REVIEW OF CARMILLA

 

Sheridan Le Fanu

 

Ed. and Intro. Jamieson Ridenhour.  Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2009.

(ISSN 1932-9598)

                                                                         

 

Unpredictably, perhaps, James Joyce provides one of the most perceptive analyses of the kind of Irish-Gothic paradoxes and possibilities beguiling readers of Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-72):

 

Malachias’ tale began to freeze them with horror. He conjured up the scene before them. The secret panel beside the chimney slid back and in the recess appeared . . . [the Englishman] Haines! Which of us did not feel his flesh creep? He had a portfolio of Celtic literature in one hand, in the other a phial marked Poison. Surprise, horror, loathing were depicted on all faces while he eyed them with a ghastly grin.

 

This passage from “The Oxen of the Sun” chapter of Ulysses presents much more than parody or pastiche as it probes Irish-Gothic conventions. These include abyssal tales-within-a-tale; soul- and flesh-freezing horrors; recessive architectural secrets reflecting psychological, familial, if not national repressions; the clash between hybrid Anglo and Irish (per)versions of Home Rule; the ambiguous colonial status of Celtic literature; an hostility that liminally pivots between self-love and self-loathing (Haines echoes the French haine or hate); and finally a haunting risus sardonicus which reflects all these uncanny paradoxes and teases us with both the possibility of resolution and the toxic fear of no exit from the ever-returning contradictions riddling the Celtic twilight. In fact, it is most appropriate to introduce a new edition of Le Fanu’s vampire tale with Joyce’s dramatic diagnosis since this passage concludes by citing the Celtic “curse” of “The lonely house by the graveyard” (412), that is, Le Fanu’s The House by the Churchyard.

 

Like the vampire-hunter Baron Vordenburg in Carmilla, its reader “devote[s] himself to the minute and  laborious investigation of the marvellously authenticated tradition of Vampirism,” but as Joyce suggests, ultimately discovers only the “ambiguous alternations” of “its amphibious existence” (80, 82-83). Nevertheless, Valancourt Classics’ recent scholarly edition of the text, introduced, annotated, and edited by Jamieson Ridenhour, makes the reading of Carmilla more enjoyable, informed, and insightful than ever before. Like Valancourt’s 2007 edition of Le Fanu’s The Rose and  the Key, this text is part of the Press’s pledge, according to its homepage, to publish “new editions of rare 18^th, 19^th & 20^th century English & European Literature”; and one can only hope that more reprints of Le Fanu’s fiction are in the offing. Again like The Rose and the Key, Ridenhour’s edition of Carmilla features contextual appendices, explanatory notes, and an introduction which places the tale in overlapping critical, literary, and national contexts. But a much needed critical bibliography, annotated or not, is missing here, though Ridenhour does conclude with a Works Cited section. Consequently, several crucial critical assessments, like William Veeder’s “‘Carmilla’: The Arts of Repression,” one of the most detailed discussions of Le Fanu’s novella, are neglected. This unfortunate omission, however, may be due to Valancourt’s required editorial format and not to Ridenhour’s oversight. On a more positive note, experiencing Carmilla in its original serial form published in The Dark Blue, complete with original illustrations, rather than its more usual form as an anthologized tale with an added Prologue involving Dr. Hesselius from In a Glass Darkly (1872)–reprinted as an appendix here--changes its reading for the better. The original text creates more narrative immediacy and intimate horrors (though it loses metatextual layers and the grim fact that Laura has died, leaving the door ominously open for her possible, posthumous return as Carmilla’s vampire heir).

 

Ridenhour’s appendices, nicely integrated into his Introduction, provide not only the Prologue from In a Glass Darkly, but also other relevant precursor excerpts and full texts. These include Coleridge’s haunting portrayal of a lesbian succubus who doubles her victim, Christabel (1816), and Le Fanu’s equally haunting “The Child that Went with the Fairies” (1870). Prefiguring Carmilla, this tale features a carriage carrying a lovely and a loathly lamia, the latter turbaned “black woman” (106) appears just like the “hideous black woman” (15) with a turban, the evil-eyed Matska, accompanying Carmilla and her mother, who has provoked so much critical attention. Besides  “Carmilla’s Vampire Ancestors,” the appendices also provide “Carmilla’s Progeny,” like Bram Stoker’s dropped chapter of Dracula (1897), “Dracula’s Guest,” in which the Count, transformed into a giant wolf, saves Jonathan Harker from the ravages of the vampiress Countess Dolingen who–as her gravestone reads--“SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH” in “STYRIA” (132), also the Austrian setting of Carmilla. I presume Ridenhour concludes with F. G. Loring’s tale “The Tomb of Sarah” (1900) to illustrate the influence of Baron Vordenburg’s “discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave” (80) in Carmilla. Nevertheless, I think Van Helsing’s discovery and despoiling of Lucy’s grave in Dracula presents a clearer source for Loring (though Vordenburg certainly prefigures Van Helsing as both vampire detective and destroyer).

