“Through Every Door and Passage”: A Liminal Reading of Carmilla

By

Mark M. Hennelly, Jr.

California State University, Sacramento

(ISSN 1932-9598)

Under a narrow, arched doorway, surmounted by one of those demoniacal grotesques in which the cynical and ghastly fancy of old Gothic carving delights, I saw very gladly the beautiful face and figure of Carmilla enter the shadowy chapel (75).–Sheridan Le Fanu, Carmilla

[I]n many of these [creation myths’] cosmogonies and theogonies, the deities and heroes mate incestuously, devour one another, and clearly transgress human and cultural norms of justice and equity. By these acts, despite priestly editing, the liminal character of the myth betrays itself. And, indeed, in most of these cycles of great myths, trickster figures may be found peeping grotesquely forth like the gargoyles on Gothic cathedrals (581).–Victor Turner, “Myth and Symbol”

Laura’s account of her pilgrimage arriving at the sepulchre of Countess Mircalla, cited above, is  representative of the paradoxes riddling Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871-72): its meaning seems both over-determined and indeterminate. On the one hand, repeated references to portentous portals, spectral monsters, self-reflexive Gothicism, but also sublime beauty, dominate the text; on the other hand, skeptical epistemologies, narrative unreliability, disturbing Beauty-Beast doppelgängers, and theological uncertainty–or better, uncertain theological certainty–deconstruct it. And the current vogue of compelling feminist and postcolonial readings seems, finally,  limited since their ideologies account for too few of these paradoxes. As the second citation from anthropologist Victor Turner (1920-1983) suggests, however, a comparative liminal reading of Le Fanu’s haunting vampire tale may prove more comprehensive in contextualizing Carmilla’s paradoxes, while still honoring its uncanny mysteries and addressing such troubling motifs as “priestly” interference, vampire-human incest, violent orality, cultural transgression, and ambiguous “trickster figures,” particularly the ancestral (and rhetorical) “figure of Carmilla” herself which reflects a real crisis in representation. Indeed, the advantages of a liminal approach include linking apparently unconnected motifs like the moon and monsters, critically qualifying recent readings like those of female friendships and postcolonial hybridity, and challenging textual revelations like the ultimate fate of Bertha Rheinfeldt and motivation of Baron Vordenburg.

In past readings of Coleridge’s seductive succubus tale Christabel (1797) and Stoker’s vampire classic Dracula (1897), the two major works toward which Janus-faced Carmilla looks before and after, I have tried to document their betwixt-and-between paradoxes by comparing them with Turner’s interdisciplinary, liminal approach to initiation rituals (see Works Cited). In this sense, one can best appreciate Carmilla’s “portentous portals” or thresholds by imitating both the “two distinct characters” of Dr. Hesselius, the ultimate recipient of Laura’s text in In a Glass Darkly, who liminally examines his patient “either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead,” and his correspondent-reader Professor Van Loo, a practicing chemist who also reads “history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play” (5-6). To be sure, recent critics of both Gothic and Victorian literature, and even of Carmilla, have generally cited the relevance of liminal motifs. Matthew Brennan, for example, notes that the Gothic always practices “an aesthetics of nightmare, an aesthetics of the liminal and of crossed or open boundaries” (6), while Kelly Hurley more relevantly indicates that “the monstrosities of the fin-de-siècle Gothic are monstrous precisely because of their liminality. To be Undead, to be simultaneously human and animal, to shift from one sexed identity to another, is to explode crucial binarisms that lie at the foundation of human identity” (24-25). Hyun-Jung Lee’s comments prove even more pertinent: “Le Fanu’s novella puts particular emphasis on the vampire’s liminal nature and its power to draw the victim into that same space of uncertainty” (27). Sarah Gilead argues that “[i]t was perhaps inevitable that a virtual obsession with liminality should characterize Victorian literature: social critics commonly characterize the period as an ‘age of transition,’ as a liminal period in a history of spiritual, moral, and intellectual as well as material progress” (186). And modern biographer W. J. McCormack insists “that transitional states of sensibility” were rampant in Le Fanu’s Ireland, wavering between colonial and postcolonial perspectives. (255). Even during the Victorian period itself, pioneer anthropologists like H. Clay Trumbull in The Threshold Covenant (1896) realized the significance of what Le Fanu suggestively describes as “call[ing] ‘Carmilla,’ through every door and passage” (76):

in various ways, among widely different primitive peoples, the marriage customs go to show that the home threshold cannot be passed except by overcoming a barrier of some kind, and making an offering, bloody or bloodless, at this primal family altar. An essential part of the covenant of union is a halting at, and then passing over, the threshold of the new home, with an accompanying sacrifice (35).

But again, it is Victor Turner who has most specifically and successfully theorized the liminal beyond such general notions as the nightmarish, or monstrous, or uncertain, or transitional, or even ritualistic. Both Turner’s increasingly playful approach to liminality (and recognition of the ludic within the liminal), “the realm of primitive hypothesis, where there is a certain freedom to juggle with the factors of existence” (The Forest of Symbols 106), and his own self-reflexive liminal strategizing–“I am frankly in the exploratory phase just now” (From Ritual to Theatre 55)–seem especially compatible with literary criticism. In fact, he frequently employs literary analogies and has written various literary critiques of works as diverse as Dante’s The Divine Comedy, Blake’s The Four Zoas, and Islandic saga literature, explaining in detail the relationships between rites and literature: “Ritual and literature, in a way, are society talking about itself, the reflexivity of society. . . . each of which is multivocal (susceptible of many meanings),” which together “represent a statement of the problems, partial solutions, and abiding paradoxes of the human condition” (Blazing the Trail 70-71). Writing somewhat in Turner’s exploratory mode and adopting his boundary-crossing, interdisciplinary, “odd-jobbing, bricolage style” (On the Edge 263), I’m sure that I will juggle some of his syncretistic concepts in the following overview, before turning to our main task of comparative application to Carmilla. But surely that possibility is one of the advantages of a liminal approach where, like initiates, readers learns to “play with the factors of culture, sometimes assembling them in random, grotesque, improbable, surprising, shocking, usually experimental combinations” (From Ritual 40). Or to invoke the related “Farfetching” strategy of Ursula Le Guin’s interplanetary envoys in The Left Hand of Darkness, readers should “find expression not in rational symbols, but in metaphor” (147). As we will see, such an approach does not result in a completely coherent reading, but in a somewhat incoherent or “monstrous” reading of a liminally monstrous book like Carmilla and a liminally monstrous being like Carmilla. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen puts it in Monster Theory, “[t]his examination necessarily involves how the manifold boundaries . . . that constitute ‘culture’ become imbricated in the construction of the monster–a category that is itself a kind of limit case, an extreme version of marginalization, an abjecting epistemological device basic to the mechanics of deviance construction and identity formation” (viii-ix).

Turner’s “processual anthropology,” which evolved over several decades, monstrously marries structuralism with post-structuralism or as he calls it, a “multiperspectival” and “‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology.” In other words, “[t]he plain truth is that I am prejudiced against system-building, though [also] seduced by it” (On the Edge 185,181,206). Turner negotiates this marriage by adopting and adapting the Belgian folklorist Arnold van Gennep’s division of ritual into stages of separation, limina (Latin for threshold), and re-aggregation or return in Rites du Passage (1909), emphasizing the interstructural liminal phase which van Gennep relatively ignores but which even recalls Le Fanu’s “life” as “an interlude between journeys” (McCormack 263). Turner “regard[s this] transition as a process, a becoming . . . even a transformation” of “‘growing’ a girl into a woman” like “a pupa changing from grub to moth” (Forest 94,101-02), just as Carmilla liminally posits that “[g]irls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime [they] are grubs and larvæ, don’t you see–each with their peculiar propensities, necessities, and structure” (31).

