woman who told her story to Hesselius, but it seems she has died.
Chapter 1: An Early Fright
Laura narrates her story (we do not find out her name until much later in the text), starting with the background of where she and her father live. They abide in Styria, a region of Austria, in a castle (schloss). They are English, though she has never been there, and her father served in the Austrian Service. When he retired he bought this picturesque estate at a very low price.
The schloss features a drawbridge, a moat, towers, and a Gothic chapel. The path from the castle doors leads into a shadowy, lonely forest. The nearest inhabited village is seven miles away. Her father’s friend, General Spielsdorf, lives twenty miles away in the other direction. About three miles away is a ruined village with a little church, and among them are the tombs of the Karnstein family.
Besides the servants and the dependents of the estate, Laura lives with only a few people—her father; Madame Perrodon, the governess; and Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, her “finishing governess.” Her mother had died when she was an infant. Occasionally Laura has friends visit, or neighbors come to stay.
Laura’s earliest distinct memory is a terrible one. When she was about six years old and asleep in the nursery, she woke up in the middle of the night. Her nurse was not there but she was not frightened, having heard nothing of ghost stories or fairy tales. She became piqued that she was neglected and began to whimper. A moment later she saw a pretty girl’s face at the other side of the bed. The girl smiled and laid down with her and caressed her. Laura fell asleep, but was awakened with a sensation as if two needles had pierced her breast. She cried loudly and the woman dove under the bed. Members of the household heard her cry and burst into the room. The housekeeper whispered, frightened, that there was a warm spot on the bed next to Laura. There was no visible sign of puncture. After that, someone slept in Laura’s room with her until she was fourteen. She was very nervous and could not bear to be alone for a long time after the incident. Her father told her it was a dream but she knew it was not. She remembers how an old man in a cassock came to her room and spoke prayers over it, prayers which she would repeat sometimes.
Laura has forgotten her life before that incident, “and for some time after it is all obscure also, but the scenes I have just described stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness” (4).
Chapter 2: A Guest
Laura and her father are engaged in a pleasant stroll in the woods. He regrets to tell her that General Spielsdorf will not be coming to visit. This is tremendously upsetting to Laura because the General was going to bring his niece and ward, Mademoiselle Bertha Rheinfeldt, and Laura was looking forward to spending a few weeks with this young woman who was said to be kind and charming.
She asks her father when they will come, and he says at first that he is glad she did not meet the young lady. She asks why, and he says because she is dead. Her father sighs and pulls out a letter, and they sit down on a bench.
The letter is extraordinary and strange, passionate and in some places contradictory. Laura cannot understand it at first. It says that Mademoiselle Rheinfeldt died in innocence but he is aware of the fiend whom he received into his house and what it did to his Bertha. He plans to spend the rest of his life hunting the accursed creature to destroy it. He is overwhelmed and distracted, but he knows what he must do.
Laura and her father walk slowly back in the twilight, thinking over what the letter might mean. They approach the drawbridge under the moonlight, and see the governesses, who have come out to enjoy the evening. Over the ground “a thin film of mist was stealing like smoke” and “no softer, sweeter scene could be imagined” (6). The news makes it melancholy indeed, but it is still serene.
Madame De Lafontaine, “assumed to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a mystic” (6) says dreamily that when the moon shines like this it is indicative of “special spiritual activity” (6). She says tonight is “full of idyllic and magnetic influence” (6). Laura’s father says he does not feel quite right tonight and it seems like there is misfortune hanging over them.
Suddenly, the sound of carriage wheels and hooves draws their attention. An equipage with two horsemen comes into view, with two riders behind. The horses are galloping wildly, out of control, and screams emanate from the carriage. Laura knows a crash is coming and averts her eyes.
When she opens them, she sees two horses on the ground, the carriage on its side, and an elegant lady standing outside of it, dabbing her eyes. Laura watches as some of the men bring out a young woman and her father goes to comfort the old woman. Her father feels the young girl’s pulse and declares she is not dead. The woman, who says she is her mother, rejoices.
The elegant woman asks about the location of the next village, and bemoans that she is on a pressing journey and must leave her daughter there so she can travel quickly. Laura whispers to her father and asks if they can invite the girl to stay here. Her father does so, and the woman says she could not impose. Her father says it would not be an imposition at all, and placing her daughter at an inn would not be wise.
The lady sees that the carriage is ready to go again, and throws the girl an odd look. She pulls Laura’s father aside and speaks quietly to him, then goes over and whispers to her daughter. She is gone a moment later.
Chapter 3: We Compare Notes
The young lady opens her eyes and asks where her mamma is. She then wonders where she is, and Madame comfortingly tells her what is going on. Madame walks her into the castle. In the meantime, Laura’s father has sent for the physician. Laura is told she cannot speak to her yet for fear of overexciting her.
They put the young woman in her room and withdraw to the stately drawing room. Laura eagerly asks Madame how she likes their guest, and Madame replies that she is the prettiest creature she’s ever seen and very gentle and kind. Mademoiselle agrees, then asks if anyone saw the other woman in the carriage. No one did, and she explains that she was old, hideous, black, and had gleaming eyes and a furious expression. Madame ventures that all the men were ragged as well. They all agree they were sullen, and too lean and roguish.
