Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in "Carmilla" and "Dracula"

Author(s): ELIZABETH SIGNOROTTI

Source: Criticism , fall, 1996, Vol. 38, No. 4 (fall, 1996), pp. 607-632

Published by: Wayne State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23118160

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ELIZABETH SIGNOROTTI

Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire

in "Carmilla" and Dracula

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker's Dracula has unques tionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth century vampire tales that have been overshadowed by Stoker's 1897 novel.1 To be sure, many of the earlier tales provide little more than a collective history of the vampire lore Stoker incorporated in Dracula,2 but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's little known "Carmilla" (1872) is the original tale to which Stoker's Dracula served as a re sponse. In "Carmilla" Le Fanu chronicles the development of a vam piric relationship between two women, in which it becomes increasingly clear that Laura's and Carmilla's lesbian relationship defies the traditional structures of kinship by which men regulate the exchange of women to promote male bonding. On the contrary, Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to be stow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women, normative as discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss and more recently by Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick.3 Stoker later responded to Le Fanu's narrative of female empowerment by reinstating male control in the exchange of women. In effect, Dracula seeks to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange, and to correct the reckless unleashing of female desire in Le Fanu's "Carmilla."

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Levi-Strauss argues that women are "valuables par excellence from both the biological and the social points of view . . . without which life is impossible" (481). As "valuables," women are seen "as the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual and proprietorial instincts . . . [and also as] the subject of the desire of others, . . . binding others through alliance with them" (496). Women, then, become the means of alliance, the "supreme gift" (65) that binds men together and creates social order. For Levi-Strauss, marriage most significantly reveals men's complete control of women. He argues that traditionally "the total relationship

Criticism, Fall 1996, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 4, pp. 607-632 Copyright © 1996 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201

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Elizabeth Signorotti

of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but be tween two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place" (115). As an essential and valuable "sign" to be possessed and exchanged, woman's sole purpose is to provide the passive link between men.

Levi-Strauss's exploration of the role women play in creating male alliance is further examined in Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Wom en" and in Eve Sedgwick's Between Men. Whereas Levi-Strauss ulti mately romanticizes the exchange of women,4 Rubin examines the specific implications for women resulting from his argument. She states that Levi-Strauss's "exchange of women" is shorthand for ex pressing the "social relations of a kinship system . . . [where] men have certain rights in their female kin . . . [and where] women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin" (177). Since women are "transacted" by men, they become only "a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it" and are denied the "benefits of their own circulation" (174). Rubin further stresses that "compulsory heterosexuality is a product of male kinship" because "women . . . can only be properly [valued] by someone 'with a penis' (phallus). Since the girl has no 'phallus,' she has no 'right' to love her mother or another woman" (198, 193-94). In her examination of Levi Strauss, Rubin underscores woman's historical subjection to male desire and her exclusion from the social order governed by male alli ance.

Sedgwick broadens Rubin's argument by investigating "com pulsory heterosexuality" as a distinguishing factor in female relation ships and in male relationships. She argues that men's relationships are defined by "homosocial desire," that homosocial relationships be tween men must be distinguished from socially threatening homosex ual unions, and the only way to eliminate the homosexual threat between men is to include a woman in the relationship, forming a (safe) triangular configuration rather than a (threatening) linear, male-to-male union. She contends that contrary to women's relation ships "patriarchial structures [assure] that 'obligatory heterosexuali ty' is built into male-dominated kinship systems, [and] that homophobia is a necessary consequence of. . . patriarchal institutions [such] as heterosexual marriage" (3). Women function in this system as signs and tools to ensure the survival of male relationships and to deflect the threat of homosexuality by serving as a link between men.

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Repossessing the Body 609

Sedgwick sums up social perceptions of women's and men's rela tionships as a "diacritical opposition between the 'homosocial' and the 'homosexual,'" an opposition that "seems to be much less thor ough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men" (2). She argues that all women in our society who promote the interests of other women (by teaching, nurturing, studying, marching for, or employing) are "pursuing congruent and closely related activities. Thus the adjective 'homosocial' as applied to women's bonds . . . need not be pointedly dichotomized as against 'homosexual'; it can intelligibly dominate the entire continuum" (3).5 The unity of the les bian continuum, "extending over the erotic, social, familial, econom ic, and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males" (3). That arrange ment, as Levi-Strauss has defined it, is a system of alliance between men that requires, in some form, the exchange of women to bind men and (as Sedgwick implies) to stave off homosexual anxiety. Sedgwick makes clear that women's relationships are not governed by homophobia; therefore, excluding men from female friendships or from access to women poses more of a threat to male kinship systems than to female. Thus, female homosocial bonds potentially carry tre mendous power to subvert or demolish existing patriarchal kinship structures, which is precisely what happens in "Carmilla."

Throughout most of the nineteenth century the central figure in vampire tales was a male whose relationships were used to depict various conflicts in contemporary society. James Twitchell observes in The Living Dead that nineteenth-century writers mainly used the vampire "to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself' (4). Other critics note that the vampire, a dead body that drinks blood and preys on innocent victims to sustain its own life, acts as a complex metaphor: it could represent the economic dependence of women; the parasitic relationship between the aristoc racy and the oppressed middle and lower classes; unrepressed fe male sexuality; eugenic contamination; enervating parent/child relationships; and, of course, sexual relationships deemed subversive or perverse in hegemonic discourse.6 Perhaps most interesting is Nina Auerbach's contention that the demonized (or vampirized) woman in nineteenth-century literature and art really depicts a "hero who was strong enough to bear the hopes and fears of a century's worship."7 Auerbach's comment may be true in some instances, but by and large the majority of women in vampire tales, at least in the

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610 Elizabeth Signorotti

early and mid-nineteenth century, were far too marginalized and vic timized to be seen as heroic; like the male protagonists of those tales, who brutalized them, women vampires were generally perceived as loathsome and diseased.

Le Fanu's "Carmilla"—the first vampire tale whose protagonist is a woman vampire—marks the growing concern about the power of female homosocial relationships in the nineteenth century. All of Car milla's predecessors—Lord Ruthven, Varney, Melmoth—were men. Le Fanu's creation of a woman vampire anticipates the shift toward the end of the century to predominantly female vampires. In both art and literature, women and specifically women's bodies became pro gressively associated with the vampire. One explanation for this shift, as Carol Senf points out, is the "growing awareness of women's power and influence . . . [as] feminists began to petition for addi tional rights for women. Concerned with women's power and influ ence, writers . . . often responded by creating powerful women characters, the vampire being one of the most powerful negative im ages" (The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature 154). But women's potential power alone does not fully explain the prolifera tion of women vampires. The female body itself was demonized. Ac cording to Sian Macfie, "the function or dysfunction of the female body was juxtaposed with notions of the perceived threat of vampir ism . . . [and these notions] were largely based upon a sense of wom en's association with blood [as a result of menstruation]. However, the idea of female vampirism also came to be understood in a more figurative sense. In addition to the idea of the literal contagion of the blood, vampirism came to be associatively linked with the notion of moral contagion and especially with the 'contamination' of lesbian ism" ("'They Suck Us Dry'" 60). Citing Havelock Ellis, who hypothe sized that "homosexuality . . . occurs with special frequency in women of high intelligence who . . . influence others,"8 Macfie con cludes that "the notion of vampirism also came to be used metaphor ically to refer to a social phenomenon, the 'psychic sponge.' The psychic sponge was understood to be a woman who was perceived [as] a drain on the energy and [the] emotional and intellectual re sources of her companions" (60). As a result of women's perceived link with vampirism, by the late nineteenth century "close female bonding and lesbianism are conflated with notions of the unhealthy draining of female vitality" (Macfie 62).9

