Carmilla 2020 or 'The Governess was Repressed'

Carmilla 2020

 

In 1970 Hammer released a film called ‘The Vampire Lovers’. It was their version of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s iconic 19^th century vampire story, Carmilla.  It played with the narrative’s sequence, making Marcella/Carmilla’s vampiric character too obvious from the start.  While its casting was undoubtedly strange, and Carmilla is far more predatory in an indiscriminate way than she is in the story, it stuck reasonably closely to the plot and can be watched as a reading of the story. Hammer did make the obvious mistake of thinking two topless women in a room with no men was box office gold. 

 

This 2020 film version claims to be based on Le Fanu’s story, it also seems to think that two young women kissing each other is art house gold, but it has so little in common with what Le Fanu wrote that it’s difficult to see why they bothered to call it Carmilla.

 

If you know Le Fanu’s little masterpiece, a plot summary of the 2020 film is all you need. (You can use the Carmilla/Le fanu links in the side bar or below to read about both Le Fanu and Hammer's version.)

 

Laura is a disconnected fifteen year old living in a big house in a generic somewhere, with only her father, a governess who likes to strap up her arm to stop her using her left hand, and a generic (I’m guessing) west Indian maid. She is looking forward to a visit from a friend. She hears the friend is ill and can’t come. The Governess is creepy and lingers a little too closely over her charge when she’s in bed.

 

A carriage crashes. The driver is killed but a young girl is saved and brought into the house. She has lost her memory. Laura is fascinated and the two girls are physically attracted to each other. The governess interrupts them rolling passionately on the floor. 

 

The governess, having given Carmilla a good beating, convinces the local doctor that Carmilla is a Vampire. Her evidence is so flimsy it’s laughable. She found a book about vampires in the wreckage of the carriage, no one knows who the girl is and girls are getting sick . Oh and a dog barked at her….it sounds like we’ve strayed into The Turn of the Screw. Her attempts to convince the doctor includes an awkward sexual encounter, but whether this is just repression breaking loose or her way of making him take her side against Carmilla is hard to tell. Neither of them seem to be having any fun. 

 

The girls escape and drift away from the house, but not too far. The Governess, the doctor and a random estate worker easily track them down. They slam a stake through Carmilla’s heart. The father turns up and carries Laura away. He does this for a very long time. Then we see Laura standing by a pond throwing stones in the water for a very long time and that’s the end of the very long, very slow story. 

 

The film makers have stripped out everything that makes Le Fanu’s story what it is. Whatever was subtle and ambiguous has gone; it was gone from the Hammer film too, but in this film they have replaced it with close up shots of insects and pictures of Laura wandering in the grounds, or Laura running in the grounds with Carmilla. 

 

What’s most surprising is that Carmilla is not a vampire in this film. Why you’d do this to the story is baffling. In both Hammer’s version and this one, the sexual aspect is amplified at the cost of the story. More effort goes in to building sexual tension between the two girls than to telling any kind of story. And on and on. 

 

If they had called this Laura and the Stranger…or The Lovers or The Governess was Repressed it would at least have been honest and would have stood or fallen on its own merits as a story about repression and adolescent fantasy. It wouldn’t have been all that interesting or convincing. 

But as a version of Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, it’s just crass.

 

It’s an art house movie without art. 

"Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances" by R.F.Foster.

I think one could fairly describe R.F. Foster's output as prodigious. The amount of reading that must have gone into his two volume biography of Yeats alone is almost frightening to contemplate. He somehow managed not to be buried by the details and he is consistently enjoyable to read. Neither of which can be said for Gordon Bowker's new biography of Joyce.

Two examples from Foster's new book: "Words Alone".