Later, when Laura and her father are alone, she begs him to tell her what the old woman said to him. He imparts that the woman said the girl was in delicate health and was perfectly sane, even if she behaved oddly. She said she would return in three months, and her daughter would say nothing of who they are or what they’re doing. Laura’s father confesses that the old woman was a little strange in her secret, but Laura cares not; she is delighted the girl is here.
Late that night the doctor comes and reports downstairs that the girl is doing very well and is unharmed. It is fine to see her now, he adds.
Laura heads upstairs to the handsomely appointed room, lit by candlelight. When she espies her guest, though, she is shocked—it is the girl from the incident when she was six years old. She has been terrified of this face for twelve years, and now it is before her.
The girl is quiet but then smiles in recognition. She comes says twelve years ago she saw Laura’s face in a dream and has not forgotten it. A peculiar light in her eyes is there for a moment and vanishes, and Laura feels reassured. She clasps the girl’s hand boldly, and the girl smiles.
The girl relates her own vision from twelve years ago. She says she was six years old and woke in an unknown place. There she saw Laura as she is now, and her lovely looks comforted her. She laid down with Laura, but then she woke to Laura screaming and was frightened. She fell on the ground, and when she awoke, she was back in her own nursery.
After Laura tells her story, the girl smiles warmly and says that it seems they were destined to be friends. Laura is drawn to her, but privately feels a bit of repulsion mixed in with her attraction. However, attraction prevails in the moment.
Laura sees the girl looking tired and suggests she go to bed. The girl agrees and explains that she cannot sleep if there is an attendant here, and she is afraid of robbers so she will be locking the door. She brings Laura into her arms and embraces her, saying she looks forward to seeing her the next day. She then sinks into her pillow.
Laura is flattered but a little confused by the girl’s extreme attention and confidence. The next day they meet again and Laura is delighted with her companion, whose name she learns is Carmilla. She thinks she is the most beautiful girl she has ever seen. They both laugh over their earlier horrors of each other.
Analysis
From the very outset of Carmilla, the conventions of Gothic literature are in full display. The setting of Laura’s schloss is remote, far away from civilization, and awe-inspiring in its natural beauty. There are ominous rumors of a fiendish creature in the region, and young women are in danger. Strange visitors arrive unexpectedly. A sense of isolation, entrapment, discombobulation, and the uncanny prevails. The past and the present will conflate, eroticism and desire will overtake the central characters, and the sense of dread and foreboding that is present initially will only grow over time. John Bowen writes of the sublimity of the Gothic setting and story, explaining, “Sublime experiences… are excessive ones, in which we encounter the mighty, the terrible and the awesome. Gothic, it is clear, is intended to give us the experience of the sublime, to shock us out of the limits of our everyday lives with the possibility of things beyond reason and explanation, in the shape of awesome and terrifying characters, and inexplicable and profound events.” Mademoiselle is right when she speaks of the eerily luminous moon and its supernatural portentousness, for such a moon shines over the site where the vampire Carmilla will arrive imminently.
One of the first things to consider about the text of Carmilla is its layered narrative structure and the potential ambiguity of the central narrator. Carmilla was included in a volume of stories, In a Glass Darkly, a compilation of the character Doctor Hesselius’ “case studies.” An aide or secretary is the intermediary figure, adding prologues to each of the cases. In Carmilla, the aide says that the Doctor has included an essay on the narrative, but makes no attempt to print it or otherwise explain what it consists of. The aide also says he has tried to speak with the narrator of the tale (Laura) but, he rues, “I found that she had died in the interval” (1).
Critic Jacqueline Simpson notes that Le Fanu was intrigued by the “old woman’s tales” passed around in his own region and sought to allude to them in his writings, but “he also felt a certain contempt for them because they expressed beliefs of uneducated and ‘superstitious’ people, and are susceptible to variation and elaboration over time. So in order to introduce them to his writings, he would often reinforce them with narratives and ‘documents’ supposedly coming from respectable middle-class informants, whose reliability is never to be questioned.” This is, of course, exactly what Le Fanu has done with Doctor Hesselius and his aide in Carmilla. We can also add to this that the voice of authority is a male voice. Gabriella Jönsson explains that the prologue “forms the first narrative frame of the story and serves to authenticate it by means of a male narrative voice that introduces the first-person narration of an ‘intelligent lady.’”
As for Laura, it seems that she is telling her story directly to Doctor Hesselius, but even that is not entirely clear. After all, she refers at one point to a “town lady like you” (17). Whom is she talking to? Is she imagining that someone else will be reading her narrative? Critic Angelica Michelis addresses this oddness, writing, “The constant blurring of boundaries—is it a fictional narrative, is it the account of a medical case, is the whole story a hallucination, are Laura and Carmilla the same person—is an incessantly appearing framing device as part of the plot as well as on the level of the narrative structure. The vampire story itself cannot be allocated a safe space in culture’s categories, it is part of the medical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, criminal history, folklore and literature and thus threatens to dissolute any discrete categories by its contaminating and invasive nature.”
Another destabilizing element present in the first few chapters of the novella and occurring throughout is the fact that the things that happen to Laura happen in dreams—or, dream-like states. Is Laura’s memory from when she was six accurate? Was it a dream, a vision, or an actual encounter? As Jim Hansen notes, Carmilla “constantly collapses the distinction between reality and fantasy by setting much of the central action of its plot within the context of dreams.” He suggests that these dreams even seem more real than some of the actual action, further complicating the reader’s ability to discern what is really going on.
