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

She could remind the viewer of Mary Magdalene, for the beauty in her face and the piety in her demeanor. There is a degree of reverence in the posture of Carmilla, too, seen as she is bent at the waist with one arm stretched out: she appears to be making a gesture of obeisance and supplication while simultaneously finding herself unable to resist the lure of the beautiful Bertha. The parallel that can be drawn between Carmilla and Mary Magdalene, the sinner turned saint, with a so strong a love for Christ that she was among the first to learn of His resurrection before any of the male heirs to the Apostleship. Just as Mary Magdalene combines sensuality and spirituality in her character, so too does Carmilla combine the two. Just as Mary Magdalene may be seen reaching forward to touch the sandal of Jesus who saves her from stoning, so too can one interpret the image as Carmilla reaching out to touch the breast of Bertha, which contains so life-giving solution to Carmilla's needs. Yet, is Carmilla to be considered an anti-Magdalene because she ultimately crosses a line set by the Church's doctrine? Or is she simply misunderstood in a patriarchal power structure that restricts female sexuality in such a way that it is rendered nearly obsolete, represented by the darkness that covers Carmilla?
If Laura longs for a friend/companion, it may be said that Carmilla longs just as much for a female companion/lover, from whom she can take blood. Trapped in a state of isolation, both because of her desires and her undead existence, Carmilla must achieve what she wants on the sly, making friends through means of deception, changing her name every place she goes, and lurking in the night to find satisfaction. In this context, Carmilla's vampirism appears more sympathetic, her anger at Laura for singing a Christian hymn at a passing funeral the result of a bitterness at her own inability to pass into the next world, held back as she is by the curse that keeps her undead. There is a tragedy hidden in the story of Carmilla and it is rooted in her exclusion from the natural rights of others.

That her "friendships" tend to be deadly for the other is what makes Carmilla a femme fatale. Without this lethal aspect to her persona, Carmilla at once becomes more than a type: she becomes a complex being with real humanity. Such an individual would have been absolutely unconventional for Victorian audiences -- thus, the lesbian persona has to be presented within the vampire trope and molded within the femme fatale type: her embrace brings joy, her mouth brings death.

For a modern audience, Carmilla may be viewed as a prototype for "women religious, who embrace both feminist orientations and Catholic traditions" (Gervais 384): her sexuality is upheld be feminist ideology and her distaste for hymns for the dead is explained by her particular situation; also, her prayerful manner is certainly rooted in a Catholic tradition -- thus, Carmilla embodies a mix of characteristics that casts her as a forerunner of the modern feminist woman religious, who, as Gervais notes, are part of a movement with the Church to "challenge some of their institutional religion's precepts and engage in feminist-based transformative strategies" (384). Indeed, Robert Geary notes that Carmilla is a representation of the Victorian fear of social collapse without its "Christian context": having left the doctrines of the Church and found the Age of Enlightenment to be too empirical in its science (and the Age of Romance too frightening in its liberty), the Victorian Age strove for balance of a modest kind (22). Carmilla tips that balance in her favor: buried like a ghost from the Age of Romance, Carmilla lurks under a new name, seeking her victims in the shape of young defenseless girls, whose trust and confidence she can easily win because of her beauty and her natural affection.

Carmilla may be seen as a threat to the patriarchal power structure of the Victorian Age because she represents the liberal spirit unleashed in the preceding Romantic Era and depicted in horrific terms by Mary Shelley, wife of Romantic poet Percy Byshe Shelley. Carmilla is not only a seductress but also, evidently, a lesbian, whose sexuality is not anchored by any relationship to family or procreation but staked rather to pleasure, desire, sensual satisfaction, and emotional fulfillment. That she must lurk and practice subterfuge in order to achieve her aims indicates the social mores of the time in which courtship played a defining role between men and women and…