The first nails The Boys Own quality of Dracula while simultaneously taking to task some of the more outrageous readings of the book:

In many ways Dracula reads more like John Buchan on mescaline than anything Irish. Its primary identity is as English (or British) shocker rather than Anglo-Irish meditation-however wittily the count and his earth boxes may be interpreted as a metaphor for declining Irish landlords. 105

We could argue whether Uncle Silas is Le Fanu's "masterpiece". Foster's topic in chapter three, "Lost in the Big House: Anglo-Irishry and the Uses of the Supernatural" predisposes him towards the novel as it is always going to be more useful to his analysis than "In a glass darkly". But I like this:

Thus the Styrian lesbian Vampire Carmilla allegedly turns into an 'autochthonous manifestation of the female nation, reaching out from portraits and ruined castles to fascinate and destroy the expatriate English, confined, as Laura is in the novella by a sterile world of patriarchal rationality where no young men are permitted because no continuation is possible.' Perhaps the connection between nation and narration can be taken a step too far.

The reproof is in the juxtaposition of controlled syntax with what precedes it more than in the diplomatically phrased comment.

Varney The Vampyre

The good news; it's far better than I expected.
the bad news: 1166 pages...
It's literally bigger than War and Peace
(But much more readable.)

Vampyr (1932)

Vampyr (1932)

Unlike Nosferatu, which tried hard to pretend it wasn’t based on Stoker’s book and failed because it obviously was, Vampyr claims to be based on Le Fanu’s “In a Glass Darkly”. The beautiful Criterion Collection DVD version even comes with a print copy of ‘Carmilla’. But even if Le Fanu’s descendants were as finickity as Joyce’s they’d be hard pushed to prove any breach of copyright.
Dreyser’s film ghosts the stories: an image here, a piece of plot. There’s a vampire, and she’s female (though old and ?blind?), and there’s a young female victim, but that’s about it. You could track other allusions. But even the obvious reference to the Dragon Volant, or the mysterious stranger in the bed room from …which story was that…. are not exclusive to those particular stories and all the allusions remain like occasional snatches of familiar music in an unfamiliar soundtrack.
The fact the story is not tied to any sources is an obvious advantage. There’s no primary text to provide easy answers to the obvious puzzles. So, a recognisable version of Carmilla this is not, although Laura’s habitual ”it appeared to be’ “it seemed” has been taken to the limit. A conventional horror story this is not and even the vampire element, which is explained by the old book, is muted.
Shadows move, some separate from their bodies, some return to them. Scene and time shift abruptly without causal linkage. Characterisation is missing. Narrative discontinuity starts to seem perfectly sensible. Images seem weighted with significance that is never explored or explained. Light becomes a character just as the old book does. In a fog bound, physically realistic landscape (Dreyser shot the whole film on location) which it would be impossible to map. All this and the editing and camera work create a beautiful film which explains very little. It’s what surrealist poetry could have been. A tribute to the time when film was still regarded as an experimental art form.
What we do get is the subjective experience of the inexplicable. If such things happened, and you were caught up in them,remembering them would, I suspect, feel a lot more like this than most modern “horror films”.

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part two

Stoker pretends his heroes have altered nothing in their journals.
“there is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.”

There is to be no retrospective rearrangement. This is one of the ways he ‘guarantees’ the “authenticity” of the story. Laura, however, is writing eight years after the facts she relates. The game allows her to tell us what she knew at the time as she unfolds the story, but it also allows her to have the benefits of hindsight.

And that’s exactly what she avoids. ‘Carmilla’ is in many ways much more opaque than ‘Dracula’. Exactly what her relationship to Carmilla was remains vague. It’s vague because Laura keeps it vague, but why she does so is what leaves the text open. The vagueness gives the story its slightly dream like or out of focus quality.
After eight years, what are her final words on the subject?

The following Spring my father took me on a tour through Italy. We remained away for more than a year. It was long before the terror of recent events subsided; and to this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations-sometimes the playful, languid, 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.