"Carmilla" is the vampire tale that most readily defies the estab lished patriarchal systems of kinship discussed above and that most

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Repossessing the Body M I

provokingly challenges nineteenth-century notions of the "con tamination of lesbianism" and the female "psychic sponge." Florence Marryat's The Blood of the Vampire (1897) depicts an equally interest ing lesbian vampire relation, offering insights into fin-de-siecle stereo types of female sexuality and gendered identity, but Le Fanu's tale is the first to investigate disruptive lesbian desire.10 Although "Carmilla"'s denouement is ambiguous, Le Fanu refrains from heavy-handed moralizing, leaving open the possibility that Laura's and Carmilla's vampiric relationship is sexually liberating and for them highly desirable. The ontological change in Laura between the beginning of the narrative and the end is never reversed, suggesting that her shifting desires are, for her, healthy and vital.

Le Fanu originally published "Carmilla" in the short-lived Vic torian periodical The Dark Blue, then added the prologue and in cluded the tale in In a Glass Darkly, five unrelated narratives held together by the figure of Dr. Hesselius, a student of psychic phenom ena whose case histories make up these stories.11 Not only "the great est" of Le Fanu's works,12 "Carmilla" is also the most daring. It depicts a society where men increasingly become relegated to power less positions while women assume aggressive roles.13 Le Fanu pushes his male characters, who lose all control over their women, toward the edge of his narrative. Ineffectual in either understanding or treating Styria's baffling (female) "malady," Le Fanu's men suffer exclusion from male kinship systems because they are unable to ex change women. Instead, women control their own exchange, prompt ing W. J. McCormack to observe that in "Carmilla" "feminine nature is powerful, destructively powerful, and its objects become hypno tized (or hyperstatically controlled) in its power" (233). Le Fanu un tethers "destructively powerful" feminine nature in "Carmilla" and refuses to retether it by the end of his story.

At the opening of her narrative, Laura's potentially powerful na ture remains under her father's control. She emphasizes the "loneli ness" of living in an ancient, secluded Schloss with her correspond ingly ancient father for a companion. She and her father survive on a "small income" —from his pension and patrimony—and reside in a part of the world seemingly untouched by anything even slightly dis ruptive: the old road is unchanged, the drawbridge has never been raised, and the ever-present water lilies remain floating calmly on the moat's surface. Fixed firmly within the parameters of her father's power as well as his "patrimony," Laura looks forward only to the infrequent visits of General Spielsdorf and his charming niece, Bertha

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blZ hlizabeth Signorotti

Kheinfeldt, who live m the nearest inhabited schloss . . . nearly twenty miles away" ("Carmilla" 574).14 Yet, she writes, far from liv ing a completely mundane life, the "first occurrence in my existence, which produced a terrible impression upon my mind, which, in fact never had been effaced, was one of the very earliest incidents of my life" (C 575). One night while sleeping, Laura recalls,

I saw a solemn, but very pretty face looking at me from the side of the bed. It was that of a young lady who was kneel ing, with her hands under the coverlet. I looked at her with a kind of pleased wonder, and ceased whimpering. She ca ressed me with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried loudly. The lady started back, with her eyes fixed on me, and then slipped down upon the floor, and, as I thought, hid herself. (C 575)

Ihe young lady who caresses Laura for a moment plays the re placement mother to the orphaned girl, but she is decidedly no mother. The homoerotic overtones of the ensuing attack on Laura's breast eclipse the initial mother/child dynamic and establish the na ture of the two women's ensuing relationship. For the moment, the "lady," Carmilla, disappears, only to return thirteen years later. De spite her long absence, Carmilla's initial attack introduces Laura to the liberating exchange of female sexuality and begins the process of Laura's ontological shifting.

Carmilla's return thirteen years later to the lonely Styrian "schloss" initiates the female usurpation of traditional male exchange privi leges. Almost immediately after Laura learns that Bertha Rheinfeldt, "in whose society [she] had promised [her]self many happy days" (C 577), has suddenly and mysteriously died from a strange "malady" (C 601), a carriage carrying Carmilla and her mother crashes directly in front of the schloss. Laura and her father (who remains nameless throughout) are rambling along a forest path, and just prior to the crash he confesses that he feels "as if some great mis fortune were hanging over us" (C 579). The "misfortune" he refers to proves to be his loss of power over Laura upon Carmilla's arrival. Moments after his confession, the carriage crashes, spilling the two women along the pathway. While Carmilla lies unconscious, her mother, a "distinguished," "imposing" woman with "a commanding

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Repossessing the Body 613

air and figure" (C 580-81), opens negotiations with Laura's father. She talks to him "with a fixed and stern countenance," explaining that she has "rapid and secret" (C 581, 583) business to attend to, perhaps the "secret" business of initiating female alliances. She finally convinces him to invite Carmilla to stay at the schloss until she re covers, then departs to attend to her "vital" business (C 583). The ex change between Carmilla's mother and Laura's father recalls Levi Strauss's "exchange of women," but with a significant difference: one of the exchanging partners is a woman. This exchange —one that al lows Carmilla to renew relations with Laura—is the first step in breaching established patterns of exchange by forcing a man to nego tiate with a woman for the "charge" (C 580) of a third woman.

The opening sections of "Carmilla" reflect some common themes of nineteenth-century vampire literature. Laura's comment on her fami ly's small income invites comparison with Carmilla's almost aristo cratic appearance and her mother's demeanor as a "person of consequence" (C 581). The vampiric aristocrats have landed, nine teenth-century readers might suppose, to suck dry the middling country gentlefolk. Carmilla's contempt toward the peasantry of Styria conflates the "aristocrat's hereditary power over others with the vampire's supernatural power over human beings" (Senf 43). In addition, Carmilla's mother—depicted as a busy vampire's mother if not a vampire herself—becomes, as Senf argues, a "negative version of what nineteenth-century women were expected to do and be" (161). Only a "bad" mother would loose her daughter into a staid pa triarchal system and allow her to disrupt social order. A good mother would train her to obey and perpetuate current systems of alliance. Against these more conventional themes of vampire literature, how ever, Le Fanu develops a tale of female desire—forbidden, exclusive female desire that bonds against male tyranny and resists marriage. Unlike Laura's and Bertha's homosocial friendship, which we can as sume is of the non-threatening sort, Laura's and Carmilla's lesbian friendship assaults patriarchal law and is finally perceived by Styria's men as anything but innocuous.

