LESBIAN VAMPIRES HAVE MORE FUN PART 2:
Why bloodsucking undead females enjoys freedoms unknown to loyal housewives and daughters
Lesbian vampire, Carmilla, the eponymous protagonist of Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 novella, should rightly be regarded as a feminist heroine and trailblazer. Her combination of Sapphic lust and deviousness alone are worthy of so much admiration.
Carmilla was published 25 years before Dracula, but although it is on a smaller scale and has a less complicated plot than its more famous successor and imitator, I prefer it. The beautiful and alluring Carmilla, who is in truth the undead Countess Mircalla Karnstein, preys on vulnerable young bourgeois girls, introducing them to nocturnal strokes, sighs and bites that they feel obliged to present as repulsive, even when the reader knows that the opposite is really the case.
“Sometimes there came a sensation as if a hand was drawn softly along my cheek and neck. Sometimes it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat…”
Carmilla is not without her faults: peasant girls are dispatched in one carnivorous bite as befitting a countess who regards the lower orders as little more than an amuse bouche preceding the principal platter. But I, for one, prefer my heroines flawed, even when their crimes are as trifling as this.
Outrageously, the fathers of the ‘corrupted’ girls discover her true identity and impale her lovely body with stakes in an act that can only be likened to mass male rape. In this hideous violation of her precious flesh, they re-establish their patriarchal property rights over their daughters’ bodies.
Happily, we find out that the novella’s main narrator, Laura, is doomed to die young as a consequence of Carmilla’s tender attendances, and so there is good hope that as another lesbian vampire, Laura is destined to continue in Carmilla’s footsteps, introducing generations of lucky young girls to similar nocturnal ecstasies.
If you enjoyed this, you may also like my latest novel THE DIFFICULT WIFE by TIM ROBINSON. Amazon link: https://shorturl.at/dJRg2 . Soon available in all major bookshops.