“The light step of Carmilla” is suggestive; not only of familiarity, but of someone who listened eagerly and cared enough to distinguish footsteps so she could identify the ones she wanted to hear. ‘Ambiguous alterations’ are an apt description of her portrayal of Carmilla’s behaviour and her reactions to it. Throughout the story she alternates between fascination and repulsion. And then there’s “reverie” and ‘fancy’. A reverie is a waking dream but without negative overtones. What does she dream that leads to the sound of those familiar footsteps. And is she frightened or hopeful? It’s impossible to tell.

Something very strange happens towards the end of the story. For most readers it’s become obvious that Carmilla is a vampire, and she is the same young woman who destroyed the general’s ward. The general tells Laura what is obvious to everyone else:

"She called herself Carmilla?" asked the General, still agitated.
"Carmilla, yes," I answered.
"Aye," he said; "that is Millarca. That is the same person who long ago was called Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.
However, that night Laura can still record:
and I was glad, being unspeakably fatigued when we reached home. But my satisfaction was changed to dismay, on discovering that there were no tidings of Carmilla.

The story wraps itself up in a sudden orgy of explanations which might signal that Le Fanu had lost control of his material. But there’s enough evidence to suggest that Le Fanu knew he could play his narrator off against what she was narrating. When the Countess Karnstein’s tomb is found and opened and the body destroyed, Laura’s language becomes uncharacteristically factual. What she doesn’t say is louder than what she does.

The next day the formal proceedings took place in the Chapel of Karnstein. The grave of the Countess Mircalla was opened; and the General and my father recognised each his perfidious and beautiful guest, in the face now disclosed to view.

What follows is a series of declarative sentences with subjects like, the face, the body, her eyes, the flesh, the head. But who is this happening to? “The vampire”. A “guest” perfidious and beautiful. Nowhere in the description is Carmilla’s name mentioned. Either the thought of her friend being hacked , burnt and scattered is too much, or she is simply refusing to accept that the body in the box was Carmilla’s. It’s no wonder she’s still waiting for her step at the door.

In The Conclusion that follows Laura reverts to being vague.

I cannot think of it without agitation. Nothing but your earnest desire so repeatedly expressed, could have induced me to sit down to a task that has unstrung my nerves for months to come, and reinduced a shadow of the unspeakable horror which years after my deliverance continued to make my days and nights dreadful, and solitude insupportably terrific.

That “It” floats. What is the unspeakable horror? What happened when Carmilla stayed with her, or what was done to the Vampire’s body? ‘My Deliverance’ suggests she is saved, but from what? From Carmilla the vampire, or Carmilla the devoted friend? From being vampirised or from being in love with a vampire?
Before the reader can stop to ask, she breathlessly rushes on piling up bits of vampire lore and quaint antiquarian details. Hidden in the pile:
The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent. In ordinary ones it goes direct to its object, overpowers with violence, and strangles and exhausts often at a single feast.

Is that the unspeakable horror? That what she took as genuine was something “resembling love”, “an artful courtship”; that the predator wanted sympathy and consent. Is Laura appalled at how close she was to being consumed or appalled that she was seduced by something that saw her as a meal? OR did she offer sympathy, consent, love even and regrets that Carmilla was taken from her?

She babbles on and “tidies up”, explaining the already obvious, but the narrative suspends the real questions and leaves them unanswered.
Would the sound of Carmilla’s “light footsteps” at her door terrify her or make her happy?

The story lives in an artful refusal to close.

Why Le Fanu was a genius.part one

In writing Dracula as a series of journal entries Stoker set himself two problems.
The first is that in a journal which has not been retrospectively tampered with, you can’t have prolepsis. Stoker handles this impressively and I think there’s only one place in the book where he slips up.

His other challenge is that he has focalised his story though the limited perspectives of the participants. Along with the problems of creating separate voices with differing attitudes and characters, he still has to find a way to give the reader essential information so the story can move forwards. When Harker records that Mina is growing languid and pale, and Mina records bad dreams and bad sleep, the reader knows Drac’s got to her, but since this is ‘revealed’ in a dramatic sequence later, the heroes seem slow in noticing the obvious significance of what they are recording. Stoker's clumsiness makes his heroes seem dim witted.