After becoming separated from structured society and crossing a symbolic threshold into a “seclusion site” (Forest 98), novices experience an altered, or better altering, mode of consciousness since every liminal entrance is entrancing and fundamentally alters the participants. Novices also serve under the ancestral guardianship of cultural “instructors” (Forest 99), that is, gatekeeping tricksters or tormenting mentors since, etymologically, the threshold is the “thrashing place” where pure grain is separated from its inessential husk. During liminality’s interlude, the social status of neophytes becomes indeterminate, ambiguous, and “nothing” (Forest 98) as they are initially debased and humiliated before being reconstructed as adults and adepts and returned to their culture’s prevailing social structure. They confront a series of antistructural challenges involving the subjunctive mood of desiring, fearing, and “it may be this” as opposed to structure’s indicative (“it is this”) and imperative (“do this”) modalities. In other words, initiates enter the dark woulds of adventure as Lewis Carroll’s Gnat puns the term in Through the Looking-Glass (171).  And mutually sharing this dream quest awakens genetically-dormant powers, besides creating significant communitas bonds or “[d]eep friendships between novices” (Forest 101). Communitas itself engenders a kind of peak or “flow experience” expressing both an openness to interpersonal relationships (and even social alliances) and a unity between consciousness and conduct (From Ritual 55-59). Initiates learn to interpret a number of sacra or sacred, “multivocal symbol[s] with a fan of referents”(Forest 107), including lunar phenomena, androgynes, womb-tomb motifs, pictures and other metatexts, masks, monsters, mirrors, and related “icons representing the journeys of the dead or the adventures of supernatural beings” (Forest 103). These sacra lead to “esoteric knowledge or gnosis [which] is the crux of liminality as it relates to the cultural engendering of personhood, and revitalization of the social structure” (Blazing 152). Such retrieved ancestral values fundamentally define and support the neophytes’ culture, which mesocosmically reflects the greater “cosmos” in a “complex weave of ‘correspondences’ based on analogy, metaphor and metonymy” (From Ritual 29), just as the individual initiate discovers she or he is a microcosm of these correspondences.

Gustavo Pérez Firmat rightly cautions that liminal “phenomena imbricate to such an extent that it is difficult, if not impossible, to discuss any one of them in isolation” (xiv); and this warning becomes even more critical when Turner analyzes so-called liminoid phenomena, which gradually evolve out of tribal cultures around the period of the mid-nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution, roughly the composition time of Carmilla when “in liminality is secreted the seed of the liminoid” (From Ritual 44). That is, under the pressures of hardening, if not petrifying, social structures, the liminal retreats underground; and its energies are displaced into social and “performative genres” like carnivals, modern pilgrimages, and the novel where liminal motifs are further blurred and distorted. As the new liminal guardian, the “solitary artist creates the liminoid phenomena,” and subversive, “revolutionary manifestos–books, plays, paintings, films, etc., expose the injustices, inefficiencies, and immoralities of the mainstream economic and political structures and organizations” (From Ritual 52,54-5). In fact, Turner considers the liminoid to be the only hope of the modern existential wasteland spawned by the collapsing dialectic between structure and antistructure: when “religious systems and their rituals are backed by superior political force and power[,] they tend to lose their ludic innovativeness and variability”; and “the society thus beset has so much the less adaptive resilience” (On the Edge 162-63). In such a “deliminalized” culture, Turner acknowledges that perpetual or at least prolonged retreat into liminoid antistructuralism may be the only recourse for the initiatory outlaw, who refuses to return and capitulate to structural hegemony. And Turner’s insights here shed some light on the inconclusive conclusion of Carmilla.

But before applying these ideas to Le Fanu’s text, we need to make one final distinction. Turner often compares and contrasts the liminal motifs in rites of initiation with those in social dramas and especially the “life crises” of rituals of affliction, both of which involve social and cultural groups rather than individual initiates. Social dramas develop through four stages which seem quite relevant to Carmilla, particularly as a postcolonial narrative: “breach of regular norm-governed social relations”; a crisis exacerbating the breach; redressive action, which may involve interpersonal, juridical, political, or religious controls; and either reintegration of the split-off factions or “the social recognition and legitimation of irreparable schism between the contesting parties” (On the Edge 180, 197ff.). This sequence seems clearly operative in Carmilla where a colonizing invader, Carmilla’s mother, breaches the laws of hospitality by inappropriately inviting her daughter to stay with both General Spielsdorf and Bertha and Carmilla and her father. The breach widens when Carmilla violates the young girls; redressive action develops under the agency of doctors, priests, and aristocratic vampire hunters; and, as we will suggest, the reader is then left to consider whether reintegration or irreparable schism (and possible prolonged liminality) ultimately ensues.

Related rituals of affliction, developed to restore cultures ravaged by diseases like Carmilla’s colonial cannibalizing–“the mysterious disease that has invaded our neighborhood,” a current phase of the “plague that has scourged [the region’s] inhabitants for more than a century” (36,77)–paradoxically invoke “ancestral shades” as forms of homeopathic magic (like cures like): “The dead also partake of the ambiguous quality of liminality, the state of betwixt-and-betweenness, for they are associated with both positive and negative processes and objects, with life and death” (Blazing 33, as Carmilla’s mother ironically insists that she is “on a mission of life and death” 62). In fact, these ancestral shades, like both Carmilla and her mother, “are conceived of as transformative agencies and as mediating between various domains normally classified and distinct” like the living and the dead (Blazing 47). In the co-written study Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Turner and his colleague and wife Edith Turner suggestively link pilgrimages, which “follow the paradigm of the via crucis,” with these rituals of affliction in which “the agents of affliction are ancestral shades, who punish their living kin either for moral misdemeanors or for breach of ritual prescriptions or prohibitions” (9,12). Of course, the way of the cross further suggests the way of dual-natured crossbreeds like Christ and Carmilla. And pilgrimages figuratively imply other relevant vampire motifs: “the symbolic or metaphorical death undergone by initiands or pilgrims puts them in the in-between state of life-in-death, like the seed with rotting husk but thrusting cotyledon in the ground” (Blazing 47). On the other hand, a generationally-affiliated and “therapeutic [affliction] ritual is [also] a rite of passage which transforms the patient [like Laura] into an adept ready to learn the mysteries of the healing cult” (Turner and Turner 12) and which provocatively qualifies any facile solving of Carmilla’s final mysteries.

We will return to these issues in what follows as we develop the liminal roles of thresholds, neophytes, guardians, antistructure, communitas, sacra, and gnosis in the text. Suffice it to say here that symptomatic Irish “troubles” and Anglo-Irish conflicts, which are subtly displaced onto Carmilla, also seem suggested, if not mediated (or left unresolved), by Turner’s social dramas and rituals of affliction. And Le Fanu’s titular ancestral shade, the “figure of Carmilla”–whether colonizer or colonized–paradoxically provides the liminal clue to this (ir)resolution, just as James Joyce’s possibly pregnant, prostitute-madonna figure of Ireland in Portrait of the Artist, the “batlike soul” who attempts “to draw [Davin] over the threshold” in his personal folk tale, vicariously captivates Stephen Dedalus with her similar paradoxes:

The last words of Davin’s story sang in his memory and the figure of the woman in the story stood forth, reflected in other figures of the peasant women whom he had seen standing in the doorways at Clane as the college cars drove by, as a type of her race and his own, a batlike soul waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness and, through the eyes and voice and gesture of a woman without guile, calling the stranger to her bed (182-83).

From the “drawbridge,” “gate,” and “steep Gothic bridge” suggestively crossing “a stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood” (1-2) at Carmilla’s opening, through the succession of doors, arches, and windows, “gateway symbols” or liminal thresholds (Blazing 32) dominate the tale. And these thresholds represent its self-reflexive, explicit (“Gothic bridge”) and implicit (“deep shadow”) Gothicism besides its related connotations of flowing, rather than frozen, antistructural subjunctivity (“through the wood”). Appropriately, the drawbridge and gate rest on the margin of “this lonely and primitive place” (1), ritual’s liminally charged “seclusion site” which Dean Le Fanu, the novelist’s father, also created for his family in unruly County Limerick as he “drew up his ladder for seclusion” when civil “commotion at the gates announced the aroused antagonism” of his congregation (McCormack 71). According to Turner, such Janus-faced openings “give an outward and visible form to an inward and conceptual process.” Put slightly differently, the ambiguity between inside(rs) and outside(rs) signifies liminality’s repeated “coincidence of opposite processes and notions in a single representation” (Forest 96,99). It may then support McCormack’s point that “Le Fanu [himself] presented a Janus-like ambiguity” (224) in his (post)colonial attitudes toward Anglo-Irish hybridity or Margot Gayle Backus’s argument that “Carmilla, while seemingly an external invader, is actually an insider masquerading as an outsider” (131). Jack Sullivan maintains that “[a]mbivalence is the controlling principle throughout the story” (64). And reader ambivalence is often registered in response to the liminal pun on threshold passages: whether “those secret [architectural] passages . . . known to exist in the schloss” (46); the subliminal rites of passage Laura endures–“the ordeal through which I was unconsciously passing” (23); or Carmilla’s own literary passages which become incantatory rites de passage for Le Fanu’s mesmerized reader, “looking like a person in a trance” at every symbolic “entrance and . . . exit” (66,76).

As indicated earlier, thresholds play comparable roles in Dracula and Christabel. In the former, Van Helsing recites the fundamental liminal rule that had become so critical in the latter: no demonic outsider can “enter anywhere at first, unless there be some one of the household who bid him come; though afterwards he can come as he please” (308). Consequently, the host’s initial invitation to the parasite proves crucial in Christabel’s accepting the burden of hospitality to the lady Geraldine:

The lady sank, belike through pain,

And Christabel with might and main

Lifted up, a weary weight,

Over the threshold of the gate (ll.129-32).