Once settled in the schloss, Carmilla and Laura hungrily pursue each other and Carmilla supplants Laura's father in his position as her guide, companion, and confidant. Laura recalls that, despite the initial shock of seeing the woman who pierced her breast so many years ago, she "felt drawn towards" Carmilla (C 585). "I took her hand as I spoke," Laura writes. "I was a little shy, as lonely people are, but the situation made me eloquent, and even bold. She pressed

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614 Elizabeth Signorotti

my hand, she laid hers upon it, and her eyes glowed as, looking hast ily into mine, she smiled again, and blushed" (C 585). Immediately stirred, "shy" Laura shifts into the bold lover. The two caress each other, fondle each other, and sigh over each other's beauty, but Laura soon becomes impatient with Carmilla's refusal to share her history. Carmilla, she remembers, "would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in. . . . Once or twice, indeed, I did at tack her more directly. But no matter what my tactics, utter failure was invariably the result. Reproaches and caresses were all lost upon her" (C 587). Carmilla's refusal to bear her "ancestral name" is just one example of her refusal to be subsumed by male authority. She is less interested in sharing with Laura her lineage—a primary concern in male systems of exchange —than her sexuality. Under her tutelage, she and Laura share themselves sexually with each other, realizing the "benefits of their own circulation" (Rubin 174). Once their "passions have been most wildly and terribly roused," Carmilla erupts, "You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever" (C 588). Despite her mingled attraction toward Carmilla and her fear of Carmilla's often painful midnight visits, Laura refuses to alert her father to Carmilla's frightening behavior. Instead, she joins Carmilla in claiming for themselves the right of bestowal and, in so doing, eliminating male control over social linkage.

Le Fanu's use of the newly restored Karnstein family portraits fur ther suggests the influence of Carmilla's unrestrained sexuality. Laura reveals that she is "descended from the [aristocratic] Karn steins" (C 595), which explains her father's interest in the ancient por traits. After unveiling one portrait dated 1698 and bearing the name Marcia Karnstein, Laura exclaims, "It was quite beautiful; it was star tling; it seemed to live. It was the effigy of Carmilla!" (C 594). The effigy's resemblance astounds Laura, but what further interests the reader is that "it was a small picture, about a foot and a half high, and nearly square, without a frame" (C 594). William Veeder believes the portrait's lack of a frame "suggests the incomplete, ambivalent quality of the young women's relationship" (208); actually, its frame lessness strikingly suggests Carmilla's unrestrained, rampant sexual ity and her infectious refusal to remain bound by male forms. In The Flesh Made Word, Helena Michie concludes that frequently women characters "are distanced from their lovers and their readers by ap pearing as either texts or as works (objects) of art, . . . [and] the act of unframing oneself, of stepping out of one's portrait, is a subversive

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Repossessing the Body 615

and dangerous move for women" (87, 107).15 Carmilla's unframed effigy accentuates her physicality—as a contained image would not— and the threat she poses to male order. Her sexual power is totally unbound, freeing her to create her own systems of female kinship and to make the "subversive and dangerous move" away from for mal rules of male exchange.

Le Fanu stresses male exclusion from Carmilla's system of kinship when General Spielsdorf recounts his misguided dealings with her. After Carmilla's lengthy stay at his home, Spielsdorf's niece, Bertha, becomes ill. Spielsdorf hires a physician to examine her and learns she "was suffering from the visits of a vampire!" (C 622). Determined to catch this vampire, Spielsdorf tells Laura's father,

I concealed myself in the dark dressing room that opened upon the poor patient's room, in which a candle was burn ing, and watched there till she was fast asleep. I stood at the door, peeping through the small crevice, my sword laid on the table beside me, as my directions prescribed, until, a little after one, I saw a large black object, very ill-defined, crawl, as it seemed to me, over the foot of the bed, and swiftly spread itself up to the poor girl's throat, where it swelled, in a moment, into a great, palpitating mass. For a few moments I had stood petrified. I now sprang forward, with my sword in hand. The black creature suddenly contracted toward the foot of the bed, glided over it, and, standing on the floor about a yard below the foot of the bed, with a glare of skulk ing ferocity and horror fixed on me, I saw Millarca. Speculat ing I know not what, I struck at her instantly with my sword; but I saw her standing near the door, unscathed. Horrified, I pursued, and struck again. She was gone! and my sword flew into shivers against the door. (C 622)

The male agent is excluded from the scene, relegated to an onlooker's position while Carmilla and Bertha enact an exchange that rests com pletely outside traditionally stipulated boundaries. Like Laura's fa ther, Spielsdorf is "cut off from his manly sword, circumscribed by the vaginal crevice, impotent before the phallically swelling vampire . . . [with] the shattered sword as his emblem" (Veeder 205).16 Spiels dorf's attempt to subject Carmilla to his own desire—by stabbing her with his sword—fails, as does his attempt to correct this transgres sive scene. Uncontainable by male systems of exchange, Carmilla shifts shape—refusing to be bound by the restrictive, one-dimen sional roles available to women—and leaves at her own pleasure.

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616 Elizabeth Signorotti

As Carmilla's power over Laura grows, so too does the alienation between the narrative's men and women. During a discussion of the mysterious "malady" that has recently infected the young women of Styria, Laura's father remarks, "We are in God's hands; nothing can happen without His permission, and all will end well for those who love Him" (C 593). Carmilla disdainfully replies, "Creator! Nature! . . . All things in heaven, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains" (C 593). Carmilla's inability to accept God as omnipotent ex tends from her general refusal to include males in her exclusively female kinship system. Instead, she worships the embodiment of the feminine, Mother Nature, and implies the naturalness of her and Laura's female union.

The alienation between men and women in "Carmilla" is exacer

bated by men's attempts to sequester information about women. The doctors hired to examine Carmilla (and later Laura, once she has a full-blown case of the vampire malady) facilitate the exchange of in formation between men about women. Laura reports that after one doctor examines Carmilla, he "was closeted with papa for some time. . . . He and papa emerged from the room together, and I heard papa laugh" (C 593). Evidently, the doctor confesses his suspicions about Carmilla, but in utter disbelief "papa" dismisses them. Neither Car milla nor Laura are told the outcome of the men's "examination," though ironically the two women know far more about the malady than any examiner could tell them, placing the men at a continual disadvantage.

The males in "Carmilla" are as ineffectual in their attempts to pro tect women as they are in their attempts to control information about them. As Veeder notes, General Spielsdorf, who, like Laura's father, is duped by Carmilla's mother, "submits to the charms of sex and rank by convincing himself that Millarca's mother was 'throwing her self entirely upon my chivalry.' Such manly protectiveness is in fact a form of emasculation, as Spielsdorf's diction indicates. 'She in some sort disarmed me . . . quite overpowered, I submitted'" (204). By playing upon male chivalry, Carmilla and her mother expose it as a weakness. Both women take advantage of the "separate sphere" ide ology common to Victorian discourse in which women, seen as the repositories of innocence and order, require protection from the nob ler, stronger sex. Ruskin's 1899 Sesame and Lilies best defines this sep arate sphere ideology: man, he claims, is "active, progressive, defensive . . . eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the de fender . . . [and woman is] enduringly, incorruptibly, good; instinc

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Repossessing the Body 617

tively, infallibly wise . . . not for self-development, but for self renunciation" (22-24).17 Intelligent as well as sexually transgressive, Carmilla and her mother invoke and subvert an ideological perspec tive intended to disable and contain women, ultimately disabling the men around them.

