#drawinggoose

LONG-ASS POST AHEAD

I mean, I can respect anyone who doesn’t like or doesn’t want to read the original. It’s not an easy read, what with the casual if arguably unintentional pathologization of homosexuality and female sexuality in general (and the brief racism), especially for actual queer women. Add to that the serious consent issues with Laura’s and Carmilla’s relationship, and you get something that modern readers looking for reflections of themselves in the text might find quite unpalatable.

And I love the web series. It’s a happy version of the story, period. No reading between the lines necessary. Just good representation with a happy ending and all the vampires and eldritch gods and murdering for Christmas a girl could want. I might recommend people read the book for the beautiful language and to get all the hidden Easter eggs in the show, but I won’t judge anyone who would really rather not. 

However, yes, book!Laura definitely gets damned with faint praise in the eyes of many web series fans. I think a lot of people write her off as stupid for not realizing what Carmilla was sooner, but forget a little forgettable line in the book that discusses her upbringing. Laura’s father never allowed her to read anything fantastical or even to be told fairytales by her governess. She’s been raised to be an extremely logical person, rooted in the new, exciting scientific mindset of the dawning 19th century. She might not even know what a vampire is, and she’s certainly unlikely to assume that her new best friend might be one just because a bunch of peasant girls have suddenly started dying and a portrait from centirues ago looks just like her. Series!Laura is much more open-minded and able to accept the existence of the supernatural; her father has protected her from bears and stalkers but never saw the need to restrict her access to vampire novels. Elle, meant to be a closer analogue to book!Laura, is (in life) quick to scorn anything related to the supernatural, but she is aware of its concepts and willing to accept it as a possibility. In a way, book!Laura almost owes more to Perry than to either of the characters meant to resemble her. She’s less shrill and panicky, but she too has her head in the sand about Carmilla because of her very logical nature.

I recognize the book’s flaws- and as I said, there are many -but I have a soft spot for it because it was the first piece of sapphic fiction that really appealed to me. More positive classics like Annie On My Mind and The Well of Loneliness (ESPECIALLY the latter) left me cold with their sterile, modern, realistic coming out narratives. I’ve never particularly liked realism and I’ve always loved vampire stories, so when I found Carmilla...it was less like seeing myself and more like seeing something I could actually want. A version of being this thing I’d just realized I was that seemed romantic, Romantic, exciting, and generally full of all the schlocky Gothic tropes dear to my heart. I was reading between the lines in a big way, imbuing the narrative mentally with aspects I’m sure it was never meant to have. And yet, that interpretation stuck with me and remains what the book conjures in my mind. I imagined all sorts of alternative possibilities, the foremost of which is now forming the basis for a novel I’m writing myself: that Laura had a consensual relationship with Carmilla and wrote the story of the novel to throw would-be vampire hunters off her scent after helping her escape Vordenburg and his lot.

Is that the actual story of the book? Hell no. While LeFanu probably didn’t set out to write a parable of “heterosexuality good; lesbians bad,” the undercurrent of homophobia in Victorian society cast sapphic love as something horrifying. Part and parcel of the unnatural that formed the basis for fear in Gothic novels. So intentional or not, Carmilla is still a homophobic story. And while Laura is ambivalent in her feelings towards Carmilla rather than exclusively repulsed, she’s definitely not giving enthusiastic consent.

Which leads nicely into my thoughts on their relationship.

Here, again, my tendency to create my own narrative behind the one LeFanu wrote colors my views. Personally, I read Laura’s love-hate feelings towards Carmilla as part of coming to terms with her own sexuality. “I don’t know you- I don’t know myself when you look so and talk so.” Lines like that, to me, smack of that first “oh shit I like a girl” feeling, especially from someone raised in the conservative society of backwater Austria circa 1820*. Loving someone but hating them because of how they make you feel. Hating yourself or not knowing yourself because of those feelings. Hating that person for making you recognize these things about your own nature. Might sound familiar to any number of queer people. However, I know LeFanu probably didn’t intend it to be read that way.

(Unless one of my other theories is true and Laura was written to be secretly gay, not killed like Carmilla because she never acted on her urges, but still doomed to be haunted by the knowledge she came until she dies, apparently under 60 years old and unmarried. Because that’s what happens to Evil Scary Lesbians, even closeted ones. But I digress.)

There’s something the inestimable @forthegothicheroine said that I quite agree with: part of the tragedy of the book is that, if Carmilla had just asked, Laura might have said yes. Might have loved her and been with her and possibly even joined her in eternity. But she didn’t. She took without asking, and in so doing destroyed any chance for happiness with the girl she loved. So that’s how I interpret their relationship. One of probably mutual affection destroyed by the impulses and nature of one party.

LeFanu, I’m sure, intended it to be read as a pretty typical “evil seductive vampire; innocent virginal maiden victim” story and there’s even a bit where his vampire hunter points out that Carmilla was probably only feigning affection for Laura to make the hunt more interesting for herself. So the above is just my very-non-canon interpretation.

Hope that addresses everything to your satisfaction!

I’m still waiting patiently for books 5,6 and 7. But how thick will they be, I wonder?

They’ll be HUUUGE XD

It’s a lot of things, and here are a few:

The doctor who treats Laura as a child wears a powdered wig. Doctors wore these way longer than most of the general population, and so did older people who had been young when they were fashionable, but not for long after the 1810s.

The ball at which Carmilla and Bertha meet is being held by a duke who, if he’s the one I’m thinking of (Grand Duke Charles Augustus of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach) was only a duke from 1815-1828.

The editor of Dr. Hesselius’ papers mentions in his forward that he tried to contact Laura when compiling the book for publication but found out she had died since writing down her story approx. ten years after the events took place. So she was ~19 between 1815 and 1828, but not so long ago that the editor would expect her to be dead, which would put her at the latter end of that 13-year window.

hi! have you tried asking at @daimodder? this is a dao/da2 centric blog :)

Yup! :D

That surely looks good.