When Laura’s trusted guardian Madame Perrodon similarly bears Carmilla over the threshold to the schloss–“The stranger now rose, and leaning on Madame’s arm, walked slowly over the drawbridge and into the castle gate”(14)–it betokens not only an uncanny coincidence of the familiar and strange and host and parasite, but also the related Lacanian suggestion that Otherness is, indeed, the discourse of the unconscious, which intrapsychic reading (of all three works) Van Helsing has already implied. In other words, to invite the demon over the threshold is a subliminal acknowledgment of the demon within, a kind of deconstructive inside-outside-the-outside gesture which extends James Walton’s insight regarding “Le Fanu’s inveterate interest in doubles, dual identities, divided selves” (66).

The fact that it is Carmilla who crosses the threshold from what Victorians called “the other side” also signifies her self-identification with the initiate Laura in what Trumbull again terms “the covenant of union” (35). And if the threshold is the thrashing place, then Laura, later wounded, must shed her culturally constructed outer shell here and discover her Karnstein affiliation with Carmilla since for Turner, all such liminal wounds are wombs of self-renewal. Laura initially insists that the castle’s “drawbridge” was “never raised in my time” (1), but Carmilla “always lock[s her] door” (19), suggesting  her closure of liminal openness and even of female birth passages since such thresholds often bear uterine implications (Blazing 32). On the other hand, Laurence A. Rickels notes that “Schloss also means a ‘lock.’ So the resources of this castle are also at the same time the resources of locking up” (162), which may balance Carmilla’s association with anti-liminal energies. Still, her performative opening and shutting of doors (and immaterializing through walls), like her “ambiguous alternations–sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend” (83), link Carmilla with Turner’s “multivocal symbols” and so herald a crisis of representation since she seems simultaneously to be an initiate, a guardian, and a sacral monster. Nevertheless, as Nancy Auerbach argues in an uncanny, non-liminal way, “[t]he opening door is the key to this vampire. . . . Laura’s Carmilla may be strange, but her face and the sensations she arouses are indelibly familiar, and her body is as material as a door” (Our Vampires, Ourselves 45).

When General Spielsdorf describes his meeting with Millarca and her mother at the masquerade ball, he confides, “It was a very aristocratic assembly. I was myself almost the only ‘nobody’ present” (58); and his emphatic nobody identifies the invisible status of ritualized and mythologized initiates, though their humbled way of negation paradoxically also provides positive potential for their eventual reconstruction. In Turner’s words, “[p]ossibly the best approach to the problem of cracking the code of myth is the via negativa represented by the liminal phase in initiation rites” (“Myth and Symbol” 578). In fact, Spielsdorf and Laura’s father, who develop a degree of communitas while coping with Carmilla’s antistructuralism, could be considered neophytes themselves. But their transitioning, triggered by their entranced fascination with the succubus and terminating in their performance of subjunctivity in destroying her, is more like the liminality of midlife “journeyers” discussed by Murray Stein: “journeyers, or floaters, feel ghostlike, even to themselves . . . they avoid social commitments and obligations, evade responsibility, duck out, drift off, hide, vanish. . . . in liminality the soul is awakened and released, so it happens during this transitional period a person is led . . . into psychological regions that are otherwise unknown, inaccessible, or forbidden.” The midlifer “shakes free as well from the somnolent effects of psychological habits, patterns, and identifications” such as the General’s initial structuralism and Laura’s father’s rationalized sleepwalking solution to the mystery of Carmilla’s disappearance, which ironically suggests that he has been one of life’s sleepwalkers in trying to deal rationally with the vampire. In Stein’s analysis, Le Fanu’s succubus thus becomes one of midlife’s “soul figures” signifying “vast subjective meanings and carry[ing] projections of the archetypal unconscious” (136-37).

Even Carmilla, especially on first reading, may seem a novice who compares herself to a “nun” (37) and says her “story” is “one of bewilderment and darkness. I know absolutely nothing” (48). The “darkness” metaphor proves particularly telling since humiliated initiates are often associated with elemental dirt and darkness during their symbolic death. The darkness, however, eventually becomes a “fruitful darkness” (Forest 110), while the dirt recalls the “hideous black woman” (15) Matska in the carriage with Carmilla, whose name means mud (Andriano 102), which “primal matrix” Barbara Babcock also relevantly links with the initiating process (93,97). The trinity of Carmilla, her mother, and Matska does imply some archetypal version of the maiden-mother-crone stages of female development, which William Veeder terms the “virgin-mother-witch trio” (215). Turner believed that etymology represents the dream past of words; and as farfetched as it may seem,  the “core” syllable in Carmilla, Karnstein, and Corra, the Celtic monster we’ll discuss later, not only suggests Kore/Persephone but also Greek “chora,” the semiotic “strange space” which Julia Kristeva associates with pre-oedipal “receptacle[s]” that dismantle symbolic structures  in borderline personalities (14) like Laura’s. Turner might further link chora with the Eleusinian mysteries of Demeter and Persephone and “the mythical and archetypal midwife” in liminal inflections of “matrilineage” so important in rituals of affliction (Forest 102,104) like that performed in Laura’s culture.

Surely, though, Laura herself is Le Fanu’s primary initiate. Carmilla’s embraces even transfigure her  “into a trance from which I only seemed to recover myself when she withdrew her arms” (22). And just as surely the Invisible Prince, whose “imminent fate” in chaotic County Limerick seemed to be “an existential nullity in which society could proceed without the slightest reference to [his] being” and whose wife Susanna suffered “visions and trances” (McCormack 46,232), could empirically identify and empathize with such neophyte conditions. Further, when Veeder calls Laura “everyperson” and argues that she “remains the adolescent caught between stages” (199,219), he, in effect, implies the universality of the liminal neophyte which Laura personifies. Her life is riddled with paradoxes and negations–“I bear an English name, although I never saw England” (1)–and recalling Le Fanu’s novel A Lost Name (1868), she remains anonymous for sixty percent of the text like all “novices’ being stripped of names” (From Ritual 44). Besides having a mixed Anglo-Austrian genealogy, she speaks “a Babel” (3) with her would-be guardians, a hybrid kind of German-French-English creolized tongue echoing “the use of archaic or secret language” employed “during the liminal stages of initiation rituals” (Blazing 136). Like Coleridge’s Christabel, Laura is also marginalized at a “seclusion site,” though Gregory Waller sees her isolated condition “in a world of [her father’s] making that seeks to exclude sexuality and maturity” (52) as her psychological burden, rather than liminality’s potential blessing. In any event, since Laura has been “studiously kept in ignorance of ghost stories, or fairy tales, and of all such lore as makes us cover up our heads when the door creeks suddenly” (3), she initially possesses no sacral metatexts to help her pass through liminal thresholds. Still, entranced and visionary (like Sussana Le Fanu) after Carmilla’s attack during her childhood, Laura’s borderline memories “stand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness,” while Carmilla’s more recent assaults even suggest Laura’s purgatorial “descent of Avernus” (5,43). And Le Fanu’s telling image recalls “Orphic cults with their emphasis on symbolic descent into the underworld, the movement of souls in transmigration from body to body [that] was perhaps the mystery cult which most stressed the generative character of midliminality” (Blazing 154-55).

As hybrid character-narrator, Laura’s reported interview with a vampire–even intercourse with a vampire–also reflects her initiatory non-status and, like Carmilla’s doubling testimony, must surely be read with a grain of suspicion. For example, when Laura “saw very gladly the beautiful face and figure of Carmilla” as the vampire crossed the threshold into the graveyard, the narration reaches its loudest unreliable pitch since Laura has just heard General Spielsdorf’s (at this point) unimpeachable, sacral story of how Carmilla-Millarca murdered his “ward” Bertha (59). As Margaret Carter generally writes, “Two factors, the distortion of memory and Laura’s affection for Carmilla, allow the reader to question this narrator’s reliability” (36). Still, Laura’s attraction to Carmilla–she asks, “Are we related[?]” (23)–also suggests a matrilineal relationship besides several other liminal ties.  And the next neophyte in line, the often-forgotten “town lady” whose “earnest desire so repeatedly expressed” her wish to hear Laura’s tale (24,79-80) like some more than willing Wedding Guest, personifies the structured status of Laura’s latter-day readers who stand in liminal line to hear her tale and self-reflect on its gnosis. As Wolfgang Iser cogently argues (with no acknowledgment of a liminal context), “self-disclosed fictionality as an act of boundary-crossing causes the [reader’s] natural attitude to be doubled by a new one that is demanded of him or her, while the world of the text is doubled by that from which it has been bracketed off, and whose reverse side is thereby brought to the fore” (272). And thus Laura’s initiating tale serves as a sacred metatext for reader-novices, just as General Spielsdorf’s serves as one for neophyte Laura.