Laura's father is equally ineffectual as a protector of women. On the evening Carmilla disappears from the schloss (another breach of separate sphere ideology, in which women are "expected to isolate [themselves] within the home" [Senf 55]), Laura and her maids "grew frightened . . . [and] rang the bell long and furiously. If my fa ther's room had been at that side of the house," Laura says, "we would have called him up at once to our aid. But alas! he was quite out of hearing" (C 602). The physical remoteness of her father's room mirrors his removal from all transactions involving either Laura or Carmilla. Le Fanu emphasizes Papa's ineffectuality by locating him at the schloss's perimeter as well as the narrative's edge. Realizing his disempowered state, Laura "began to cool a little, and soon re covered [her] senses sufficiently to dismiss the men" (C 603) she had summoned. They, like Spielsdorf and Papa, can offer nothing vital.

Camilla's sexual possession of Laura foils Papa's attempts to marry her to General Spielsdorf, a match that could reestablish the male bond and the male exchange of women. By the time Spielsdorf returns to Styria, Laura's illness is visible. Her father laments, "I wish our good friend, the General, had chosen any other time; that is, I wish you had been perfectly well to receive him" (C 608). Laura's fa ther fears her malady will reduce her value on the husband market, yet he still hopes Spielsdorf is "thinking of claiming the [Karnstein] titles and estates" (C 610). Her father says this "gaily," Laura tells us, "but the General did not recollect the laugh, or even the smile; . . . [instead] he looked grave and even fierce" (C 610). Spielsdorf realizes that Papa retains no right to "transact" his daughter, who has already assumed that right and made an exchange with Carmilla. Although Veeder argues that Laura laments her exclusion from the "relationship among males" (219) in which her father participates, no evidence for this exists in the text. On the contrary, Laura relishes the liberating feelings resulting from her alliance with Carmilla: the "gentle, and, somehow, not unwelcome possession" and the "peculiar cold thrill [against her breast preceding] a sense of exhaus tion" (C 601). Rather than envying the relationship among males, the two women enjoy the power of female alliances.

Laura's and Carmilla's female alliances result in a rejection not

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MS Elizabeth Signorotti

only of marriage but of motherhood as well. Senf notes that "during the nineteenth century [it was assumed that] motherhood was a woman's highest duty" (158). Their transgressive relationship dis rupts the laws of procreation necessary to maintain social order. Le Fanu, however, refrains from making them culpable for their pro creative transgression and from condemning his vampiric representa tion of lesbian desire, leaving "Carmilla" more open-ended than may at first appear.

"Carmilla"'s resolution follows the traditional means of vampire extermination, but the neat resolution "fails to contain the larger forces of which Carmilla is only a single manifestation."18 Realizing that Carmilla is the vampire responsible for the mysterious malady plaguing Styria, Spielsdorf and Papa enact the obligatory staking scene (significantly termed "transfixation"—literally, nailing down something gone wild—by the Catholic church) then burn her body and scatter her ashes in the river. This scene, however, only ambigu ously ends Carmilla's existence. Since Le Fanu suggests "that a vam pire's victims must become vampires themselves," he raises questions in the reader's mind "about the ultimate fate of both Laura and Mile. Rheinfeldt."19 Indeed, we learn that "it is the nature of vampires to increase and multiply . . . according to a ghostly law . . . [and that a vampire] spectre visits living people in their slumbers; they die, and almost invariably, in the grave, develop into vampires" (C 627). Moreover, in the prologue to "Carmilla" the editor of Laura's story informs us that he "was anxious to reopen the correspondence commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a per son so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much

to my regret, however, I found that she [Laura] had died in the inter val" (C 573). By the time this tale reaches its readers, both Laura and Bertha have died, yet presumably they continue to live as resur rected vampires, perpetuating the chain of female alliances begun by Carmilla.

The conclusion to Laura's tale is as ambiguous as the extermina tion of Carmilla. During the spring following Carmilla's transfixation, Laura's father takes her on a tour through Italy. The year-long tour represents his attempt to reinstate Laura in the male chain of ex change, to reinscribe her into the world of her father and cure her of the lesbian desire she still maintains. But his attempt fails. Laura has tasted the sweet fruit of self-determination and fulfilling desire and does not wish to return to her pre-Carmilla life. She writes that, de spite the passage of time, "to this hour the image of Carmilla returns

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to memory with ambiguous alternations —sometimes the playful, lan guid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing-room door" (C 628). Laura ends her account fancying that Carmilla is poised to enter the drawing room. This image suggests her longing for Carmilla to re-enter her, to penetrate her once more. By this point, Laura has changed as a result of her vampiric love. No longer a mere "sign," she has become a fleshed-out, desiring woman. Far from restoring Laura to her father's system of exchange, the conclusion of her narrative confirms the reader's suspicions that everything Carmilla represents, if not Car milla herself, remains loose and desirable in Styria.

Like the unframed Karnstein portrait, the entire "Carmilla" narra tive is incompletely framed. In the brief prologue the editor com ments: "upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he ac companies with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS. illuminates" (C 573). Yet the narrative ends without pre senting either Dr. Hesselius's note or the editor's concluding re marks. Instead, "Carmilla" ends with Laura's reverie. The frame that opens the tale is never closed, recalling the lack of closure around Carmilla's effigy. The prologue's editor also informs us that Laura was Doctor Hesselius's "informant" (C 573), but Laura's pointedly addressing her story to "a town lady like you" (C 589) eliminates the male link between her and her reader and provides a direct route from one woman to another. Le Fanu's incomplete narrative frame supports the perception of "Carmilla"'s women as free from male systems of control or exchange. Laura's relationship with Carmilla is not sandwiched between an editor's and doctor's comments and then

exchanged with the reader; rather, like Spielsdorf's and Papa's failed attempts to contain these women, the editor similarly fails to frame them in his narrative.20 Laura addresses her female reader directly, eliminating any intervening male agent, just as she and Carmilla eliminated the middle-man in their own exchange.

Dracula is Stoker's response to Le Fanu's portrayal of female em powerment. If Le Fanu frees his female characters from subject posi tions in the male kinship system, Stoker decidedly returns his to exchange status and reinstates them in that system. Stoker's female characters are "supreme gifts" (Levi-Strauss 65) whose exchange fi nally binds Dracula's "little band of men" together (Dracula 378).21 In Dracula Stoker creates what Fredric Jameson would call a "laboratory