Le Fanu, on the other hand, exploits the problems a first person narrator creates for the writer, to create a character, Laura, not only in what she does in her story, but in the way she tells it.

We play the game: Laura, the narrator of Carmilla, is a real person, telling us about events that happened to her eight years ago when she was nineteen.

We know nothing about Laura except what she tells us. The paratext sets up expectations which the story seems to frustrate. All we are told about Laura is that she was: “a person so clever and careful ….. Much to my regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.” Her narrative of events is described as being told with such conscientious particularity.

The Laura of the story does not seem clever. She goes out of her way to show she isn’t. I’d argue she is ‘careful’ in what she reveals. If the story exhibits “conscientious particularity” it does so in what the narrator hides and fudges. 8 years have passed since the story ends. We are explicitly told this is being narrated retrospectively at someone else’s request. But from the start of the story Laura exonerates herself and muddles the issues. She does it surreptitiously but consistently. She has two strategies that can be described as characteristics and once established are then exploited by Le Fanu at the very end of the story.

The first, used to exonerate herself and excuse her lack of comprehension, is her insistence on how isolated she and her father were. The isolation of the schloss is partly the trappings of the gothic story and serves its own function in the narrative but the geographical isolation bleeds into racial isolation, (her father is English) which exonerates her from not knowing the local stories about vampires, which would have rung the alarm bells much earlier. (Not that Laura has much to do with alarm bells). The geographical distance from “society” allows her to repeatedly tell her addressee that she has to accept Laura’s naivety as the result of her upbringing in such an isolated spot. Carmilla’s behaviour, beliefs, etc would be judged differently by a more worldly wise person. Though how such a person might have judged her is never clarified.

Her second habit is that when reporting what happens she relies heavily on phrases like “It appeared” or “apparently” or ‘what looked like” where straight description would be justified. For Laura, things aren’t simply what they are; they are always potentially something else. However, she never seems to want to cut through “appears to be” and reach “was”. Her description of Carmilla’s behaviour is therefore nebulous. Laura insists on its ambiguous nature. And given the fact that she has had eight years to think about it, she’s either very confused, or out to obfuscate.
Part two later.

Round the Wrekin

I’ve been struggling to write a paper for a conference.
It’s not that I don’t want to do it. I do. It’s not that I’m not interested in what I have to say. I am. The problem is that I know exactly what I am going to say. I could stand there and talk the thing without notes and nail it in forty five minutes. Writing it seems tedious.
A plod from point to point.

Dammit: I should have lived in an oral culture.

Writing is interesting when it starts to reveal things, slides down side alleys into weird little corners or suggests directions I hadn’t thought of. Can’t afford that here. Simply plodding; it’s just hard work.

Anyway that’ s my minor revelation and my excuse and I’m sticking to it until tomorrow, when I will have run out of time and will just have to write the damn thing.
#
A man walks into the pub. He has two guitars. Later, when we go out for a break he accepts an invitation to play. I hear the unmistakable sounds of “Blackwater Side’. I’ve never heard it done live and never worked out how to do it. I wander back in to listen.

I’m seventeen again, back home in my bedroom in Coventry, the window’s open and it’s a warm summer afternoon. I’m sitting with the Eko, the familiar smell of its dark fragrant interior, the slightly sick smell of steel strings, the relaxed feel of that slightly curved fretboard. I'm staring hard at a John Renbourne song book, trying to learn his version of Jansch’s “Reynadine”. (and failing)

Later, we talk. It’s a conversation consisting entirely of snatches of guitar music, verses of songs, titles, names. Shorthand. Things I didn’t know I had remembered.
I knew I should have lived in an oral society.