In liminal cultures, guardians or mentors function as relatively stable educators in tribal lore; in liminoid cultures with their performative genres, on the other hand, guardians often transform into amorphous, shape-shifting tricksters or tormentors who may seem much more subversive than the ritual mentors of yore. Most commentators either find that the “male elders” in Carmilla “tend to merge into one” (Walton 68) or see “the fathers, priests, and doctors who are the story’s male ‘knowers’” as “hordes of male authorities” (Heller 80,89) trying to eradicate female knowledge. From a liminal perspective, however, General Spielsdorf, Doctor Spielsberg, and the playful, hunchbacked “mountebank” proficient in “the art of dentistry” (28-29) appear to be more authentic guardians than the other “male authorities” as they correctly interpret the “extraordinary evidence” of “a preternatural conspiracy” (56). German Spiel means play, and Spielsdorf and Spielsberg, almost by virtue of their names’ shared ludic etymology, juggle the clues and identify Carmilla as a vampire. In legend, hunchbacks wield magical powers–hunchback Punch outplays both Death and the Devil–and Le Fanu’s mountebank “showing his white fangs” (27) also resembles the prototypical “clown character” with “‘a hump back [and] protruding teeth’” famous in the lore of India (On the Edge 238). Turner has even discussed the “flashing of teeth” motif as part of the playful “pedagogics of liminality” (The Ritual Process 104-05) in which a laughing approach to life, like the mountebank’s “merry discord,” conquers all adversaries. And the motley mountebank, “dressed in buff, black, and scarlet,” carrying “masks,” and familiar with all sorts of “monsters” (27-28), plays a kind of pattering harlequin who sells Laura and Carmilla a sacral “medicine-bundle” (On the Edge 235) or “amulet against the oupire.” He even volunteers to defang Carmilla after recognizing her “sharpest tooth,–long, thin, pointed, like an awl, like a needle; ha, ha!” (28-29), as if his laughing “white fangs” can outlast her lustful, violent ones. And, obviously, the mountebank’s all-encompassing laughter provides a much more effective liminal pedagogy than Laura’s patronizing, skeptical father’s “laughing very heartily” at her “nursery” story of being attacked as a child, just as she anticipates “he would laugh at my story” of Carmilla’s more recent violations (4-5,40).

Of course, maternal guardians, like Madame Perrodon, “whose care and good nature in part supplied to me the loss of my mother” (2), also appear in Carmilla; but few, if any, seem at first  liminally significant, though Matska’s “grinning derisively” (like the mountebank) after the carriage accident is suggestive. Carmilla’s first communication, “the clear, long-drawn screams of a female voice” (10), does appear to argue for the power of Kristeva’s pre-oedipal and pre-structural, semiotic register over symbolic structures. And Carmilla’s  first words, “Where is mamma?” (13), employ rational discourse to suggest the irrational chora or female receptacle, which Turner might contextualize as the liminal “obligation to perpetuate the matrilineage and links entailed in the relationships between particular categories of matrilineal kin belonging to . . . the ‘womb group,’ descended lineally from a specific woman through female links” (Blazing 20). Carol Senf relevantly reads the text in terms of Le Fanu’s alleged mother complex, which, of course, proves unprovable: “Because she was a social activist and a woman of some power both within the family and outside it, Le Fanu’s mother may have been a source of his interest in the power that women have” (27). Whatever the source, Carmilla’s matrilineal line, which Laura, “maternally descended from the Karnsteins” (56), shares, appears liminally ambiguous, almost as if the seventeenth-century Countess Mircalla Karnstein, a.k.a. Carmilla, mothers herself, or even creates her own mother. An intrapsychic reading, again emphasizing female development from caterpillar through chrysalis to butterfly (psyche), might explain this paradox better than Carmilla’s vampire logic, that is, her ability to materialize, dematerialize, and shape-shift. Laura’s own birth mother, like Christabel’s, also provides a cautionary tale–“Your mother warns you to beware of the assassin” (44).  This critical caution is usually interpreted as a warning against Carmilla; and yet, juggling possibilities, we could also argue that the should-be “assassin” of both Laura and liminality would be antiquated, hyper-structural systematizers like the (patrilineal) rationalists and priestly zealots (robed in black like the vampire’s henchmen) fighting for their lives in Carmilla by strictly “proceeding . . . according to law” (69). As Turner writes, “If law and/or religious values have lost their cultural efficacy, endemic continuous factionalism may infect public life for long periods” (On the Edge 292).

In any event, Carmilla herself, a “tormentor” who can “play [a] cruel trick” (70,46), performs the various liminal roles of tormenting mentor and trickster most successfully in the text. And as Le Fanu’s Lady of the Limen, she closely resembles Turner’s representative trickster figure, the Lord of the Limen and two-headed crossroads and graveyard guardian, the west African Exu:

one face is that of Christ, the other Satan’s. Exu, whose ritual colors are black and red, is the Lord of the Limen and of Chaos, the full ambiguity of the subjunctive mood of culture, representing the indeterminacy that lurks in the cracks and crevices of all socio-cultural “constructions of reality,” the one who must be kept at bay if the framed formal order of the ritual proceedings is to go forward according to protocol. He is the abyss of possibility; hence his two heads, for he is both potential savior and tempter (From Ritual 77).

Carmilla’s cross-sexual tendencies resemble the trickster’s (Laura even wonders “if a boyish lover had found his way into the house,” 23); and vampires are notoriously androgynous, penetrating flesh but receiving body fluid in return, besides transforming into theriomorphic creatures like the “sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat” (39) as tricksters also do. More significantly like a liminal guardian, Carmilla questions Laura’s cultural structures, “how can you tell that your religion and mine are the same; your forms wound me” (25); and she dialogically critiques Laura’s “faithful creator”: “Creator! Nature!” before preaching passionately on behalf of the Demiurge: “All things proceed from Nature. . . . All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains” (30). Such subversive gnostic correspondences, in heaven as it is on earth, often occur in the liminal pedagogy of mentoring tricksters who work playfully “to turn boys into men and girls into women” (From Ritual 32) as they behave like Carmilla: “destructive, creative, farcical, ironic, energetic, suffering, lecherous, submissive, defiant, but always unpredictable” (“Myth and Symbol” 580).

Turner describes the next liminal motif, antistructure, as a kind of mundus inversus or “topsy-turveydom” (From Ritual 42), “the critical and potentially creative destructuration [sic] of . . . order” signified by the “perilous personal journeys in everyone’s life from one brightly lighted familiar area (and set of habits) to another, through a medial darkness of liminality, illuminated only by the candles of guesswork and mythological speculation” (Blazing 148,132). This “perilous personal journey” seems much like what twelve-year-old Le Fanu experienced when his father, “a chaplain to a military establishment, surrounded by the pomp of the Williamite constitution” at Phoenix Park near Dublin, moved his family south to Abington, “a parish on the borders of counties Limerick and Tipperary, on the edge of the Slieve Felim mountains,” a truly liminal area which Thackeray described as antistructurally “black, ruinous, swarming, dark, hideous” (McCormack 17-18,20). In this context, Laura seems to personify Le Fanu’s alter-ego as “the novice [who] is borne off to a newly made seclusion hut on the margin of the village, where she will undergo liminal instruction by female elders for many months, before ‘coming out’ in a ritual which is also the precursor of her marriage” (On the Edge 271). Significant signs of antistructure facing Laura include the “scene of utter confusion” during Carmilla’s carriage accident (which Tammis Thomas says “‘overturns’ many expected [cultural] patterns” 48) with its “two wheels in the air” and the horses freed from their “traces” (11);  “the great, palpitating mass” (73) which attacks Laura in her bedroom; and  “the Ruins of Karnstein” (56) to which she finally journeys and which suggest a kind of cultural, if not cosmic entropy. Misleadingly, “the carriage was replaced in its upright position, and the horses, quite tractable, in the traces again” (12), as if antistructure has retreated and structure has been safely restored. Like some viscous Lovecraftian monster, Carmilla’s slimy “mass” metaphysically deconstructs Newtonian physics, anticipating Hurley’s point that slime “is a liminal phenomenon” which “testifies to the inability of human classificatory systems to contain and master matter” (35-36). And “the Ruins,” innocuously foreshadowed at the tale’s opening, later become the necropolis inhabited by Laura’s ancestral shade who seems both the alpha and the omega of Carmilla. No wonder Laura, like Bertha, suffers “appalling dreams” (67) in her serially long, dark nights of the soul during each “stage of [her] malady,” which antistructurally  “discoloured and perverted the whole state of [her] life” (42). Whether it is considered a psychomachia, theomachia, or even cosmomachia, Laura must learn to reconcile the struggle between structure and antistructure, between the politico-religious “law” of vampire-slayers (69) and the “ghostly law” compelling “vampires to increase and multiply” (82) in mockery of the biblical injunction. As Turner would say, she must discover the creative side of chaos in order to create a new cosmos, a more functional, brave new world for herself and her culture.