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Elizabeth Signorotti

space" to carry out "experiments" on female characters, ultimately achieving an "imaginary vengeance" against the rising power of women,22 particularly against women who tried to assert control over their own sexuality. It is usually assumed that Stoker sought ven geance against women in Dracula because of his hostility toward prostitutes who had infected him with tertiary syphillis (see, e.g., Robert Tracy, 46). But the root of Stoker's struggle with women's sexuality can be traced to his relationship with his wife. In 1878 he married Florence Balcombe, who one year later gave birth to their son, Noel. Stoker's granddaughter believed that Florence "refused to have sex with Bram" after Noel's birth, which has led to the percep tion of her as a "cold," "aloof" woman who was "very anti-sex" (Far son 213, 214). Whether or not she was sexually frigid is debatable. What is clear, though, is that her behavior toward her husband was unconventional—that sexually she did not fulfill her part of the mar riage contract. In creating Dracula, then, Stoker was probably less concerned with achieving vengeance against a particular group of women who had infected him than he was with asserting control over a whole range of women, who, like his wife —indeed, like women throughout Victorian England who had welcomed the New Woman movement—had violated conventional expectations about women's sexuality. Rather than embrace sexually self-determining women such as Laura and Carmilla, Stoker placed the women of Dracula firmly under male control and subjected them to severe pun ishments for any sexual transgression.23

Stoker's familiarity with Le Fanu's vampire tale is certain. Farson claims that Stoker was "absorbed in the vampirism in 'Carmilla/ published two years after he left Trinity" (23), but more convincing evidence is found in the original first chapter of Dracula, which Sto ker deleted when his publisher requested that he shorten the book to reduce printing costs. In this section, he alludes to "Carmilla." At the opening of this chapter, Jonathan Harker loses his way as he sets out for Castle Dracula on Walpurgis Nacht, a night "when the graves were opened and the dead came forth and walked, when all evil things of earth and air and water held revel" (Dracula; rpt. in Farson 142). A shaft of moonlight reveals he is in an overgrown graveyard with a great, snowy-white marble tomb before him:

Impelled by some sort of fascination, I approached the se pulchre to see what it was, and why such a thing stood alone

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Repossessing the Body 621

in such a place. I walked around it, and read, over the Doric door, in German:

Countess Dolingen of Gratz In Styria

Sought and Found Death 1801

On the top of the tomb, seemingly driven through the solid marble—for the structure was composed of a few vast blocks of stone—was a great iron spike or stake. On going to the back I saw, graven in Great Russian letters: The dead travel fast.' (Dracula; rpt. in Farson 142-43)

The reference to Styria recalls the Austrian setting of "Carmilla" and invites comparison between the two vampire tales. Whereas "Carmilla" abolishes male rights over women, Dracula reasserts those rights. This is indeed the key distinction between Dracula and "Carmilla," one that Stoker apparently had in mind from the opening —albeit deleted—chapter of his book.

Stoker's overriding concern in Dracula is the threat of rampant fe male sexual desire. Senf rightly points out that this ancient, aristo cratic vampire who preys on the wives and fiancees of England's working class reveals, among other things, the "power that negative social values from the past often have over the present" (44). As Troy Boone further concludes, the novel suggests that "a new understand ing of sexuality and decay is necessary for any attempt to attain so cial order and growth," and that "for all its apparent 'reification' of dominant political beliefs, [Stoker's text] exposes the dangers of fail ing to challenge their authority."24 Both Senf and Boone present valid arguments, but, like other readings in Dracula's critical legacy, theirs fail to emphasize the degree to which Stoker responds to the threat of female sexuality in Dracula.25 In Stoker's text Dracula —and Dracula's sense of sexuality —actually dominates very few of the scenes, whereas the sexually-charged female vampires —those at Castle Dra cula, Lucy, and Mina—receive most of Stoker's attention.

For his first "experiment" in Dracula, Stoker presents the problem of Lucy's sexual aggressiveness, a problem to which he ultimately provides a violent solution. Although Lucy's sexuality does not be come rabid until her vampiric possession, Stoker presents her from the beginning as exhibiting personality traits potentially dangerous in women. In a letter to Mina, Lucy asks, "why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?" (D 59). Her wishing for

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622 Elizabeth Signorotti

the right to have more than one sexual partner—a reality for males such as Stoker himself—makes her a threat to established gender roles. Stoker feels obliged to inform the reader that her wishes are unseemly when, in the same passage, she again asks Mina, "why are men so noble when we women are so little worthy of them?" (D 59). Lucy serves as Stoker's paradigm of woman-gone-wrong and predict ably suffers for it.

In his attempt to redress Carmilla's defiant behavior, Stoker im bues Lucy with Carmillaesque qualities. Her sleepwalking, which in dicates a propensity toward vampirism in Dracula, first occurs in her childhood, just as Carmilla first visits and "infects" Laura during her childhood. In both works, the tendency toward socially aberrant be havior arises in early childhood, but while Carmilla's and Laura's behavior remains unrestrained, Lucy's is eventually checked. Stoker also suggests that Lucy has lesbian tendencies. In a letter to Mina she says, "I wish I were with you, dear, sitting by the fire undressing, as we used to sit; and I would try to tell you what I feel. I do not know how I am writing this even to you. I am afraid to stop, or I should tear up the letter, and I don't want to stop, for I do so want to tell you all" (D 55). Lucy's wish to share her secrets while undressing suggests her desire to reveal "what is more properly concealed,"26 something she knows is "wrong." The men in the text can control Lucy's and Mina's homosocial relationship as long as they both re main accessible; they cannot, however, control what Lucy presum ably has in mind.

As it to temper her questionable behavior, Stoker denies Lucy her inheritance rights and places her firmly within the male-governed kinship system. Lucy's mother, who controls the Westenra estate af ter her husband's death, dies shortly before Lucy's impending mar riage to Arthur Holmwood. Mrs. Westenra, Dr. Seward tells us, "had for some time expected sudden death from her heart, and had put her affairs in absolute order; . . . with the exception of a certain en tailed property of Lucy's father which now, in default of direct issue, went back to a distant branch of the family, the whole estate, real and personal, was left absolutely to Arthur Holmwood" (D 166). Sep arating Lucy from her inheritance fictionally and historically posi tions her in "a long tradition in which women do not inherit" (Rubin 164). Even before Lucy's wedding, Mrs. Westenra (whose role is the "corrected" equivalent of Carmilla's subversive mother) ensures Lucy's total dependence on her future husband. If her daughter had

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Repossessing the Body 623

any wild ideas about being financially independent in marriage, she has permanently disabled her.

Once Dracula kisses Lucy into sudden sexuality, she grows "voluptuous," "savage," "wanton," and "diabolically sweet" (D 211). Dracula's "authorizing kiss . . . triggers the release of the latent power and excites in [Lucy] a sexuality so mobile, so aggressive, that it thoroughly disrupts . . . [compartmentalized conceptions] of gen der" (Craft 228). Dracula's kiss enables women to become sexual penetrators. Using their sharp teeth to penetrate men, they reverse traditional gender roles and place men in the passive position cus tomarily reserved for women. In "Carmilla" the penetration of female vampires—in effect, the female appropriation of the phallus—is seen as an act of empowerment; in Dracula, however, Lucy's unmanagable sexual penetration is presented as inherently evil because it threatens fixed gender distinctions. In an attempt to cure Lucy of her reckless sexuality, Van Helsing and his crew of "brave men" perform massive blood transfusions on her. By having her drained blood replaced with a "brave man's blood" (D 148), Lucy might survive. The act of transfusing blood, of penetrating Lucy's body with the phallic needle and enabling the men to deposit their own fluids in her, conjures up images of gang rape. As Rubin stresses, "women [in some societies] are frequently kept in their place by gang rape when the ordinary mechanisms of masculine intimidation prove insufficient" (163). Iron ically, Lucy's wish to marry "as many [men] as want her" (D 59) vio lently comes true. Each transfusion symbolizes a kind of ghastly marriage and prompts Van Helsing to fret that "this so sweet maid is a polyandrist" (D 176). Stoker gives Lucy what she wants and teaches her a lesson at the same time.

