Carmilla chooses her victims (young women isolated from society and without friendship) mainly because they are easy prey. She is a sensual, tender and affectionate woman herself -- beautiful to behold, as Laura describes: "She was slender, and wonderfully graceful…her complexion was rich and brilliant; her features were small and beautifully formed; her eyes large, dark, and lustrous" (Fanu 30). Bertha is a young woman intended to meet and befriend Laura, till she falls victim to Carmilla; and Laura is equally young and eager for a confidante. The fact that Carmilla first introduces herself to Laura when Laura is a girl and crying because she has been left alone in the nursery suggests that Carmilla is an altogether different kind of femme fatale -- not one who preys upon men to achieve her own aims but rather one whose very nature compels her to seek the embrace of young women -- and then their blood. Why does Carmilla choose to seduce women when she could just as easily, one assumes, seduce men? The answer is that Carmilla is attracted to women and they to her. Whether the attraction is merely sexual or part of a gender formation that rivals the patriarchal power structure of the Victorian era is perhaps incidental in the light of the greater significance that is Carmilla. As Kathleen Costello-Sullivan states, the Victorian foundation was crumbling and the popularity of the vampire in Gothic literature signaled the "Victorian uncertainty" (xviii) regarding the patriarchal society that had built itself upon the Church and then abandoned the Church for science and reason. In Carmilla, the patriarchs have their revenge on one who destabilizes their power by decapitating the title character and burning her body parts.
In the picture by DH Friston, the reader sees Carmilla half-leaning, half-climbing into the bed, reaching toward the chest of the General's niece, Bertha Rheinfeldt. Bertha is exposed from the chest up, a prominent bosom on full display, hid materially only by the form-fitting thin fabric of a nightgown. Her head is turned to the left, her left arm back over the pillow extending behind her head, and her long golden hair flows outward to her right. The outline of her legs is discernible under the bed's blankets and they appear to be slightly parted. Her position suggests a number of interpretations: she may be one who is in deep slumber, or one who is caught in the feverish struggle of sickness, or one in the climax of sexual sensation. From the waist up she is bathed in a kind of ethereal light. Carmilla, on the other hand, is bathed in shadow. What is she reaching for? Is she reaching to snatch the beauty that belongs to her victim? Is she reaching to begin a ravishing embrace? To steal her life? Her face indicates no evil threat, no perverse desire. There is in it rather a curious fascination, as though Carmilla were an innocent, aroused by the beauty of the goddess-like woman before, wanting only to reach out and touch it, to crawl out from her dark corner and feel the glory. This original pictorial representation of Carmilla gives a subtle suggestion as to the sympathies of both artist and novelist: as Zizek states, it is the ability to "elevate the everyday, trivial object into a sublime Thing" (117) that separates the masters from the amateurs. Here, the sublimity of the sketch is found in the sympathetic portrayal of Carmilla, the femme fatale.
In the background approaches General Spielsdorf with a sword, ready to do violence to Carmilla, as though he represents the established order that is there to make certain no one taints the purity of the princess in bed. His sword is held waist-high and the image carries certain phallic connotations, as though his masculinity were more a threat to both women than Carmilla to Bertha. The image taken on its own gives an uninitiated reader no sense of the evil that Carmilla is represented to be in the story. One wonders whether the artist betrays some sympathy with the titular character, pitted as she is against a patriarchal power structure and elitist purity, which keeps her hidden, dark and oppressed. Indeed, there is almost a holiness about Carmilla, whose head is covered by a long veil, as though she were a medieval woman covering her hair in a
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