Neophytes can learn to accommodate antistructural rhythms by practicing subjunctivity: “one would have to reckon liminal processes subjunctive . . . , for they represent alternatives to the positive [and indicative] systems of economic, legal, and political action operating in everyday life” (On the Edge 164). In fact, “we may perhaps trace the grammatical mood to a cultural mood, a mode of thought to a mode of action. Ritual liminality, containing sacrifice and stressing wishes and vows, here seems to underlie a grammatical mode of framing language” (Blazing 134). The centrality of sacrifice suggests not only surrendering old cultural habits and prejudices during liminality, but also ultimately giving up liminality itself for a return to structure’s indicative securities–though perpetual liminality would completely sacrifice structure, while a social drama’s act of reintegration would tend to resolve the two modalities. And these alternatives are central to Carmilla as the vampire’s “mysterious moods” (22) might suggest. Sometimes Le Fanu typographically emphasizes the subjunctive mood as when Carmilla’s mother tells General Spielsdorf that “on reflection” ( a crucial interval of liminality as we will see) he “should suspect, who I am” (64). More crucially, when Doctor Spielsberg suspects that Laura has been infected by the Undead, and is supported by a colleague’s letter, the “coulds,” “woulds,” “shoulds,” “mays,” and “mights” proliferate until the emphatic conclusion: “there could be no doubt” that “the patient was suffering from the visits of a vampire!” (72).

We should note here the subjunctive motif of sparagmos or dismemberment which for Turner suggests not only personal sacrifice and individual scapegoating, but also “the decomposition of ritual” or surrender of common liminal energies for more specialized “liminoid genres” or arts and, ultimately, the greater cultural good in modern societies (Blazing 153,56). Similar to sparmagos is Derrida’s etymological wordplay with the closely synonymous concepts of pharmakon and pharmakos, whose grammatological function as “writing supplement[s]” to initial rhetorical logic seems particularly relevant to the “figure of Carmilla” and related notions of grammatical modes, sacrifice, and double narratives and even chiasmus (see both below). Like Carmilla, pharmakon can connote both a poison and a cure, but particularly “a housebreaker, threatening some internal purity and security” (128), while pharmakos, again like Carmilla, can suggest “a scapegoat” or a “wizard, magician, poisoner.” And the “ceremony of the pharmakos” is liminally “played out on the boundary line between inside and outside, which it has as its function ceaselessly to trace and retrace” (128130,133).  This liminal “rite of the pharmakos” is a kind of “ghost-writ[ing]” (134) like Carmilla’s shady doubling of her illuminated victims in the original illustrations to Carmilla: her benighted “figure” represents not just a supplement or “after thought,” but also the prelogical, “original” darkness. Reversing the “figure” again, pharmakos “parasites” were also “domesticated by the living organism that housed them at its expense” (133) as the hospitable hosts General Spielsdorf and Laura’s father house the parasitic Carmilla.

Veeder has argued that “Le Fanu uses various stylistic devices which provide some of the finest pleasures in ‘Carmilla’” (200), and many of these also contribute to the tale’s subjunctivity. For example, Laura finally recognizes Carmilla’s name game in which the vampire “anagrammatically” plays with Carmilla, Millarca, and Mircalla (81), recalling that among “the ‘instructions’ received by neophytes may be reckoned . . . the revelation of the real, but secularly secret, names of the deities or spirits” (Forest 103). Walton has suggested that Le Fanu employs a kind of figurative “chiasmus” to choreograph “Laura’s relations with Carmilla” (67); but Le Fanu likewise deploys rhetorical chiasmus to reflect their self-mirroring identities–“I you and you me” (18) as Carmilla asserts–which further implies the playfully “crossed connection-making” or “chiasmus . . . authorized, even prescribed, by the ambivalence of the pharmakon” (Derrida 127). In The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic doppelgänger tale, he memorably double-crosses rhetorical chiasmus when Jekyll tries to disown his double: “He, I say–I cannot say, I” (94); and Le Fanu similarly modifies the trope to stress his doubles’ double consanguinity of common bloodlines and bloody transfers. In Carmilla’s words, “as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others,” though in this same paragraph she revamps the yoking even further: “I live in your warm life, and you shall die–die, sweetly die–into mine” (22). Le Fanu uses wordplay for the same effect when Laura compulsively repeats grave in connection with the response of Spielsberg,“the grave little doctor,” to her mysterious malady: “I told him my story, and as I proceeded he grew graver and graver” (50). Finally, Le Fanu emphasizes the intersubjectivity between Laura and Carmilla by having them repeatedly recount the same experiences so that their stories bleed into one another. This kind of subjunctive narrative doubling becomes most critical after Laura hears the General’s account of Bertha’s violation and subsequent “unconsciousness”: “You may guess how strangely I felt as I heard my own symptoms so exactly described” (67), which guessing game also doubles the lady in town with the extratextual reader.

In the later stages of his career, Turner turned his interdisciplinary attentions toward three new liminal areas: performance genres (which we have seen), pilgrimages (which we will see), and neurobiological triune-brain studies (which are relevant to antistructure). Dr. Hesselius’s “tract on The Cardinal Functions of the Brain” in “Green Tea” somewhat previews these studies, at least in its analogous concern with “the interior sense” or “inner eye” of  “nerves” interconnected by “fluid” that “is spiritual, though not immaterial, any more than . . . light or electricity are so” (In a Glass Darkly 38-39). Turner is interested in “the ‘limen’ or threshold between the” left-lobe, indicative-mood hemisphere and the right-lobe, subjunctive-mood hemisphere and cautions against any “left hemispheric hegemony, if not imperialism.”  He seems most preoccupied, however, with “the archaic brain stem, the limbic system” of primitive emotions, containing ancestral mammalian and reptilian instinctual deposits, which liminality unleashes and which, for Turner, validate Carl Jung’s concept of archetypes and the collective unconscious (On the Edge 288,282-83,270-71). P. Broca discovered the limbic system in 1878, and Bram Stoker seems to dramatize its subjunctive power when Jonathan Harker doubles his liminal tormentor by scuttling up and down the walls of Castle Dracula “in his lizard fashion” (70). Coleridge’s Christabel, on the other hand, suggests that art can preview science when she, “[s]huddering aloud with a hissing sound” (l.591), imitates her loathly mate, the serpent-woman Geraldine. Yeats’s Crazy Jane relevantly advises the Bishop:

“Fair and foul are near of kin,

And fair needs foul,” I cried.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“For nothing can be sole or whole

That has not been rent” (“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop” ll.7-8,17-18).

Le Fanu’s Laura has been “rent,” but not yet made “whole” because her rite of passage hasn’t activated her limbic powers. She does repeatedly feel that “restless and unscrupulous passion” of “curiosity” and “ardently desired to know” Carmilla (21), but unlike Christabel and Harker, Laura never imitates Carmilla’s “power of the hand”–a sure “sign of the vampire” (82)–unless one counts her powerful handwritten narrative. The closest Laura comes to identifying with Carmilla is “a paradox,” that is, a “conscious[ness] of a love growing into adoration, [but] also of abhorrence”; and so even ten years later, as we’ve partially heard, “Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations–sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church” (23,83). Nevertheless, perhaps this admitted moodiness becomes the limbic mark of Laura’s subjunctive at-onement and a clue to the only kind of intrapsychic openness initiates can achieve in a liminoid culture. As the Jungian James Hillman suggestively explains, “familiarity [with one’s dream world] after some time produces in one a sense of at-homeness and at-oneness with an inner family which is nothing else than kinship and community with oneself, a deep level of what can also be called the blood soul” (241).

