Carmilla in Context
S. Brooke Cameron, Peadar O’Dea
The Palgrave Handbook of the Vampire·2024
With her warm body and “strange” backstory, Carmilla has left readers wondering and wanting more of (if not openly desiring) this human-like lesbian vampire from the moment Le Fanu first penned her in 1872. Her subsequent reframings, by the author himself, as a part of his In a Glass Darkly Series, or later novelists on female vampires (in Stoker’s Dracula), highlight the ambivalent potential of this queer vampire. Our chapter extends this reading of a lesbian vampire who “goes both ways” to the wider sociopolitical nineteenth-century contexts, especially Irish politics at the end of the century. In keeping with her queer origins, Carmilla represents an ambivalence toward empire, as Le Fanu himself tried to reconcile his own conflicted or “fringe” political position.