ABSTRACT
The narrative structure of “Carmilla” reproduces the epistemological structure of the tale, in which male knowledge subjects female experience to scrutiny. The language used by nineteenth-century medicine to diagnose the female patient echoes throughout “Carmilla,” particularly in describing the female vampire. In order to understand the ideological charge of Le Fanu' influential representation of the female vampire, in fact, the chapter argues that it is necessary to examine attitudes about female appetite implicit in Victorian definitions of the hysterical woman. As Carmilla' face darkens, she becomes what figures like the black woman in the carriage symbolize in nineteenth-century racist and sexist iconography: the woman as angry, demonic, and animalistically sexual Other, for the “irrepressible” shuddering of globus hystericus in this scene suggests both menace and orgasm. “Carmilla” predates the emergence of a clearly defined category of lesbianism by several decades.