“Kinship and community” preview communitas, or lasting friendships among novices, which springs from antistructural “flow” as theorized by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and Games, “where action and awareness are one and there is loss of the sense of ego” (Turner, The Anthropology of Performance 107). The “loss of the sense of ego” or caution against left-hemispheric “imperialism,” which Turner emphasizes, is essential not only in egalitarian liminal rituals, but also in achieving postcolonial communitas as suggested, perhaps, by Ascendancy Protestant Le Fanu’s “lasting friendship with Patrick Kennedy,” who “was a Catholic of humble origins with whom Le Fanu worked in complete harmony until death claimed them both” in 1873 (McCormack 238). At any rate, Turner sees communitas as “the fons et origo of all structures and, at the same time, their critique. For its very existence puts all social structural rules in question and suggests new possibilities.” Furthermore, in an overly structured society like General Spielsdorf and Laura’s father’s, members of the lonely crowd “can go crazy because of communitas-repression; sometimes people become obsessively structural as a defense mechanism against their urgent need of communitas” (Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors 202,266). Laura exclaims, “You, who live in towns, can have no idea how great an event the introduction of a new friend is, in such a solitude as surrounded us” (16); but the fact remains that townspeople, like the majority of Le Fanu’s readers, require communitas as much as those in rural cultures. Laura’s father and the General “have been very old friends” (57); nevertheless, their friendship grows much more intimate and honest during their brief pilgrimage to Carmilla’s shrine, documenting that “the original ardor and communitas” of medieval pilgrimages “persists” into modern times (Turner and Turner 26). Laura herself has had only “two or three [occasional] lady friends” (3) so that when Bertha Rheinfeldt dies before her intended visit, it deprives Laura of potential communitas bonding, except with the false friend Carmilla, who represents a mocking return of the repressed relationship. Laura does, however, eventually seem to develop a true communitas exchange with her designated reader, the town lady, a surrogate for all readers who must then respond to Laura’s text with self-revealing openness.

Calling Carmilla a “false friend,” at least in terms of communitas, takes issue with Auerbach’s feminist readings of Carmilla as a Victorian testament to the “its century’s dream of homoerotic friendship”: “The female vampire is licensed to realize the homosexual, interpenetrative implications of the friendship male vampires aroused and denied” (“My Vampire, My Friend” 12,11). But Auerbach does recognize a kind of subjunctive “flow” dimension within female human-vampire friendships: “In the flow of female dreams, murderer and murdered, mother and lover, are one; women in Carmilla merge into a union the men who watch them never see” (Our Vampires, Ourselves 43). Turner describes authentic communitas as “intersubjective illumination” (From Ritual 48) characterized by “familiarity, ease and, . . .  mutual outspokenness” (Forest 101), besides “personal honesty, openness, and lack of pretentions or pretentiousness” (From Ritual 48), whereas Laura complains of Carmilla’s “wakeful reserve,” lack of “trust in my good sense or honour,” and her “utter failure” (21-22) at any honest disclosure. During the masquerade, Carmilla simulates being “very good friends” with her intended victim Bertha by “lower[ing] her mask,” but ironically this gesture reveals only a false facade, “a remarkably beautiful face” (60), at least to the seduced General. With the help of Baron Vordenburg, Laura later understands that vampires are “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” with whom they develop a kind of intense, co-dependent relationship until the “coveted victim” (81) becomes an earth-covered victim like Bertha. Such a “friendship” is false not because it appears homoerotic, but rather because it involves deceit and betrayal and not true communitas. Having argued this way, I must still admit that we again face a crisis of representation here with the “figure of Carmilla” who, like Frankenstein’s Creature, “realistically” functions as a serial killer, but whose “figurative” meaning, whether involving lesbian friendship or liminal flow, remains up to the individual reader’s critical imagination. And so Susan Broadhurst’s general comment about the “retriev[al of liminal participants’] chthonic identity by direct corporeal insertion in the creative act” (170) could support Laura’s passionate relationship with Carmilla.

At the conclusion of Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas (1864), Maud Ruthyn recites the gnostic, Swedenborgian creed that, arguably, informs the entire novel, “This world is a parable–the habitation of symbols–the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape” (436). When Victor Turner discusses “nonlogical sacra,” which provide “the symbolic template of the whole system of beliefs and values in a given culture,” he likewise discovers “an embarrassment of symbolic riches” in the very “heart of the liminal matter” (Forest 108-09,102). We have already seen how sacra like wounds and androgynes operate in Carmilla, and so here we will focus on monsters, womb-tomb motifs, lunar and other natural imagery, sacral metatexts, and mirrors.

Turner discusses how mentors provide “esoteric instruction” in the “recombination [of cultural factors] in fantastic or monstrous patterns and shapes” since “[m]onsters are unfamiliar combinations of familiar elements” (Forest 106; Blazing 153) like the hybrid “hippogriffs” (31) the mountebank mentions and the “monstrous cat” Carmilla transformatively “resemble[s]” (39). As a member of the living-dead, Carmilla of course, represents the most significant hybrid monster; and as an initially unplayful personification of social structure, General Spielsdorf is hell-bent to “relieve our earth of certain monsters” (56) because they demonstrate (note the common etymology) promiscuous mixtures that culture’s categorizing taxonomies can never classify but only murder to dissect. As Keats concludes when Apollonius exorcizes the mysterious Lamia with logic-chopping, structural analysis:

Philosophy will clip an Angel’s wings,

Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,

Empty the haunted air, and gnomed mine–

Unweave a rainbow, as it erewhile made

The tender-person’d Lamia melt into a shade (Lamia II:ll.234-238).

Such monstrous mixtures actually encompass all natural phenomena, including the human, whether Anglo-Irish, right hemispheric-left hemispheric, or betwixt-and-between initiates. And Turner’s comments seem most applicable to Anglo-Irish (if not vampire-human) affinities, “culture, as discriminatory, would seem to reject the unity of nature, if indeed, the inter-breeding capability of different human stocks would indicate natural affinity” (On the Edge 231). Again, Carmilla, “liminality incarnate,” herself personifies such mixtures as Lee suggests: “The vampire as animated corpse, material death circulating among the living, and liminality incarnate is a figure characterized by its equivocal, composite nature” (31). The most critical womb-tomb motif is Bertha’s death, which sacrificially serves as what Mikhail Bakhtin would call a “pregnant death, a death that gives birth” (25) for Laura since the General’s cautionary tale saves Laura’s life, while also signifying that stadial (in stages) development, as in Blake’s The Four Zoas, requires the death of each preliminary stage before the next can be successively born, only to sacrifice itself someday. Both initiations and pilgrimages feature this kind of “liminality . . . [as] a death-birth or a birth-death” (Blazing 32).

The text’s rampant lunar symbolism suggests the same kind of life-through-death cycle, though in a perhaps more mystical way. Mademoiselle De Lafontaine, who like her interdisciplinary father aspired “to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a mystic,” delivers a lunar sermon to Laura on the full moon shining with “a special spiritual activity” upon Carmilla’s “twilight” arrival. Indeed, the “effect of the full moon in such a state of brilliancy was manifold. It acted on dreams, it acted on lunacy, it acted on nervous people; it had marvellous physical influences connected with life” (8,9). For Tamar Heller, the moon signifies “the female menstrual cycle” and the “inevitable tide of female nervousness and hysteria” (82), which Carmilla transfers to adolescent Laura. More universally, the sacral moon suggests a “full” or total personality, the gnostic goal of liminal rites. In fact, other natural phenomena in the text, like the “undulating expanse of forest” (67) which surrounds the Karnstein Ruins and which resembles the “palpitating” monster Carmilla, signify the same mixed and flowing truth. And such sacral paradigms of transformative becoming rather than structural stasis are also signified by the topography leading up to Carmilla’s secret shrine and complemented by Laura’s lapse into the continuous action of the historical present: “The ground breaks into gentle hills and hollows, all clothed with beautiful wood, totally destitute of the comparative formality which artificial planting and early culture and pruning impart” (54). Suggestively, Turner cites Jung again in reading such “natural phenomena” as sacral projections of liminal development: “they are symbolic expressions of the inner and unconscious psychic drama that becomes accessible to human consciousness by projection–that is, by being mirrored in the events of nature” (“Myth and Symbol” 579). Raised to a corresponding cultural or even cosmic level, the ominously “fading crimson of the sky,” plus the four horsemen accompanying Carmilla’s carriage and the revenant’s ultimate identification as “the beast” (7,10,82), portend the advent of some apocalyptic upheaval, some “twilight” of contemporary gods and the return of much older ones.