I come away feeling vindicated. Earthed. Driving home in the dark feeling as if I’ve just been gifted with the permission to touch something old and solid.

A gentle reminder of something valued, the suggestion that it can be taken out in public once in a blue moon. Not lost, or forgotten, just waiting around patiently.
*
Having knocked the new writing project into a mini shape to see what it looks like, I can have a break (when the conference paper is written, Liam, only when you’ve written the conference paper.) Since the project is a narrative, I read S/z, which is one of the most enjoyable books I can remember reading. Talk about reading as discovery. And Narrative Discourse, which doesn’t quite have the gleeful élan of s/z but which I thoroughly enjoyed. Applying these two now to Carmilla, to see how that story works, to see if I’ve got the ideas sorted in my head and to rediscover the story.

All this to cycle back to “For All We Know” in the hopes of it answering some questions for me which will then feed into the writing project. Round the wrekin, I'd admit, but that's often the best way to get anywhere.

Hurm.

Why can’t poeting be as social as traditional music. Set question for Mr. C. Carson.

Malleus:hammering Carmilla again

Hammer’s Karnstein trilogy is supposedly “based on the writings of Sheridan Le Fanu”. Ironically, the best film of the three, Twins of Evil, has nothing to do with him.

The second film, Lust for A vampire, is so bad it’s not even funny. I don’t mind bad films. Santa Clause Conquers the Martians is bad but amusing. The Ninth Gate is awful but every time I watch it I’m reminded of how much I like the Dumas club.

But Lust for a vampire has an embarrassing hero and a final vampire death scene that manages to be both silly and embarrassing. The idea behind the film: what would happen if the woman you were in love with turned out to be a vampire…has potential. But it’s potential that never leaves the bank. The film hasn’t got much going for it to start with but they did manage to include, if not the worst “love scene” in all of Hammer’s slightly daffy “love scenes”, then certainly their entry for “the most embarrassing song accompanying a drawn out and embarrassing love scene”. You’ve got to wonder why they did the third one.

But they did and although the script credits remain the same they tried for something different. A story in which there are no good guys: two male leads, one of whom is unlikable and the other hardly “heroic”. If only they’d had the courage to make the vampire attractive or sympathetic or vaguely likeable so there was no bad guy then they could have achieved some kind of moral ambiguity. But as long as the vampire represents appetite demonized; your average Friday 13th American teenager stuck in a castle and allowed out to pull the legs off the locals, there can be no real moral problem.

Carmilla herself is relegated to a walk on roll; literally brought back to life to vampirise her descendant, the decadent Count Karnstein. (Who is supposed to look broody and menacing but looks horribly like Kenneth Williams, complete with flaring nostrils.) Her seduction of the count and one other bedroom scene are the only attempts at anything conventionally sexual in the film. There is very little nudity, and very little “sex”. Instead of naked actresses, we get young women chained to a cross and burning.

Lingering at the edges of this film, is a powerful idea trying to get in.

What happens when misogyny is stamped, approved and authorized. The Contemptus Mundi Preachers of Lady G would approve. The Brotherhood, a group of black clad religious do gooders, who burn young women as witches in the name of their own self righteousness, are fine examples of repression, perversion and sublimation.

Desire denied, soured into fear and self-loathing, desperate to cleanse itself by destroying whatever it desires. In this case men punishing women for their guilt; their crime is to be desirable. It doesn’t seem to occur to the brotherhood that all their victims are pretty young girls who live alone, who have refused the suit of “honest men”. Or that “beating the devil” out of the sexually attractive niece is no less sexual than taking her to bed.

The binary: desire given into is evil, the way of the vampire; desire repressed is the mark of the religious man. And no middle ground

There are moments when the claustrophobia of religious mania surfaces. But as usual with Hammer the film flirts with an idea and loses it. Peter Cushing tries valiantly to play what could have been an interesting character, a bigoted witch finder who learns he’s been wrong, and has a chance to redeem himself, but the film never quite gets there.

