Carmilla's Contagious Disease: Regulating Nineteenth-century Sexuality

Abstract

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1871) has acquired increasing critical review, first for ramifications of the sexualized relationship between its two female protagonists and more recently for its contribution to Irish Gothic Studies. This paper offers an analysis of the intersections of multiple avenues of existing criticism on Le Fanu and on "Carmilla," while also providing deeper attention to the male characters' motivations and new connections between female bodies and nineteenth-century medical practices. Examining the history of nymphomania, as presented by Carol Groneman, demonstrates the parallels between nineteenth-century female vampirism and nineteenth-century women diagnosed with a sexual disorder. Descriptions of vampirism draw from the discourses of disease, infection, and contagion so often that narratives involving female vampires repeatedly present confrontations between the normal, healthy female body and the abnormal, dangerous female vampire body. The distinction between the two kinds of bodies also mirrors the nineteenth-century tropes of the fallen woman and the angel in the house. Because medicine and morality are always already conflated, these particular confrontations between different types of diagnosable female bodies endow medicine with the power to regulate multiple aspects of female lives. After tracing these diagnostic processes that male medical authority exploited in order to regulate female bodies, "Carmilla's" narrative reveals how nineteenth-century medicine's pretense of objectivity belies cultural and sexual anxieties that "Carmilla" leaves unearthed but unresolved.