But the gang transfusions fail to cure Lucy's sexual recalcitrance, prompting Van Helsing's crew to attempt to mask her sexuality by surrounding her with pungent garlic flowers. While garlic plays a symbolic role in traditional vampire folklore, in Dracula its role is dual. More than just a traditional means of discouraging Dracula's visits, the ability of garlic to disguise odors, especially body odors, suggests, as Alain Corbin argues in The Foul and the Fragrant, "a way of denying the sexual role of the sense of smell, or at least of shifting the field of olfactory stimulation and allusion."27 Van Helsing and Dr. Seward saturate Lucy's body and environs with garlic flowers not only to keep Dracula at bay but possibly to disguise the sexual odors her newly excited body exudes.

Lucy s unresponsiveness to ordinary mechanisms of masculine in

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624 Elizabeth Signorotti

timidation while alive permits Van Helsing and company, after her death and resurrection as an Undead, to resort to the most violent means of correction available to them. Cora Kaplan argues that tradi tional fictional "punishment for female sexual transgressions . . . [is] the immediate loss of social status."28 For Stoker, though, the tradi tional punishment is not severe enough to rectify Lucy's transgres sions. Instead, he employs vampire lore's extreme phallic corrective: staking and beheading Lucy. In this scene, Stoker's gang of brave, noble men carry candles dripping "sperm" (D 197) into Lucy's tomb. Even more sexually alive in the coffin, Lucy's "body shook and quiv ered and twisted in violent contortions" (D 216). But before she can perform any other sexually suggestive gyrations, Arthur, shining with "high duty," drove "deeper and deeper the mercy bearing stake" into her chest (D 216). This act of transfixation "cures" Lucy and returns her to the accepted role of sexually passive female. Ar thur and his companions have repossessed her body, permanently fixing her in the "stabilized] distinctions of gender" (Craft 224) and the male system of alliance. Lucy's sexuality is "corrected."

Stoker's "experiment" with Lucy reveals the unpleasant results of woman's attempting to escape male systems of exchange and usurp ing traditionally male power. Lucy's potential power is effectually exterminated, leaving Mina the lone woman in the text. Through Mina's example, Stoker creates another, more successful experiment, one that communicates the happy outcome for a woman who will ingly remains a vehicle for the promotion of male bonding. By the end of Dracula, Mina's body becomes a male-occupied zone. She has no more control over her own body than Lucy finally had.

Stoker portrays Mina as the traditional Victorian angel-in-the house. A doting, adoring wife to Jonathan, she confesses that she has "nothing to give him except myself, my life, . . . my love and duty for all the days of my life" (D 105). Mina completely surrenders to Jonathan's will, and any self-improvement she undergoes is only to better serve him. She practices shorthand and typing "very assidu ously" so that she "shall be useful to Jonathan" once they are mar ried (D 53). And to complete the picture of the ideal woman, she expresses the obligatory note of disdain for the New Woman. Despite Alan Johnson's contention that "Mina's status as 'New' is suggested in the fact that she is an orphan and 'never knew either father or mother,'" a status further "established mainly by her practical com petence,"29 Mina twice disassociates herself from the New Woman movement. In bragging about her voracious appetite, Mina believes

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Repossessing the Body h2^

she would have "shocked the 'New Woman " (D 88). Similarly, she disdainfully remarks that "some of the 'New Woman' writers will some day start an idea that men and women should be allowed to see each other asleep before proposing or accepting. But I suppose the New Woman won't condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!" (D 89). In the latter comment, Mina supports gender divisions based on fe male inferiority. Stoker imbues her with all the qualities an ideal woman should possess —for the Victorian male. Unlike Lucy, she is not predisposed toward vampirism, but eventually she, too, becomes "unclean" by Dracula's kiss, an empowering kiss that threatens her presumably static position in the male alliance system.

In their quest to exterminate Dracula and his influence over wom en, Mina becomes the intermediary link between Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Lord Godalming, Quincey Morris, and Jonathan Harker — the tracking party. To assist these men in their pursuit, she tran scribes their journals and notes pertaining to Dracula. In fact, she considers it her "solemn duty. . . . [to] be prepared" to serve as group secretary (D 179). As tracking Dracula becomes more difficult, the need increases for each tracking-party member to have immediate and updated information. Mina begins to type in "manifold, and so took three copies of the diary, just as [she] had done with all the rest," distributing them to the men. She thus becomes the source for all information dispersed to the tracking-party members. Once the men's words were written in their own journals; now, all information passes through Mina before reaching Van Helsing and the others. The text she compiles, which eventually becomes the Dracula manuscript, links the men in their common knowledge and common purpose and provides the means of binding them together.

In addition to linking the men through her text, Mina functions as the receptacle for male emotion and the victim of restrictive male chivalry. Speculating on her feminine role as "safe outlet" (Howes 113) for male emotion, Mina writes, "I suppose there is something in a woman's nature that makes a man free to break down before her

and express his feelings on the tender or emotional side without feel ing it derogatory to his manhood" (D 229). As the cheerful dumping ground for excessive or unmanly emotions, Mina is expected to ac cept, support, and comfort her men. In return, the men subject her to their limiting and restrictive notions about male chivalry, fixing her within the separate sphere reserved for Victorian women. When they decide it is best to exclude her from all Dracula-tracking knowledge

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626 Elizabeth Signorotti

(because they "are men, and are able to bear" [D 242]), she laments, "I could say nothing, save to accept their chivalrous care of me" (D 242). As Johnson notes, Mina is "apotheosized and nullified by the men's chivlary" (21) because the male world, Dr. Seward says, "is no place for a woman" (D 256). Unlike "Carmilla"—where chivalry al lows women to take advantage of men and to expose their ineffectu ality—Dracula portrays male chivalry as a noble and desirable means of protecting women from unpleasantness. Mina continually accepts chivalrous care with gratitude, assured that men know best. As a re sult of her experiences in this exclusively male network, Mina is pro gressively transformed from a woman into little more than a sign to be utilized and exchanged.

After Dracula rapes and infects Mina, Van Helsing and company use her body to help track him. Previously banned from the gang's pursuit of Dracula, she becomes useful after having imbibed his blood. Their sharing body fluids links Mina and Dracula psychically and allows her, in a hypnotic state, to report on his whereabouts. She tells Van Helsing that "you can hypnotize me and so learn that which even I myself do not know" (D 327). Mina offers her supine, hypnotized, and defenseless body for the men to probe freely. Since she best receives Dracula's psychic waves during early morning hours, she invites the entire crew of men into hers and Jonathan's bedroom to wake her and hypnotize her in bed. As a sort of fleshy radio receiver, Mina's body transmits messages from Dracula directly to the gang of men, and after waking she has no recollection of what has passed. Her unconscious, passive body links Van Helsing's group with Dracula and provides the ground upon which they wage battle against him. Since Dracula's declaration that "your girls . . . are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine" (D 306) reveals his taboo abrogation of gender codes,30 the crew battles as much to free themselves from his potential sexual aggression as to re turn Mina to male systems of control. Without Mina to serve as a bridge between the "little band of men," their homosocial group might suffer from the taint of homosexuality. To eliminate that threat, Mina must remain under their control, although they must share her with Dracula just long enough to exterminate him and his threat to destabilize gender codes.

