#shortanalysis 'Carmilla' by Sheridan Le Fanu

SHORT STORY: Carmilla

AUTHOR: Sheridan Le Fanu

This short story penned during the Victorian era by Sheridan Le Fanu is sort of a prelude to all other vampire based stories that are written after it, especially the novel ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker. The story uses many themes of vampirism which were new during the time when it was written which eventually makes the narrative a novel piece of literature at the time when it was published. Needless to say that ‘Carmilla’ is a Gothic horror story; the author has used many Gothic elements in his narrative like ancient castles, ruined chapels etc. The story itself is captivating & remarkable. The lucid descriptions in first person are quite conventional as well as the dialogues which are remarkable for a person living in the latter half of the 19^th century. Sheridan Le Fanu surely has produced one of the legendary masterpieces of Vampire fiction. It seems a pity that many readers are unaware of this work of art by Le Fanu, the master of gothic horror.

The story is female centric where both of the main characters in the story are young ladies, one whose name is Laura who is narrating her experience in first person & the other whose name is Carmilla who happens to be a vampire.

The character of Carmilla itself is sort of a mystery & the author has used his literary powers to keep it that way. He reveals nothing about her which adds a lot to the suspense in the narrative. It is not to be misunderstood however that Carmilla has no personality at all…….she certainly does have one which intrigues & shocks the reader as well. She is a vampire who looks like she is only 20 years old. She is sensual like most vampires are but gets emotionally attached to only a few of her victims. She is diabolical but she does not seem so at all & can be a wonderful conversationalist. She indulges in harmless gossip but has certain eccentricities that shock the rustic people with whom she associates with…..in turn to plague them. As a historical character in this work of fiction, Carmilla the seductive vampire is actually the Countess of Karnstein whose real name is Mircalla. She was the victim of a vampire in her life & thus turned into one herself, endangering all who lived in the area. She speaks very little of herself to Laura who she grows emotionally attached to & the eager young girl Laura can simply only gain a few hints from Carmilla:

‘What she did tell me amounted, in my unconscionable estimation—to nothing.

It was all summed up in three very vague disclosures:

First—her name was Carmilla.

Second—her family was very ancient and noble.

Third—her home lay in the direction of the west.

She would not tell me the name of her family, nor their armorial bearings, nor the name of their estate, nor even that of the country they lived in.’

However towards the end of the text, we realize who Carmilla really is but it simply adds to the horror & mystery behind this strange woman created by Le Fanu. Indeed, the less we know of Carmilla, the more she seems to grow upon the mind of the reader.

Taking a cue from Le Fanu’s Irish descent, we can also suppose that Carmilla was some sort of a banshee (a female spirit in Irish mythology, usually seen as an omen of death and a messenger from the Otherworld) who not only heralded the death but also was the cause of the death of the members of her family as well as of the people she associated with. Le Fanu however took one step further & turned Carmilla into a horrid but graceful killer.

Being written during the Victorian age, it is obvious to the reader that the author has tried to curb the extent to which he describes Carmilla’s sensuality. However, all readers are well aware that vampires are definitely sensual creatures & seduce their victims to perfection. In this short story, there are many hidden undertones of Lesbian love which if brought out in the open would have greatly shocked the reader of its day. The author has taken precautions to dilute his vampire’s seductive nature to a great degree yet in some cases, the obvious train of thought that is wished to be produced by the author is quite visible:

‘Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.” Then she has thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving me trembling.’

 

Carmilla shows great affection towards the young & vulnerable Laura who finds her new friend’s embraces& kisses rather disturbing. Laura is at once appalled & disgusted by Carmilla’s advances but at the same time, also feels the same sort of ecstasy that her companion feels. Le Fanu brings also to the focus the great fear on the part of many people of his day & age about homosexual relationships. Carmilla seems however only to plague female victims. She kills many in a few days’ time, but serenades the ones who she falls in love with like Laura:

‘In these mysterious moods I did not like her. I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust.’