An interesting lesson? You can plan the best story in the world. But without the execution, it’s just another good idea that doesn’t really work.

Hammering Le Fanu's Carmilla#2

‘The vampire lovers” does escape its own banality. Once. And it’s a scene not in the story. Carmilla is trying to escape with a dying Laura. The Governess, previously vampirsed, crawls to the top of the stairs and begs Carmilla not to leave her. Carefully putting Emma (Laura) out of sight she rushes up stairs and finishes off the Governess. Enter the (handsome?)sword waving (hero?) as she descends.

Laura has seen her eating habits and is obviously disgusted and terrified. Carmilla is stranded, literally and figuratively between the satisfaction of her desire, the fact that she is disgusting to the person she loves, and the immanence of her own death.
Oh where was Lacan when we needed him. If desire can truly only be the desire for the desire of the other, then Carmilla is the loneliest person on the planet.
But that moment is brief and it soon passes.
I’m not sure if it’s Carmilla or Le Fanu who gets staked and beheaded in the film. He deserves so much better.
Herzog? Of course. (See previous Herzog post re “The definitive love scene”.)

Hammering Le Fanu's Carmilla

Having watched two films that claim to be based on Le Fanu’s marvelous story, one so bad I've erased its name from my memory, I finally tracked down Hammer’s “The Vampire Lovers’ which is the first of their Karnstein trilogy and supposed to be a reasonably faithful rendition. It’s a good example of what happens when form, style and content get separated.

The ambiguity at the centre of Laura’s written narrative was always going to be vaporized in a film unless handled with care. But to switch, mindlessly, the first person narration, with all its carefully constructed ambiguities, for the flat third person stare of the camera, was guaranteed to kill what made the story interesting as a piece of writing.

So let us consider the erotic potential of a predatory lesbian vampire. Didn’t take long did it? For those who respond to that phrase with the same excitement as they would to ”the mould on last week’s custard” the repeated sight of the leading lady dropping her clothes at every possible opportunity is unlikely to cover up the holes in the plot, the bad dialogue or the generally crummy acting. Though you gotta love those painted castles with their slightly wrong perspectives on the painted backdrop. Unfortunately someone decided “predatory lesbian vampire” was a free ride to the box office, without actually stopping to think why or if or how that could be made unsettling or frightening or even interesting. Carmilla isn’t a “horror Story” as such. But it’s not Victorian porn either. “The Vampire lovers” isn’t a horror story either, rather a series of events that provide opportunities for actresses to get undressed.

Give the scriptwriter his dues, having decided his focus, he follows what’s left of the story. But his next mistake is to set everything out in chronological order. Le Fanu reveals his plot like a modern Asian horror film, so that the exposition is part of the climax. In terms of simplified sequence the written story goes: C.B.A.D. Not the Hammer version. B must follow A and be followed by C. Straightening out the chronology is a mistake. It’s now obvious from the start that Carmilla is a vampire and preys on young girls (we get the general’s story, B, in full before what should be Laura’s narrative C), and so Carmilla’s arrival at Laura’s schloss is no surprise.

The written story gains its effects because of the narrator’s inability to understand what is happening, (even though the reader sometimes does), her paradoxical attraction and repulsion to Carmilla, and the equal ambiguity of Carmilla’s feelings for Laura. Because it’s told first person we are positioned to share Laura’s confusion and much of the story doesn’t make sense to her until the end. But in the film there’s no mystery about Carmilla’s actions. Given the obvious desire to run with the sexual element the disturbing slippage in the story, where it’s never really clear what’s happening, is dispersed. In the film it’s made very clear exactly what is happening.

There’s some minor plot tinkering, some of it to acknowledge perhaps at least a hundred years of Vampire fiction between Le Fanu and the film. The only major additions are the governess’s switch from fat and old and friendly to young and pretty, the disappearance of the nanny, the introduction of the idiot butler, (who plays the policeman in part two?). The father’s absence which provides the governess with some small moral dilemma…and the murder of the doctor.