With Dracula safely out of the picture, Van Helsing and his little band of men finish their job by anchoring Mina within their system of exchange. "Seven years ago," Jonathan Harker writes in his con cluding note, "we all went through the flames; and the happiness of

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Repossessing the Body 627

some of us since then is, we think, well worth the pain we endured. It is an added joy to Mina and to me that our boy's birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend's spirit has passed into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him Quincey" (D 378). Mina has provided the ultimate service to the little band: she has borne a child—a son, not a sign—that permanently links them together. Through a woman's mediation, the men have "come to establish lasting cordial relations" (Levi-Strauss 67) and have effectively reversed the pattern of "Carmilla." Because Mina fulfills her subservient, womanly roles, she escapes Lucy's punishment, yet she returns to her position as an asexual sign. Stoker locates her desire, which is anything but trans gressive, in relation to supporting patriarchal systems. To reinforce her static position, he eliminates all women other than Mina from his text, thus eliminating even the remote possibility that Mina might participate in any kind of relationship—homosexual or homosocial— with another woman. As Boone asserts, in their battle against Dra cula "the male characters can revise and transform progress and mas culinity, yet for them the feminine must remain static. . . . Mina the individual character is completely absorbed by her role as symbol; her body here is a sign of the success of the men's endeavors" (85; empha sis added). Le Fanu's disturbing elimination of male alliance through women and his allowing women self-determination is remedied in Dracula. Stoker captures the free-agent women loose at the end of "Carmilla" and returns them to their proper sphere and proper sta tions as objects for exchange.

The closed narrative frame in Dracula also solves the problem pre sented by "Carmilla"'s open-endedness. Harker's opening account of his trip to Castle Dracula, which provides the first half of Dracula's narrative frame, is completed by his concluding note seven years later. His opening and closing comments sandwich Mina's narrative, placing it under male control. Unlike Laura, who relays her story di rectly to her female reader, Mina is not allowed direct access to her readers but must go through male channels to be heard. Harker's final note further silences Mina, reestablishing what Craft terms the "pattern of heterosexual mediation" (237). Her lengthy journal entry, which initially closes the narrative, obviously causes Harker some anxiety because it affords her the final word and allows the reader to remember her voice over all others. Seven years later he encloses her words completely within his. The completed narrative frame and the

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Elizabeth Signorotti

birth of Mina's child, the "little band's" son, subsumes her forever under male control. This, for Stoker, was the happy ending that Le Fanu failed to provide.

In "Carmilla" Le Fanu presents a province, far removed from En gland, where women are free to express their sexuality. His absten tion from enforcing the laws governing kinship systems—his allowing women to escape their traditional roles as valuables to be exchanged between men—is a radical move for any Victorian writer. Surprisingly, it took twenty-five years for a strong reaction to his demolition of male authority. It took a writer experiencing sexual anxiety in his personal life, similar to the anxiety of the disenfran chised men in "Carmilla." In Dracula, Stoker finally repossessed the female body that eluded him in his personal life and every man in "Carmilla."

State University of New York/Binghamton

Notes

1. See, for example, John Polidori, The Vampyre (1819); Charles R. Matu rin, Melmoth the Wanderer (1820); and Thomas Pecket Prest, Varney the Vampyre or The Feast of Blood (1847).

2. For an excellent history of vampire origins and lore, see James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Dur ham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1981), 3-39. See also Montague Summers, The Vampire, His Kith and Kin (New York: University Books, 1960), 1-77; Carol A. Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 17-30; and Brian J. Frost, The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989), 1-35.

3. See Claude Levi-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (ed. Rod ney Needham, trans. James Harls Bell and John Richard von Sturmer [Bos ton: Beacon Press, 1969]); Gayle Rubin, "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex" (in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter [New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1975], 157-210); and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).

4. In his conclusion to The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Levi-Strauss romanticizes the male system of kinship by stating, "In the matrimonial dia logue of men, woman is never purely what is spoken about; for if women in general represent a certain category of signs, destined to a certain kind of communication, each woman preserves a particular value arising from her talent, before and after marriage, for taking her part in a duet. In contrast to words, which have wholly become signs, woman has remained at once a

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Repossessing the Body 629

sign and a value. This explains why the relations between the sexes have preserved that affective richness, ardour and mystery which doubtless origi nally permeated the entire universe of human communications" (496). In this extraordinary statement Levi-Strauss imbues the male system of exchange with "richness, ardour and mystery." He celebrates its exoticness, which has prompted Rubin to ask, "Why is he not, at this point, denouncing what kin ship systems do to women, instead of presenting one of the greatest rip-offs of all time as the root of romance?" (201).

5. This idea is not entirely new. Sedgwick builds upon Adrienrte Rich's notion of a lesbian continuum. For Rich's seminal essay see "Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence" (in Powers of Desire, ed. Anne Sni tow, Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson [New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1983], 177-205).

6. For useful discussions of vampirism as metaphor see Senf, 31-74; and Sian Macfie, "'They Suck Us Dry': A Study of Late Nineteenth-Century Projections of Vampiric Women," Subjectivity and Literature from the Romantics to the Present Day, ed. Philip Shaw and Peter Stockwell (London and New York: Pinter Publishers, 1991), 58-67.

7. The Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge, MA and London: Howard University Press, 1982), 10.

8. See Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Vol. I, Sexual Inver sion (London and Watford: University of London Press, 1897), 100.

9. More recent examinations of the vampire as an example of transgres sive female desire include Sue-Ellen Case's "Tracking the Vampire" (differ ences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies [1991], 1-20), and Patricia White's "Female Spectator, Lesbian Specter: The Haunting" in Inside/Out, ed. Diana Fuss [New York and London: Routledge, 1991] 142-172. Case argues that in current cinematic depictions the vampire serves only as a proscription for female desire and ultimately shifts the viewer's gaze from the real issue— active female or lesbian desire —to the deadly, diseased desires of the vam pire. For Case, subversive desire is "crossed out" by representing it as dis gusting; the healthy alternative is traditional heterosexuality. White explores the crossing-out of transgressive desire in Robert Wise's 1963 horror film. Al though technically The Haunting is not a vampire film, it introduces the dis ruptive force of lesbian desire between Theo and Eleanor only to resist the "visualization of desire between women, displacing] that desire onto the level of the supernatural" (157). Theo's seduction of Eleanor becomes the "haunting" of the house itself, and the viewer's attention is diverted from what Theo does to Eleanor to what the house does to its inhabitants. This

common displacement or repression of lesbian desire in film, Andrea Weiss further suggests, helps to divert our gaze to Hollywood's "endless variations on heterosexual [or socially acceptable] romance." See Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema (London: Jonathan Cape, 1992), 1.

