Cape May MAC Book Club: Carmilla

By Evelyn Maguire

We are officially halfway through our summertime book club! This past Saturday, we discussed the 1872 vampire novella Carmilla. A little blurb for those of you who have yet to pick this one up: When hapless Lady Laura meets Carmilla, an enticing — if strangely off-putting — young woman, the two become intimate confidantes. But little does Laura realize, Carmilla has bloodthirsty secrets…

If you missed our live discussion, check out the recording here. And to stay up to date with book club news, follow our Facebook Event Page and subscribe to the Cape May MAC blog!

Carmilla garnered my interest when I learned it was published over two decades prior to Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Like many, I thought of Dracula as the novel that started it all for vampire fiction; the Dracula to Edward Cullen pipeline, as they say (Haha). But in fact, the first known full-length, literary interpretation of the vampire was introduced in the 1845 horror serial Varney the Vampire: The Feast of Blood, and even that was preceded by “The Vampyre: A Tale,” a short story ideated during the same famous literary holiday friends’ trip that spurned Frankenstein.

But though Carmilla laid the groundwork for much of the mythology that carried over to Dracula — a vampire’s ability to shape-shift, the aversion to sunlight, the seductive nature by which a vampire may entreat themselves to victims — Carmilla is largely unknown today. In fact, some sources note that a very early draft of Dracula even featured a chapter which was a direct ode to Carmilla — cut by the editor.

As always, there’s ten thousand and one things to be interested in regarding this novella. Le Fanu was an Irish writer, an acclaimed editor and journalist, and wrote Carmilla shortly before his death. Like many stories at the time, Carmilla was serialized, meaning it was published chapter-by-chapter, in the literary magazine Dark Blue. Though the gothic fad had begun to fade by the 1870s, Carmilla is a very gothic novel: An isolated, sprawling castle, the merging of the rational and the supernatural, the undertones of sexuality presented alongside terror.

One topic of conversation we kept returning to throughout our discussion was the role of a “monster” in literature, and what traits/fears a monster can represent for an Irish writer amidst the decline of the English empire. Carmilla, the vampire seductress, is from a “very distant” land, she comes to invade and corrupt the castle of an Anglican family, and her homosexual desire for her victim/love interest is subversive to the dominant culture. In this way, many scholars read Le Fanu’s use of the vampiric monster as a stand-in for a generalized Anglican “panic” that coincided with the diminishing power of the English empire. This theme, of the vampire operating as a cultural “other,” is perhaps the most prominent carry-through to Dracula.

All to say — give this one a read! It’s eerie, quick, and set in an atmospheric, gothic castle… what more could one reader want?

Up next for the Cape May MAC Book Club is Cranford by Elisabeth Gaskell. Join us at 11am on Saturday, July 30th for the live discussion!

Evelyn Maguire (she/her) is on the Digital Marketing team at Cape May MAC. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.