29 pages • 58 minutes read
Joseph Sheridan le FanuCarmilla
Fiction | Novella | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Laura
Laura is a young woman of nineteen during the events that she narrates, though there is an “interval of more than ten years” (31) between her documentation of these events and the events themselves, Also, earlier in her account she says that the interval is eight years (7). The reader finds in the preface that Laura has died of some unknown cause by the time of the publication of her account. Physically, she is “a beautiful young lady, with golden hair and large blue eyes,” according to Carmilla, with whom she has a mutual attraction. Laura describes herself as “spoiled” (8) and lives with her father and a few servants in a secluded castle, or “schloss,” in Styria. Her mother is long dead. Laura is lonely and expresses longing for the companionship of other girls her age, which is granted with the arrival of Carmilla, who appears to be about the same age as Laura. The formative moment of Laura’s life happened when she was around six, when Carmilla, or an apparition of Carmilla, appeared in her nursery at night and bit her on the chest with her fangs. This encounter produced a “terrible impression” on her mind (8), and the scenes of the encounter “shand out vivid as the isolated pictures of the phantasmagoria surrounded by darkness” (11).
Laura is infatuated with the vampire Carmilla, though she is also frightened of her. Of her relationship with Carmilla she says: “I was conscious of a love growing into adoration, and also of abhorrence. This I know is paradox” (31). She frequently remarks on the physical beauty of Carmilla, and though they never engage in anything beyond kissing, each professes a love for each other. The intensity of Laura’s relationship with Carmilla is never close to being matched by her relationship with any other character in the story. Even her relationship with her father is described in often lukewarm terms. Laura frequently describes Carmilla with a fondness, and though she is scared of her, she never blames Carmilla for her actions, even when she finds out definitively that she is, in fact, a real vampire.
Carmilla
Carmilla is a 150-year-old vampire that preys exclusively on young women. Besides Laura, she has preyed on Bertha and at least three other young women in the environs of Laura’s schloss. Carmilla, in her human existence, was Countess Mircalla Karnstein, a member of an extinct family with a sinister reputation and whose schloss is now in ruins. Physically, Carmilla is very beautiful, with “eyes large, dark, and lustrous” and with hair “exquisitely fine and soft, and in color a rich very dark brown, with something of gold” (28-29).
Despite her beauty, Carmilla is quite violent, in both sentiment and in action. She is prone to bouts of languor and nervousness, during which she often utters obscure and paradoxical statements regarding love and death, such as “You must come with me, loving me, to death” (46), or “Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood” (47). Indeed, throughout the novel Carmilla constantly equates love with death. Carmilla’s predations on young women seem to be a compulsion that she has only partial control over. As a vampire, she “yearn[s] for something like sympathy and consent” (98) from her victims, and her vampiric conquests take on the form of a romantic love affair in the case of both Laura and Bertha.
Laura’s Father
Laura’s father is never named in the novel. Laura says that he is “the kindest man on earth, but growing old” (7). He is English, and is thus a foreigner in Styria, though his wife, who died in Laura’s infancy, is a native of the land. Laura’s father believes that vampires are a superstition, and thus is slow to act on curing Laura’s vampiric illness, even when he is warned by an experienced doctor. He loves Laura very much but is impotent in his attempts to protect her.
General Spielsdorf
The General lives in a schloss near Laura’s schloss. His ward, his niece Bertha, is preyed on by Carmilla in much the way that Laura is. When Berta dies, the General becomes enraged at Carmilla, and he dedicates his life to tracking down Carmilla and destroying her. He grieves deeply for the loss of Berta, his “poor child,” and feels very guilty for not preventing her death. The General is not just motivated by revenge, though. He hopes to aid humanity before he dies by destroying Carmilla, so she can plague no one else ever again.
Baron Vordenburg
The Baron is an expert of vampirism who discovers Carmilla’s tomb. He is described as being bizarre in both appearance and demeanor. He is a descendent of the nobleman who was responsible for hiding Mircalla’s tomb and thereby protecting the vampire Carmilla. Because of this, the Baron is motivated by familial guilt to find Mircalla’s tomb and stop Carmilla’s vampiric predations. The Baron is the source of all the “official” information regarding the nature of vampires, which he relates in the final chapter of the novel.
Carmilla’s Mother
Carmilla’s ‘mother’ is shadowy figure who manipulates both Laura’s father and the General into accepting the vampire Carmilla into their households. It is unclear whatexactly the mother is; she may not be actually Carmilla’s mother, nor even a vampire at all. She travels with a retinue of an “ill-looking pack” of servants and a mysterious “hideous black woman” (22). The mother is very persuasive and is adept at fabricating stories in order to get Carmilla placed amongst her prey. She is confident and dominating, and makes her requests “in the tone of a person from whom such a request amounted to conferring, rather than seeking a favor” (77).