Although Laura tries to make some sense out her friend’s passionate actions, she ultimately is drained of most of her blood by Carmilla in the form of a giant black cat during the night. It is only with timely action by certain individuals in the story like General Spielsdorf, Laura’s father & Baron Vordenburg that Laura is saved from a fate worse than death.

Although Carmilla’s remains are burned & thrown into the waters of a nearby flowing river, Laura even nine to ten years after her last meeting with Carmilla seems to still be haunted by her. This psychological aspect to the narrative adds a vague tinge of terror towards the end of the text.

For an ardent reader of the Gothic horror literature, Le Fanu’s story immediately brings to mind a lot of scenes & incidences from the classic horror novel ‘Dracula’. Many themes & ideas from ‘Carmilla’ seem to have influenced the writer of ‘Dracula’. For instance both works are set in first person intending the reader to come to a logical conclusion about events that follow in both narratives. In both the stories the main vampire is able to either transform into a gigantic hound (Dracula) or a gigantic black cat (Carmilla). Both stories end in the ultimate defeat of the vampire by persons who delve into folklore like Van Helsing (Dracula) & Baron Vordenburg (Carmilla). There are other many such instances to prove that the author of ‘Dracula’ was definitely influenced by Le Fanu’s work.

Rapt in bold intense love scenes, Carmilla the female vampire seems to surpass her successors in evil & even in pathos. One simply at times finds Carmilla to be but a pathetic piece of fine feminine grace who is more a victim than her own blood drained young victims. Her sleep walking at nights & languid disposition adds to our thinking that Carmilla is but a sad woman in need of love.

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#shortstory 'It was a dark, stormy, moonless night' by Fiza Pathan

It was a dark, stormy, moonless night. The man stepped out of the Church which stood at the end of the forest path. The Church stood behind the man …….dark and silent; it was an old Franciscan Church built in 1320 and deserted by the end of World War One. The man walked into the graveyard, his hands in his jean pockets. The rain fell across the full forest landscape drenching the ground as well as the man’s cycle which was standing within the graveyard. The man’s name was Jerome. He had never seen a night like this before. As he passed a few lonely tombstones he neared his bike parked to an old mossy gate. He was drenched from head to toe; the night air was nippy and darkness was working up his mind. He got upon his cycle and rode out of the graveyard. But, the moment he started to ride across the forest path…….he had that unearthly feeling that he was being followed. His trainers

pumped the cycle to a fast pace. His breathing got heavier…..his body felt tight and his wet clothes were chilling his bones. Suddenly, he stopped and looked up……there stood a pale looking creature upon the old oak tree.

“Who is that?” gasped Jerome, terrified….but there was no answer and all of a sudden the pale creature vanished and……..his ears caught  the ascending sound of a woman’s wail. He gripped his bike…..a chilling silence followed another ascending wail. Jerome picked up courage and got onto his bike and started to race himself out of the forest. The wail grew wilder and the sound started to ring in his ears like a gong. As he rode out of the mossy forest, he heaved a sigh of relief. He looked around, there up

ahead stood his mother’s bike and his mother looking on at him.

Jerome leapt for joy as he pedalled towards his mother. “Where were you?” inquired his chubby mother calmly. ‘Never mind’ retorted Jerome. ‘Let’s just get out of here’. And they both rode down the highway.  His mother was an overweight middle aged woman, but could ride a cycle like a professional. Jerome was still ill at ease; the sound of the woman’s wail was still ringing in his ears. The rain suddenly ceased. Jerome’s mother sighed with relief, “At last that is over.” “Yeah that’s for sure”, piped in Jerome gleefully as if to say he had a new lease of life-when suddenly his ‘pager’ beeped.  He brought his bike to a halt to take a look at the message------he was horrified: “WHERE ARE YOU SON?” And the message was from his Mother. ‘Then…..then who is ‘this’ with me’, thought the pale looking Jerome, clutching his bike handle. But his ‘mother’ sped on and suddenly a wail leapt from her…….a morbid stench of the dead filled the atmosphere. Jerome’s nostrils were filled with the horrible stench and a tear rolled down the scared man’s cheek. ‘No-no’, he moaned in pain, getting on his bike and speeding off in the opposite direction back to the forest. His muscles were tense…..his whole chest heaved heavily. But the wail did not cease, as he drove faster the wail became shriller. Jerome pedalled himself back to the forest where he rode all the way to the church and dropping his bike ducked into the mossy structure.