 

Ridenhour’s textual notes–easily accessible footnotes, not separated endnotes–are extremely helpful in an explanatory or literal sense. The only inaccuracy I found occurs in a note on the distance of a “league” (about three miles), which is incorrectly noted as “six leagues” measuring “[a]pproximately nine miles” (rather than eighteen miles) at one point (62), though correctly noted at another (57). “[T]he first-ever scholarly edition of Le Fanu’s novella” vaunted on the back cover, however, might also be expected to provide critical notes recalling relevant scholarship or suggesting new interpretive possibilities; but that does not occur here.  For example, Le Fanu’s narrator defines the recurring German term “schloss” as a “castle” on the very first page, but in The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels makes much of the fact that “Schloss also means a ‘lock’,”a crucially repressive motif in Carmilla (162 ff.) which Ridenhour fails to note.

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Ridenhour does identify the lines Laura’s father recites just before Carmilla’s dramatic first appearance as a slight “misquotation” (10) of Antonio’s speech opening The Merchant of Venice:

 

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:

It wearies me; you say it wearies you;

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

 but omits citing Shakespeare’s very suggestive succeeding lines:

 

What stuff ‘tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,

That I have much ado to know myself (I:i,1-7).

 

These last sentiments bespeak a kind of occluded prologue for Laura (and her reader) who also attempts to detect the origin of her own “sad” ambivalence or “strange melancholy” (42), to exorcize it as far as is possible, and thereby to discover her authentic self. Baffled by the “paradox” of her “love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence,” Laura portentously queries Carmilla, “Are we related . . . I don’t know you–I don’t know myself” (23). There are several other recurring textual motifs that Ridenhour might briefly note (or include in his Introduction) like the narratological role of the novella’s various metatexts and their effect on reader response; Gothic grounds-of-knowledge passages which offer possible scientific, psychological, spectral, and skeptical readings of the text’s mysteries; the ambiguously interrelated values of hospitality, hosts, and parasites; the function of all the thresholds and their very pertinent liminal rubrics of ritualized initiation; and even “familiar” Freudian Unheimlich–unhomely or uncanny–symptoms like fear of death, repetition compulsion, primitive superstition, return of the repressed, promiscuous womb/tomb and domestic/demonic couplings, and the omnipotence of thought (like blindly scientific theories). Different readers would obviously find different suggestive patterns–the point is that Carmilla seems richly over-determined, and a scholarly edition should note at least some of these interpretive possibilities.

 

On the other hand, Ridenhour’s Introduction does an excellent job of reviewing past critical readings before providing its own original approach. These readings include a brief (and inconclusive) discussion of Laura’s narrative unreliability, doppelgänger motifs, sexual thematics, and “Anglo-Irish anxieties” (x). Ridenhour then surveys the influence of “The Literary Vampire,” specifically “the folkoric vampire, the femme fatale, and the Byronic vampire” (xi), represented by James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire, or, The Feast of Blood (1845-47), Christabel, and John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). Drawing on critics like Margot Backus and W. J. McCormack, Ridenhour next moves to the post-colonial concerns of “Blood Sacrifice and Irish Identity” as related to the Nationalist movement and its ambiguous relationships with the vampire figure. (Appendix B nicely provides contrasting 1885 illustrations from Punch and The Irish Pilot, one the colonized “Irish Vampire,” the other the colonizing “British Vampire,” 99.) In this section Ridenhour also discusses “the three traditional feminine aspects of Ireland” represented by the maternal Mrs. Karnstein,  the “colonial savage” viewed “through British eyes,” Matska, and native or pure Irish culture with its primitive belief in “predatory fairy” folk, Carmilla (xxvi-xxvii, xxxii), who, like Yeats’s Cathleen ni Houlihan, demands sacrificial blood from her people. It would seem that Laura should be added somewhere to this (un)holy Celtic trinity, if only as benighted Carmilla’s eventually enlightened double.