Turner also nominates various kinds of interpolated metatexts as sacra so that, for example, the General’s early letter announcing Bertha’s death left Laura and her father “speculating upon the possible meanings of the violent and incoherent sentences” (8), just as Carmilla’s uninitiated reader engages in the same kind of speculative juggling of interpretive possibilities of the whole text. Readers may also speculate on Laura’s father’s unidentified citation of Antonio’s opening speech in The Merchant of Venice (9-10). He leaves the quotation liminally unfinished and so omits the next lines which clarify both Antonio’s present, and Laura’s future, weary “sadness,” besides her goal of self-knowledge: “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,4-7). The sacral and “somber piece of tapestry . . . representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom” (17) in Carmilla’s bedroom not only suggests the liminal reflexivity of the vamp being vamped and the fact that passion etymologically entails suffering, but also foreshadows the revelation that suicides become vampires (82). If one views Cleopatra as a kind of classical Eve figure, then her vampirism is figuratively handed down to all her daughters or, more universally, to all children of Eve. Similarly, the painting of “Mircalla, Countess Karnstein” (33), that is, of Carmilla herself, can ultimately teach initiate Laura her own origins, her own matrilineage as sacra traditionally do. The woodcuts by Michael Fitzgerald and David Henry Friston in the text’s original publication in The Dark Blue (1871-72) prove similarly suggestive, especially the illustration depicting a shadowy Carmilla reaching out to an illuminated Bertha asleep on her bed as suspicious General Spielsdorf enters the room, sword in hand (74, see fig. 1). Heller finds Bertha to be “at once unconsciously and voluptuously inviting” and the General’s sword “phallic” (86), while I tend to see sacral reflections of Henry Fuseli’s famous painting The Nightmare (1781) in this woodcut, suggesting that Carmilla represents an intrapsychic, limbic layer of Bertha's [and her double Laura's] borderline personality which the General, personifying the structurally imperative or indicative mood, tries to excise or exorcize. As sacrum, this represented self-division would be cautionary.

Figure 1

The General’s lengthy inset story of his ward’s seduction and murder by Carmilla represents roughly fifteen percent of the entire tale, and as a sacrum, it leads Laura and her father to the “truth” (or at least one version of the “truth”) about Carmilla. The long masquerade section has been analyzed in detail by Tammis Elise Thomas, and she pertinently argues that “Le Fanu depicts the masquerade as a site of initiation into the terrors of the supernatural and the forbidden pleasures of female same-sex desire” (41). Masks and masquerades are two of Turner’s favorite sacral motifs; and when “maskers and monsters” appear together, they “provok[e] the novices . . . into thinking hard about the elements and basic building blocks of symbolic complexes they had hitherto taken for granted as ‘natural’ units” (Blazing 50). In the General’s metatext, these “building blocks” include class, social, and personality structures.  For example, the “aristocratic assembly” obviously honors Carmilla’s mother as “a person of rank” (58-59) but neglects Le Fanu’s  possible wordplay with rank, ranging from disgusting and indecent to growing profusely, which connotes two opposing representations of vampires as personifying abject evil or transformative flow. The General also name-drops “the Grand Duke Charles,” whose “hospitalities are quite regal” (58), reflecting an elitist value system that allows Carmilla’s aristocratic mother to take full social advantage of his hospitality by self-inviting a parasite into his home. And when she claims “the privilege of her mask” in addressing him so intimately, Carmilla’s masked mother subversively portrays the outside-inside-the-inside motif: her inhuman mask reveals, rather than conceals, her internal and infernal inhumanity as she plays liminal mentor: “The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable.” When the General attempts to mimic her “license of a masquerade” and requests that she unmask herself, the masker ironically replies “You have no mask to remove. You can offer me nothing in exchange” (59-60), fully aware that she has already negotiated a kind of bloody bride-theft.

Related mirror sacra appear, of course, in Le Fanu’s collection title In A Glass Darkly (1872), in which “Carmilla” is reprinted with an added Prologue involving Dr. Hesselius. Robert Tracy relevantly reads this mirror image as a reflection of the neophyte reader: “The glass of [Le Fanu’s] title is not a window-pane through which we glimpse dim intimations of a spiritual world, or of divine truth. It is a mirror in which we glimpse our own dark nature” (xv). In an even more liminal sense, Turner repeatedly calls gnosis, the ultimate goal of initiation rites, “a stage of reflection” (Forest 105), which implies both Tracy’s self-reflection and “the esoteric knowledge,” signified by sacra “in a communitas of women,” that Laura must learn in order to restore herself and rehabilitate her culture:

the esoteric knowledge communicated in symbols in the girls’ puberty rites changes the inmost being of the neophytes. It is not merely that new knowledge is imparted, but new power is absorbed, power obtained through the weakness of liminality which will become active in postliminal life when the neophytes’ social status has been redefined in the aggregation rites. Among the Bemba [tribe in Africa] a woman has been grown from a girl through the importation of gnosis in a communitas of women (Dramas 258).

Specifying the exact nature of what Hesselius terms “the profoundest arcana of our dual existence and its intermediates” (84) in Carmilla, however, is like turning on lights to see darkness or depicting the unconscious with rational discourse. Expressing a metaphysical confusion common to both Gothic mysteries and Victorian crises of faith, Laura exclaims, apropos of Carmilla’s irrational behavior, “[r]especting these very extraordinary manifestations I strove in vain to form any satisfactory theory” (23). Gnoses are the flickering shadows on Plato’s cave wall; and solar “Truth” eclipses the shadows without enlightening them. We could call Carmilla’s general gnostic bent a kind of  limbic “blood knowledge,” or more specifically, the female mysteries of blood in various Great Mother or Eleusinian cults; and Kore/Persephone’s six-month alternation between above ground and underground remains a viable, reintegrative option for Laura. In another context, Veeder argues that “Carmilla seeks blood knowledge, beyond names, language, objectifying categories” (208), but he feels that Laura resists this resource. Pursuing the vampire’s Demiurgic celebration of “Nature,” Joseph Andriano’s Jungian-Manichaean reading finds that “the parental archetype” in Carmilla “is vividly polarized: the patriarchal Logos is the Lord of Light and Spirit, while the martriarchal Eros is the Lady of Darkness and moribund flesh” (104). We might also call upon the gnosticism of Swedenborg’s “correspondences” linking heaven and hell, or Le Fanu’s theatrum mundi with his theatrum mentis, which certainly animate the text, just as “the doctrine of correspondents” (177) informs Uncle Silas. As Devin Zuber writes, “without Swedenborg’s theory of correspondence or his notion of influx from a spiritual world, Le Fanu could not have uncannily anticipated post-structural work on . . . hybrid identity” (75). Or, like Heller, we could see the tale as a battleground between rival sexualities, pitting the “transmission of knowledge between men” against “female homoeroticism and female knowing” (89). Or, finally, we might adopt Jamieson Ridenhour’s recent folkloric-postcolonial analysis of Carmilla which sees it as a complex aisling or allegorical encounter with an enchanting “fairy-woman” who represents Ireland and provides “some foretelling of the future” that carries gnostic implications. At the same time, Ridenhour finds the text, like in-betwixt-and-between Le Fanu himself, “both mirroring and subverting the Nationalist [aisling] form [and so] coming out with no clear response” (xxix,xxxv).

Following Turner’s (and his wife Edith’s) leads, however, I want to conclude by discussing Carmilla as a liminal pilgrimage, specifically the pilgrimage to St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Derg, County Donegal, in order to juggle gnostic possibilities which both include and integrate many of the above readings. For Turner, again, “gnosis is the crux of liminality” since it “abounds in direct or figurative transgressions of the moral order which rules secular life, such as human sacrifice, cannibalism, parricide and incestuous unions” (Blazing 152); and, indeed, human sacrifice, cannibalism, and incest all appear in Carmilla. Turner compares pilgrimages and initiation rituals (and rites of affliction) since “both in initiation rites and in the pilgrimage process, the dead are conceived of as transformative agencies and as mediating between various domains normally classified as distinct” (Blazing 47), just as Le Fanu’s “ancestral shade” Carmilla transforms Laura’s innocence and mediates between ancient and contemporary, pagan and Catholic, and dying and living. Suggestively, it is on the liminal “western fringes of Europe, in the surviving haunts of the Celtic peoples,” like “Ireland,” that “spirits of the dead, temporarily released from purgatory, have begged mortals in the twilight” (Blazing 43) to make a pilgrimage for them, which suggests that Carmilla may desire salvation as much as she does the satisfaction of her sanguine appetites. Still, pilgrimage goals often waver between pleasing or placating ancestral shades, on the one hand, and petitioning their forgiveness or seeking solace in bereavement, on the other. The latter possibility recalls General Spielsdorf’s grief over Bertha, but really all such optional goals may be operative, whether ironically so or not, in Carmilla.