The wailing had stopped, and Jerome was kneeling near the statue of the Holy Mother. His breathing was heavier and his manly structure was reduced to a trembling wreck.  His pale blue eyes darted around the full church from the altar to the dusty chairs….no one, he was safe …he was okay.  But the incident was lingering and the empty church was playing tricks with his mind.  The scuttle of a lizard or the rustle of dried up leaves within the old abandoned church was making him apprehensive. ‘Who’s that?’ he would suddenly yell clutching his throbbing heart.  ‘What was that there’, he would cry aloud thus bringing a little life into the old structure.  His lips were trembling and the dampness was making him insane.  He was reduced to a mere animal in a trap, and all he wanted was to get out of this mess, but what could he do?  If he didn't stay here well then – neither could he go back on the highway, where that – that  ‘thing’ was.  Jerome gripped his wet shirt and moaned in pain.

Suddenly….there was another sound… clanking sound. Jerome alerted himself like a mole rat, he burst out of the church and moved closer to his bike.  The clanking sound was getting louder, and so was the sound of his breathing. The rain started to fall again, sending chills up and down his spine.  Cupping his ears he strained to hear the sound against the pouring rain. He heard it….it was coming from the graveyard.  He choked down the lump in his throat and motioned himself towards the graveyard.   Jerome was freezing but the weather was not showing any mercy. His trainers trotted along the marble slab as he moved ahead.  Tears were rolling down his heavy laden eyes profusely – tears of desolate terror.  The agony that he felt at that moment was unmentionable…he was for a moment nothing more than a bundle of nerves. He got closer – closer to the sound…closer to the clanking noise… closer to his worst nightmare.  When he turned the corner… Jerome was freaked right out of his wits.

In front of him stood the person who he thought was his mother… with an unholy expression on her white face…clanking bones of a skeleton at a rhythmic pace.  Her eyes were bloodshot and her arms and limbs were covered with the mud of the forest.  Her smile was fiendish as well as her body language.  A maleficent force was surrounding her and that evil power was being felt by Jerome.  He was nearly going to faint from fright, when a wail from the creature in front of him stirred him up.  Her voice was ghastly and her behaviour was demonic.  Jerome knew his end was near.

The rain patted down the earth and Jerome fell down upon the murky ground.  His body was soaked and his face was yellow due to the loss of blood.  He clutched the mud of the ground as he begged for mercy, but other than an agonizing howl…he got nothing. Jerome stopped trembling at last, his heavy breathing ceased and his eyelids closed in exhaustion.  Before he fainted, Jerome only heard one last sound…the sound of his bike…moving away. 

#Review 'The Hound' by H.P.Lovecraft

SHORT STORY: The Hound

AUTHOR: H.P.Lovecraft

This short horror story penned by H.P.Lovecraft, one of the best writers of the ‘fantastic’, is quite similar to the general writings of Edgar Allan Poe. The story is par excellence teaming suspense with a bit of an indirect moral which makes this story a fantastic read. The main theme however of this story is about man’s eternal search for truth & how this search often ends not to the expectation of the seeker.

Dabbling’s with ‘truth’ as we know often leads an inquirer to take up many different fields of study. The two main characters in this story too were in search of truth. They were as the text states:

‘Wearied with a world where even the joys of romance & adventure soon grow stale.’

They were definitely not of any normal disposition although they were young & full of life. Lovecraft often uses scholarly people as characters in his texts to bring out his thoughts. These characters often are recluses who devote themselves to their study away from the daily happenings of society. St. John & the narrator in this story are also in search of a new field of study to aid them in their quest for the truth. They try every known & possible intellectual movement but, all these fields of study fail to whet their appetite or its newness or novelty was soon exhausted by them, which led them to look for another & yet another field of theory & research. Ultimately, they somehow get interested in grave robbing which was sort of the ‘philosophy of the decadents’ which was in practice at the time when this short story was penned.

