Hearing today's interaction with the General, Comtesse and 'Millarca' out loud really strikes home 1) how elaborate a setup the charade is, which also highlights 2) how little Carmilla ultimately gives a damn about her eventual snacking spree on the lower class women of the village once she gets around to Laura's home. Because look at all the effort that went into planting her with Bertha and the General. It didn't have to be them, of course. Bertha just caught Millie's eye. But the point is the place it happened: a giant extravagant Rich and Important People masquerade.
The General mentions that he's the closest one to a 'nobody' there, just as Laura's father exists in the shallow end of the well-to-do pool--while still living in a castle with servants. And isn't it something how Millie and her crew have sniffed out targets within that balancing area. Obviously well off (not peasants, lame) but also obviously not big enough in the hierarchy to draw attention if a tragedy were to befall them; at least not enough to go hunting after the crew. (Give or take a General with a vendetta.)
I keep circling it now. How Carmilla/Millarca/Mircalla can and does very easily very quickly target random victims to her taste in the village entirely on her own and drinks them to death in no time. No invitation. No theatre-quality ruses with la Comtesse and company and staged tragic happenings. Just her and her own power, settling for the unpolished girls she has access to in order to preserve her honeymoon period with Laura a little longer.
All this pageantry to attach herself to Bertha, to Laura, and, we can guess, other pedigreed victims in the past, is just that for her. Pageantry. Picking her next meal with her pinkie up. And I think that's important to acknowledge when examining the difference between that MO and her attachment to Laura, regardless of what future chapters will try to insinuate otherwise.
Because if Laura had been any other upper(ish) class girl, she would have been as dead as Bertha ages ago. Drunk and loved to death and promptly ditched. But Carmilla is committed to her and to collecting her into vampirism to drag along with or without consent; a decision the novella never shows her making with any other victim. It's just been corpses all the way down. Either with hasty throwaway meals in the village or dragged out loving suppers made of girls like Bertha. However complicit Carmilla is or isn't in her own monstrosity, she is making choices within it, those choices are classist and self-serving to an undead aristocrat's palette, and they have all ended with her victim, treated with care or not, dead.
And Laura breaks that habit. She isn't just another case of Carmilla playing with her food. She is a spur of true love cracking through who knows how many lifetimes' worth of playacted romance with victims past.
For those who think I am taking le Fanu's wedged in explanation, no, I am not agreeing with the bullshit stance of 'all vampires are faking their love for their victims all the time always! especially the gay ones!!' that the story ultimately tries to pin in place. I'm saying that Carmilla has shown she proves that assumption wrong in both directions.
She doesn't seduce the peasant girls. She just breaks in, chugs them, kills them, and moves on.
She does star in intricate traveling theatre setups to get planted in more than one plush abode with a pretty daughter in it. And with them she does bother with friendship, charm, romance, et cetera, because she sees them as worth bothering with.
And Laura? Laura she latches onto with all the possessive bottomless love that the story implies was thrust upon her once upon a time; the same kind of Love that brought her into undeath. A love she hasn't felt herself once since then, not enough to collect any companion into vampirism. Except for Laura.
Apart from being grateful at having the podcast turn up old stones in this story that I'd either forgotten or completely overlooked. It's a refresher in how genuinely complicated Carmilla is as a character and as a villain. I've run into reads of her that are all purely sympathetic to the point of sanding down all her actions into being someone else's will, it's not her fault she's like this, there's nothing to take away from the story that paints her in a bad light that isn't just the man characters being wrong about vampires and lesbians and lesbian vampires!
And I didn't understand why that irked me so much until I realized that this borders on the same edge of Dracula's defanged makeover into a patchwork woeful dreamboy caricature made of traits that belong to anyone other than himself. Because we like Carmilla. We love Carmilla. She is The Classic Lesbian Vampire and Can Do No Wrong!
Except she does. She very much does, regardless of what biases are there to read in the male characters' framing of vampirism/homosexuality/impurity/Other etc.
The classism is there. The needless serial killing (VS taking a few sips and running) is there. The longing so great it demands she must steal Laura away is there. Just as the love is there, bringing with it the bitter agony and self-made misery of fear that Laura, her Laura, will learn the truth soon, that Carmilla's willpower is second to Carmilla's wants, and she will conscript the girl she loves because that is how a monster loves; it was how she was 'loved' and made what she is.
And God! Think of what would come after Laura being turned! Not just the revelation of what Millie has forced on her, but everything Carmilla has done for ages. All that death she's breezed through for so long is now suddenly a sword hanging over her head, held up by the thread of Laura's affection and her ignorance to what said beloved has been up to on her nights out.
Carmilla isn't a tragic monster because she's inherently innocent and the narrative has simply maligned and mistreated her. Carmilla is tragic because she's been a casual, canny and far from helpless monster for well over a century and is only now being tripped up by the bittersweet fact of her love and all the dread and shame that comes with being a bastard (gender neutral) and knowing that any moment your paramour will learn the truth of what you are.
tl; dr: Today's chapter hit me with an epiphany stick. Just as Dracula didn't deserve to be defanged by over a century of sanitizing and sexifying, Carmilla doesn't deserve to have all her sharp edges blunted into a helpless anti-villain/antihero because Girl. She's in on this gothic horror villain shit. Said villain shit needs acknowledging to make the reality of her romance with Laura stand out as truly tragically shattering to her undead lifestyle.
dededos
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