10. Unlike "Carmilla" and Dracula, Marryat's text equates lower class ori gins with social vampirism: "to be working class is to be vampiric upon those who form the professional classes or who belong, through heredity, to the aristocracy" (Macfie 63).

11. Le Fanu's interest in psychic phenomena, the occult, and demonology dates back to his childhood in Ireland. S. M. Ellis writes in Wilkie Collins, Le

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Elizabeth Signorotti

Fanu, and Others that as a child Le Fanu "read largely and without restriction in his father's well-stocked library, where he found good store of old tomes on demonology, occult, and curious lore" (174). His preoccupation with the supernatural contributed to his unusual writing habits and his complete se clusion, earning him the moniker "The Invisible Prince." Le Fanu "wrote mostly in bed at night, using copybooks for his manuscript," Ellis writes.

He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimming tapers would be left burning while he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he would brew himself some strong tea—which he drank copiously and frequently throughout the day—and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb and the Powers of Darkness rampant and terrifying. What wonder then, that, with his brain ever peopled by day and by night with mysterious and terrible beings, he became afflicted by horrible dreams, which . . . were the bases of his last stories of the supernatural. (174)

For more on Le Fanu's life, see S. M. Ellis, Wilkie Collins, Le Fanu, and Others (Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1931), esp. 149,174-176; Ivan Melada, Sheridan Le Fanu, ed. Herbert Sussman (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1987), chapter 1; and W. J. McCormack, Sheridan Le Fanu and Victorian Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).

12. This claim is William Veeder's ("'Carmilla': The Arts of Repression," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Summer [1980], 197).

13. Since "Carmilla" is generally unknown, it is helpful to summarize the story-line. For the following summary I am indebted to Veeder's "'Carmilla': The Arts of Repression," 220n.

"Carmilla" is an autobiographical narrative written by Laura after her traumatic relationship with Carmilla and delivered to us by an editor after Laura's death years later. A motherless and lonely girl in her late teens when the story begins, Laura lives with her aged father in an iso lated schloss in the Austrian province of Styria. Her strongest child hood memory is of a night attack which readers see clearly as vampiric. When the story opens, Laura is looking forward to the visit of her father's friend, General Spielsdorf, and his niece, Bertha. Her grief upon learning of Bertha's sudden death is assuaged when the crash of a mysterious carriage brings a young lady, Carmilla, to recu perate at the schloss. Carmilla is, in fact, a vampire, who reappears through the centuries with the anagrammatic names Carmilla, Millar ca, Mircalla, and who was responsible for the childhood attack upon Laura. Much of the story deals with the affectionate and predatory re lationship which develops between the young women, and with the attempt of various males (Laura's father, General Spielsdorf, and Baron Vordenburg) to free Laura from the vampire's spell. Through the vam pire lore of Baron Vordenburg, Carmilla is finally tracked and de stroyed in the orthodox manner—staked, beheaded, burned, and

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Repossessing the Body 631

scattered on water. But she lives on in Laura's all too fond memories of her.

14. All citations from "Carmilla" (hereafter referred to as C) are taken from Novels of Mystery of the Victorian Age, intro. Maurice Richardson (Lon don: Pilot Press, 1945), 573-628.

15. Helena Michie, The Flesh Made Word: Female Figures and Women's Bodies (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).

16. In his brief discussion of the original illustrations accompanying "Carmilla," Robert Tracy incorrectly identifies the sketch of the scene Gen eral Spielsdorf describes as an illustration of Laura and Carmilla. The sketch actually shows Bertha asleep, "her breasts highlighted and very prominent, her nightdress so thin that breast and nipple are plainly visible—and Car milla apparently reaching to seize and fondle a breast" ("Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophines and Necrophiles in Nineteenth-Cen tury Fiction," ed. Reyna Barreca, Sex and Death in Victorian Literature [Bloom ington: Indiana University Press, 1990], 39). Because there were two illustrators for "Carmilla" (D. H. Friston and M. Fitzgerald), there is some inconsistency in the three depictions of Laura, Bertha, and Carmilla, but all three focus on the sexuality of the women. The first illustration shows Car milla sitting and Laura standing at the edge of the woods just as they are about to hold hands. The second illustration shows Carmilla's back as she stands in front of Laura's bed. She holds a candle so that it illuminates the

outline of her figure under her sheer nightgown. Laura is shown as just wak ing and looking somewhat surprised at Carmilla's presence. The third illus tration is discussed above. All illustrations appear in "Carmilla," The Dark Blue, January (1872), 592-606; February (1872), 701-714; and March (1872), 59-78.

17. John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies (New York: Charles E. Merrill [1899]). 18. Jack Sullivan, Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu

to Blackwood (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1978), 10. 19. Edward Wagenknecht, Seven Masters of Supernatural Fiction (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 11. 20. The 1970 film version of "Carmilla," The Vampire Lovers, closely fol

lows Le Fanu's story-line with one important exception: the entire plot of the film is framed by the perspective of a male narrator who, as Weiss points out, "appears on the screen in the opening and closing sequences and who gives voice-over narration leading the audience into the film's events." Women's control over their own bodies apparently caused the film's produc ers some anxiety. Because the controlling voice of the narrative is male, Weiss observes, "the range of possible, alternative interpretations that spec tators can read from the film" is dramatically restricted and male control of female desire and the female body is reasserted (Vampires and Violets, 96).

21. All citations from Dracula (hereafter referred to as D) are taken from Bram Stoker, Dracula, intro. A. N. Wilson (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).

22. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 201.

23. Daniel Farson considers it doubtful that Stoker "recognized the lesbi

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632 Elizabeth Signorotti

anism in 'Carmilla'" and is "sure he was unaware of the sexuality inherent in Dracula" (see The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker [New York: St. Martin's Press, 1975], 22). This comment is unconvincing, es pecially given Stoker's own comment in "The Censorship of Fiction" (The Nineteenth Century and After, September [1908]): "A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses, and when we have realised this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger." It is difficult to view this comment as coming from a man unable to recognize sexual impulses in his or someone else's fiction.

24. Troy Boone, "'He is English and Therefore Adventurous': Politics, Decadence, and Dracula," in Studies in the Novel, Spring (1993): 76-91, 77, 89.

25. This is not to say that female sexuality in Dracula has been critically ignored. See, for example, Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me With Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," ed. Elaine Showalter, Speaking of Gender (New York and London: Routledge, 1989), 216-242.

26. Marjorie Howes, "The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homo erotic Desire, and Self-Expression in Bram Stoke's Dracula," Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Spring (1988): 104-119, 111.

27. Alain Corbin, The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imag ination (Leamington Spa, UK and New York: Berg Publishers, 1986), 74.

28. Cora Kaplan, "Pandora's Box: Subjectivity, Class, and Sexuality in So cialist Feminist Criticism," in Feminisms, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991): 857-77, 870.

29. Alan P. Johnson, "'Dual Life': The Status of Women in Stoker's Dracu la," in Sexuality and Victorian Literature, ed. Don Richard Cox (Knoxville: Uni versity of Tennessee Press, 1984): 20-39, 24.

30. Craft discusses the abrogation of gender codes in "'Kiss Me With Those Red Lips.'"

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