Oh and the compulsory “good looking” young man who can "save" Laura and reassert the hetro-normative discourse.(I never thought I’d get to use that phrase). Though why they change Laura's anme to Emma is indeed a mystery.

The Devil in Love

Thinking of ambiguity and seduction.

Jacques Cazotte was executed during the French revolution. Nothing ambiguous about that. His literary output was slight, a few tales read today by specialists in 18th century French Literature, and Le Diable Amoureux, The Devil in Love.

The latter haunts the spaces between the medieval fable or narrative, the folk tale or fairy story proper, and a modern short story. It’s one of those pieces, like a good fairy story or a bad horror movie, which escapes itself and becomes something far greater than it should be.

Alvaro, a young nobleman, raises the Devil, who (eventually) takes the form of a beautiful girl who calls herself Biondetta. The Devil seems to have fallen in love with Alvaro, and does everything she can to make him reciprocate. Alvaro is caught between his affection and desire for Biondetta and the nagging feeling that he can’t trust the devil to tell the truth. Is she really so in love with him, or is this just a ruse to win his soul? The story turns on the tension between Biondetta’s attempts to seduce Alvaro, and Alvaro’s attempt to get his mother’s blessing for their marriage before succumbing to his desire.

In purely narrative terms the ending is not good. The story crashes into bathos. Cazotte may have planned and discarded a sequel, and he certainly changed the original ending at the suggestions of friends. However, becuase the ending doesn't provide the usual neatly wrapped bunch of answers, the ambiguity of the story is only strengthened.

Since this isn't an attempt at a logically rendered opinion, I don’t feel I need to defend my interest in the story. The intro to the Dedalus European classics is sniffy, describing it as “pale and hesitant” in comparison with later tales of diabolical bargains. But what sets this one aside is the ambiguity at its core. We know Faust is screwed. We know the usual fictional devil is out for his soul at all costs. But what happens, if for once, the devil is genuinely in love?
Neither reader nor Alvaro can know if Biondetta is genuine in her passion. As in Carmilla, there is no way of resolving the issue.

Dublin Detour part two

Carmilla may be the best vampire tale ever written. Like most vampire tales the ending is anti-climatic, the good guys win, the vampire is destroyed. Unlike Dracula, it’s never entered the mainstream and attempts to film it have been awful.

But in the middle of the nineteenth century, Le Fanu plays sophisticated games with his narrative. Today it’s usually described as a lesbian vampire tale. Very naughty, very trendy. But Le Fanu was too good to be so obvious. (And would he have got away with it if he was? Good Queen Vic reputedly had only recently declared there was no such thing)
Carmilla is a vampire, and she is attracted to the female narrator. Though in what way, other than as a food source, remains ambivalent.
The narrator can't decide but records her confusion. Unlike Uncle Silas, there is no evidence in the narrative to qualify Laura's confusion. This produces a feeling that everything is slightly out of focus. It's made worse because a modern reader knows so much more about literary vampires than Le Fanu's original audience and can't help but wonder why the narrator is so slow. (If he had thought his audience knew as much as a modern reader, the long exposition would have been omitted as unnecessary. (Although Hollywood doesn't seem to have learnt this lesson.)

As in Uncle Silas, the reader probably picks up the clues much faster than the narrator does, who remains innocent right to the end. You could read it as a lesbian story, but you can just as easily see it as one of those over wrought expressions of Victorian female friendship. Because both options are possible, the story has an unsettling ambivalence, like The Devil in Love, which is far beyond the usual hot house sexuality of modern vampire novels.

Le Fanu inhabits the margins, the space where decisions and definitions are not easily made. Like the Lady’s invitation to Gawain, Carmilla offers the reader the opportunity to do with the story as he or she wishes.