How Lesbian Vampires Were Resurrected: Carmilla, Lesbian Porn, and Male Impotence

Written by Nicole Pezza

‘Tis the season of the witch; and of the vampire, but especially of the even scarier, lesbian… Carmilla functioned as Dracula’s prophetic mommy, and it did for gothic novels what Harry Potter did for fantasy:  it introduced the (kind of) new, extremely prolific and highly fan-fictionable trope of the vampire. 

Although it is certain that Dracula’s author did read and draw inspiration from Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872  Carmilla, it is certainly no Freudian slip that Bram Stoker omitted the lesbian element from his own novel. At the end of Le Fanu’s novella, Carmilla is killed, and so is lesbianism from future literary works that would be featured in ‘the-100-must-read-classics according to The Guardian’. However, as it often goes, the taboo topic of lesbianism was ultimately reclaimed by the underground culture within various alternative subgenres, such as porn comics and exploitation cinema,¹ which produced some esteemed titles of the calibre of ‘Vampyros Lesbos’ (1971), and ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ (2009). It is a truth universally acknowledged that the analysis of a society must often consider the unsaid and the forbidden, which seep through the breaches of censorship to reach counter-culture.  

Carmilla, as a gothic novel, was supposed to be scary, but not so scary to ever be the last of its genre  (#WLW, #lesbianvampire) within classical literature, yet the trope of lesbianism provoked an anxious  reaction. Denying the existence of any homoerotic elements within the novel has affected not only the Canon, but has also influenced contemporary theories, according to which the heated relationship between  the she-vampire, Carmilla, and the story’s heroine, Laura, is purely motherly. Cancellation is no novelty for the lesbian community, but let’s reassure the skeptics with Carmilla’s words to Laura: 

“I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you.” 

At least, these words impressed Bram Stoker, insofar as he crafted his own novel, Dracula, in the form  of a punitive tale,² excluding the trope of homoeroticism and relegating women to secondary,  subservient roles (always the prey, never the predator, like the character of Lucy in Dracula). In Le Fanu’s novella, similarly, Carmilla’s death symbolises the castigation of female desire; queers do not get their happy ending. The exclusion or ultimate destruction of homoerotic relations prevented these horror stories from turning into a real-life  nightmare, since men wanted to be a little scared at the mention of vampires, but not really scared at the presence of lesbians. 

The horror of female homosexuality both repulsed and drew them in, so  much so that it became a staple theme in subsequent pornography. Ironically enough, pornography is the most likely space to encounter lesbian relations, since mainstream cinema  excluded female subjectivity from the narrative. By watching man-made lesbian porn, the male gaze removes female agency and takes pleasure from the ideology it condemns.³ As much as Dracula, man-made lesbian porn uses the profitability of the immoral to create a punitive tale where female passivity dominates, and lesbian sexuality is exploited.   But what makes lesbians so frightful for men? After dusting off some psychoanalytic tomes, I found it likely to relate to castration anxieties à la Freud. Bear with me: traditional structures of kinship are regulated by the exchange of women between men,⁴ especially within the family and in order to create a new family. Marriage itself consisted of the passage of property from the father’s side to the husband’s. This process  reinforces male bonding through shared participation in the rite, whereas the woman functions as the  passive link between the two. How disruptive then, are lesbian relations, where women indulge in sexual relations excluding male participation, even though sex is viewed as a traditionally male dominated field. The patriarchal Victorian society, under the influence of which Le Fanu  and Stoker were writing, could not picture the exclusion of men from sex, marriage, or even love. Thus, this feeling of exclusion led men to develop unconscious anxieties on male impotence and, ultimately,  the symbolic fear of castration. 

Once again, it is the lesbians that have to answer for this, since they remind men of their lack of  importance within homoerotic relationships; out of these fears and dreads, a monster is born… the lesbian vampire. What could be more terrifying to conceive for the morally strict Victorian society than a monster with a ‘deviant’ sexuality? For this reason, the vampire operates in the darkness, hiding from the eyes of the society and its morals. Not only do vampires stay away from the righteous light of the day, they are also a ‘bad influence.’ Being a vampire is quite literally a disease that can be transmitted.  Unironically, Victorian society thought that of lesbianism, too. ‘Deviant’ sexualities were analysed by increasingly paranoid psychopathological studies that linked queerness to infectious diseases. 

The result of these moralistic views on sexuality is the association between lesbianism and the monstrous Other,⁵ that is, the vampire, our Carmilla. Victorian society conjured all its worst nightmares into a mythological figure, which ideologically represented all the individuals who couldn’t comply with the strict ethical code of the time. This mythological figure is a sinner, a blood-sucking monster, the ultimate marginalised individual. Carmilla is punished and killed because she is the ultimate Other, ostracised from society for her crimes and her sexual preferences. Queerness has historically been linked to Otherness within heteronormative cultures, as Monique Wittige affirms in her infamous statement, ‘lesbians are not women.’⁶ Within the norms of a heteronormative society, lesbians do not fit in the equation, since their existence and sexuality does not depend on the Male Sapiens. If that is valid for a lesbian, we can imagine what it is like for a lesbian vampire…

What happened to the lesbian vampire afterwards? We are currently witnessing a constant increase of queer content created by queer people on social media, and the ‘vampire aesthetic’ on Tik Tok is also often  linked to the queer aesthetic. Queer author V. E. Schwab produced a series on Netflix called ‘First Kill’ (2022), which features as a protagonist a lesbian vampire who falls in love with a vampire hunter. Ultimately, the recent reappropriation of the lesbian narrative and the lesbian monster tells us that nowadays, although queerness might be perceived as otherness, there’s still a chance for otherness to be embraced. 

Bibliography

¹ https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7846 

²https://www.jstor.org/stable/23118160?searchText=signorotti+carmilla&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3F Query%3Dsignorotti%2Bcarmilla&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly default%3A5c29fec7a89cb0493208a0f5c28b6aa0 

³ https://www.jstor.org/stable/4315957?searchText=swedberg+porn&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQue ry%3Dswedberg%2Bporn&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly default%3Ac95700c07cff96f2037e61ceeae91577

⁴https://www.jstor.org/stable/23118160?searchText=signorotti+carmilla&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3F Query%3Dsignorotti%2Bcarmilla&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly default%3A5c29fec7a89cb0493208a0f5c28b6aa0

⁵https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827492?searchText=carol+a+senf&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery %3Dcarol%2Ba%2Bsenf&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly default%3A81ddbbc7a57ffac7147affefa5814fe7 

⁶ https://www.labrys.net.br/special/special/delauretis.htm