They create a museum of all their grave robbing treasures which they keep away from prying eyes for obvious reasons. They jointly dwell together alone without servants in a great stone house near a barren & creepy looking moor. In that mansion of stone, they house all their repellent treasures like mummies, headstones snatched from old churches, skulls of all shapes, heads preserved in various stages of dissolution, grotesque statues, paintings, a portfolio made from tanned human skin containing as the author puts it :

‘Unknown & Unnameable drawings’

Certainly by this description itself, the author of the macabre sets the tone for even more gruesome happenings using suspense filled sentences as tools to aid the reader along this path of terror.

The two characters in this short story namely the author himself & his companion St. John then go out on a journey to Holland to dig up the grave of a certain ‘ghoul’ who had been lying in the grave itself for five centuries. The author’s use of the term ‘ghoul’ here gives us an idea of what to expect throughout the remainder of the story. A ghoul as we know is a monster associated with graveyards and consuming human flesh, often classified as undead which signifies ‘the vampire’……yet the title of the story is ‘the Hound’…..again an ardent fan & reader of horror fiction would be aware that the legendary vampire is also able to leave its eternal tomb & change into the form of certain animals, a huge hound being one among them.

The author mentions in this story that the ghoul himself was a grave robber & also a person who had robbed something rather marvelous from an ancient sepulcher. The two characters while digging for the body find around the dead skeleton’s neck an amulet made of green jade which is the stone often used in China. The amulet consisted of the figure of a sphinx with canine features or a dog like appearance. The author & St. John take away this amulet from its grave but their lives after this undergoes a dramatic change.

It is also well enough to note that this is the first story of H.P.Lovecraft where the mention is made of the fictional & forbidden book called ‘Necronomicon’ penned as Lovecraft put it, by the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred. It is in this book that the author & his companion come to know about the strange properties of the amulet which disturbs them quite a bit. Yet they continue to preserve the amulet & even light a scented candle infront of it.

The story then goes on to tell us about how the author & his companion are haunted by the sound of the evil baying of an unusual hound, which they are unable to see. Unlike other vampire stories, Lovecraft has used the invisible to channelize our thoughts towards the most impossible, thus succeeding in getting the reader totally involved in the text. They at first enjoy the idea of being pursued by evil which gives us a morbid glimpse into their most peculiar psychological makeup. Later however, they are shaken into the belief that the amulet is the cause of all their woe. St. John ultimately becomes the first victim of this ‘hound’. According to the author’s description, St. John was literally torn to ribbons by a carnivorous animal. As the companion lay dying however, he signals the author finally to the actual cause of his sad ending:

‘The amulet – that damned thing’

The author tries at first to ignore the link between all the events from Holland uptill St. John’s death & tries to get away from the mansion. A circumstance in London however makes him realize that what was to become of his companion would be his ultimate doom as well. He tries in vain to save himself by returning the amulet back to its owner in Holland but to his misery, he is robbed of the amulet by thieves. When he returns to the grave however, he finds the amulet back with its owner who has been somehow nourished in the grave the way a vampire is nourished by drinking blood. The skeleton in the grave now has grown some flesh & is caked with blood. When it gave a deep sardonic bay like a hound, the author runs away from the wretched place like a madman.

It is towards the end of the narrative that we realize that the story was a sort of suicide note of the author who wishes to end his life after the end of this tale. He at the end of the story seems to be plagued by the memory of all that had taken place which had affected him psychologically for the worse.

The underlying ideology in this story is of course the never ending fight between good & evil & where must one finally draw the line. To get a little excitement in one’s life, most individuals some way or another delve into the tempting depths of evil just as the author & St. John did, but the climax finally made the reader realize which is the more safer path to choose.

http://pathanfiza.blogspot.in/2013/02/review-road-to-madness-by-hplovecraft.html