According to the Turners, the Church sometimes condoned “pagan practices [like vampire slaying] which were not directly repugnant to Christian notions of morality” (33). And this is especially true of the pilgrimage to the liminal site of St. Patrick’s Purgatory: “the very gate to [the] western underworld. . . . whose [Celtic] mythology regards the sunset as the path to the Land of the Dead, and the soul as journeying westward after death” toward St. Patrick’s “hallowed ruin” (112-13). In a remarkably similar vein, Laura introduces her pilgrimage to “the Chapel of Karnstein” and “grave of the Countess Mircalla” (79): “Passing the drawbridge we turn to the right, and follow the road over the steep gothic bridge, westward, to reach the deserted village and ruined castle” (54). Although the journey of “half a league” (57) may hardly seem a pilgrimage in terms of space, it is much prolonged, in terms of time, by the General’s lengthy inset tale. It may also be more than coincidental that the transitional time frame of Carmilla from midsummer to early autumn overlaps with the ten-week, traditional pilgrimage period “from June 1 to August 15" (124, besides suggesting the seasonal transformation from the hot-house period of adolescence to the mature wisdom of autumnal harvest represented in Blake’s The Four Zoas). Furthermore, “the name of Lough Derg (derg means ‘red’) [refers] to the blood of a serpent slain in its waters by St. Patrick”; and “the origin of [this] legend [rests] in pre-Christian mythology and pagan ideas of life after death” since Ireland’s patron saint was then blessed with a “miraculous glimpse of Purgatory, where the suffering soul lay in unspeakable torment” (110-11). The name of the slain serpent is “Caorthannach, or Corra–the Devil’s mother,” another mongrel monster who “resemble[s] a wolf with a serpent’s tale” (123).

Such details add nuances to the General’s allusion to Carmilla’s “hellish arts” and “malignity of hell,” besides his calling the Karnstein Ruins “accursed ground” (76). They also recall that Carmilla’s “coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, [the vampire’s] body lay immersed” (79) in addition to echoes of Kore and chora in Corra, the sacral, monstrous hybrid “recombined in bizarre and terrifying imagery,” which places “the initiand temporarily into close rapport with the primary or primordial generative powers of the cosmos” (“Myth and Symbol” 577). When we further note that “St. Catherine is the only foreign saint” to be monumentally honored at Lough Derg, and that she was “martyred by being beheaded” (Turner and Turner 118), such details suggest not only “the long lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein” with its “carved escutcheon” and “monumental inscription,” but also the fact that Mircalla-Carmilla’s “head was struck off, and a current of blood flowed from the severed neck” (77,79). As always with the “figure of Carmilla,” though, we are left with more questions than answers: is her death a kind of baptism of blood like St. Catherine’s; is her blood flow a sign of liminal self-sacrifice and sacral martyrdom for Laura’s benefit; conversely, is her destruction a retributive exorcism ironically indicting juridical-priestly, structural vengeance; or is it an appropriately redressive cure of the vampire’s plague in a ritual of affliction?  But there’s more.

St. Patrick’s Purgatory is also “impregnated with Irish experiences,” with “specific symbols and ideas of Irishness” (Turner and Turner 136). In fact, it is “a kind of national totemic center, where the Irish periodically reaffirm and strengthen their sentiments of solidarity”; but at the same time, it reflects the traditional “disunity among the Irish themselves,” particularly the “perennial divisiveness in Irish politics” (131). “Pilgrim symbology” also provides “a clue to the iconoclastic passion of the English assailants of the Lough Derg pilgrimage, who wish both to crush the spirit of Irish independence and to break the Roman [Catholic] link” (136). And these are exactly the kind of cultural and personal conflicts that McCormack sees confronting Le Fanu’s betwixt-and-between “Anglo-Irish ascendency”: “Caught between the new and aggressive power of Irish Catholics and the distant authority of English politicians who openly repudiated their identity of interest, [the Anglo-Irish were] forced to examine [their] alternatives” (80). The gnostic mystery then remains–where, personally, does Le Fanu stand in this treasure-trove of comparative riches?

I would suggest that like Lough Derg with its competing pagan, Protestant, and Catholic histories (and mythologies) and like the bicameral brain with its multi-layered stem, Le Fanu liberally layered Carmilla with a variety of contesting structural and gnostic impulses. Unlike Structuralism, however, Gnosticism itself harbors competing symbologies and should more accurately be termed gnosticisms or gnoses. For example, in the so-called “Manual of Discipline,” God created “the Prince of Lights” and “the Angel of Darkness,” otherwise named “the spirits of Truth and of Error”: “But God in the mysteries of his understanding and in his glorious wisdom has ordained a period for the ruin of error, and in the appointed time of punishment he will destroy it forever” (Campbell 284), which could reflect a gnostic sanctioning of Carmilla’s destruction. On the other hand, in several gnostic accounts of Eden, the serpent becomes a liminal mentor and the repository of feminine knowledge, while the overruling God becomes a kind of hyperstructural Blakean Nobodaddy. In the words of the Hypostasis of the Archons, “Then the Female Spiritual Principle came in the Snake, the Instructor, and it taught [the First Parents], saying, ‘. . . you shall not die; for it was out of jealousy that he said this to you. Rather, your eyes shall open, and you shall become like gods, recognizing evil and good.’ . . . And the arrogant Ruler cursed the Woman . . . [and] . . . the Snake” (Pagels 36), which reading could lead to gnostic support of Carmilla’s liminal virtues. The problem remains that these texts were not discovered until after Le Fanu’s death, and, except for the influence of Swedenborg, we don’t really know how acquainted Le Fanu was with gnostic ideas.  Still, Uncle Silas’s theory of correspondences certainly reflects liminality. In the words of the Gospel of Thomas, unearthed in the twentieth century but representing perennial gnostic ideas like the unity of center and circumference, “When you make the two one, and when you make the inside like the outside and the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same . . . then you will enter [the Kingdom].” And that “Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you” (Pagels 155,154).

In conclusion, then, I would say that in Carmilla liminality allowed Le Fanu to dramatize many of the paradoxes within his own transitional culture and within his own transforming selfhood. Liminality delights in disorder and dwells in possibility. Consequently, it should not be used systematically as a kind of master trope since that would be most “unliminal” or deliminalizing as Turner would say. Turner’s son Frederick, a poet and literary critic, puts it this way: “Turner would surely approve of the appropriation of his ideas across the disciplinary boundaries that separate the social sciences from the humanities; but we must recognize that he would have been uneasy at the prospect of a system or school of Turnerian literary criticism, especially if it showed signs of turning into an orthodoxy” (148). And just as liminality suggests the unfinished, incomplete, or potentially transformative, many readers have noted the lack of closure at the “close” of Carmilla. James Twitchell argues that “true to the gothic tradition the last word is never written” (132), Thomas that “several subversive forces remain at large at the narrative’s conclusion” (58), Adrienne Major that “the impossibility of narrative closure” is due to “lingering horror [and] ruthless domesticity” at the tale’s end (164,163), and Nancy Welter that Carmilla “challeng[es] itself with an ending that refuses to restore order among the characters” (138). Lee, though, comes closest to providing a liminal reading: “As Laura closes her narrative, the borders of her self–symbolized by [her] room’s threshold–remain in a compromised, traversable state” (33).

Several concluding mysteries do remain unresolved. What, for example, is Bertha’s fate, since she cannot rest easy after her death at Carmilla’s hand, unless Carmilla’s own death somehow frees all the souls she has turned? The only plausible answer is that the General has secretly staked and beheaded his ward as Seward and Van Helsing do to Lucy in Dracula, though such a disturbing possibility is never broached in the text. And what about “that quaint Baron Vordenburg,” whose “grotesque features puckered up into a mysterious smile” (80-81) when asked about Carmilla? Laura’s father and General Spielsdorf “were indebted” to his “curious lore . . . for the discovery of the Countess Mircalla’s grave” (80). Still, that “mysterious smile” suggests a mentoring trickster. And the text’s repeated instances of narrative unreliability and compulsive acts of repetition make one wonder whether the good Baron hasn’t actually repeated “the stratagem” of the “Moravian nobleman,” his ancestor (though whether matrilineal or patrilineal hangs in liminal uncertainty), lest the “remains” of his idol Mircalla be “profaned by the outrage of a posthumous execution” (81-82). Despite an “official paper” (79) to the contrary, this possibility appears no more farfetched than Vordenburg’s ancestral shade’s original deception of officialdom; and it also seems in the spirit of the revenant.

And lastly, what about Laura? The answer to this central question depends heavily on her own, and our own, final perceptions of Carmilla, but the possibilities would seem to include Laura’s liminal failure as well as her liminal success since she plays mentor to Hesselius, the town lady, and you and me. My own perception, though, is that Laura hangs suspended in prolonged (and certainly fictive) liminality, what McCormack calls Le Fanu’s symptomatic stance of “transitional stasis” (260), because she loses, perhaps even sacrifices, her dramatic agency and functions solely as a kind of sober, sad, and spectral narrator. As Turner writes, “Liminality may be the scene of disease, despair, death, suicide, the breakdown without compensatory replacement of normative, well-defined social ties and bonds” (From Ritual 46). In the added Prologue, Laura has literally become spectral in death, whether or not she has been turned into a vampire through Carmilla’s “love.” In any case, since liminal thresholds provide such far-reaching passages into Carmilla, it seems hardly accidental that Laura’s final word on the subject, ten years later, would be door: “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door” (83).

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