Carmilla’s Kindred: The Virgin Vampire

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Women Write About Comics celebrates the 150th anniversary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with a series of posts on female vampires in nineteenth-century literature.

Étienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon’s novel La Vampire, ou la Vierge de Hongrie (The Vampire, or the Virgin of Hungary) was published in 1825, just six years after John Polidori’s genre-defining “The Vampyre”, marking it an early addition to the contemporary vogue for stories of this sort. De Lamothe-Langon was evidently familiar to some degree with “The Vampyre” as his introduction to the novel notes the influence of Lord Byron upon the vampire theme – Polidori’s tale was, for some time, misattributed to Byron.

La Vampire, ou la Vierge de Hongrie was, for many years, practically unknown to the English-speaking world; not even Montague Summers’ wide-ranging survey of vampire literature made mention of it, despite listing a number of other French works. It was not until 2011 that the novel received an English translation courtesy of Brian Stableford, under the less generic title of The Virgin Vampire.

Cover of Black Coat Press's 2011 edition of The Virgin Vampire by Etienne-Léon de Lamothe-Langon. Illustration shows a white-faced vampire woman.

One of the more significant aspects of the novel is that its vampire is female. Although commonplace today, the very idea was still a novelty back in 1825, as demonstrated by the preface in which the author explains why he chose the feminine title La Vampire:

“Is that French?” we might be asked. “Don’t we always speak of a male vampire? Don’t dictionaries attribute the masculine gender to the word?” We do not disagree, but, as it is a woman who plays the role of the persecutor of the living in this romance, is it not appropriate to make the fact known? Would Le Vampire have provided the necessary designation?

Like many other vampire authors of the period, de Lamothe-Langon also felt it necessary to include a short outline of folkloric vampires, quoting from Antione Augustine Calmet’s treatise on the subject and citing the widespread custom of leaving food for the dead as evidence of belief in vampires. De Lamothe-Langon describes vampires as “these cannibals of the tomb who, when the sepulchral stone covers them, acquire frightful appetites that they did not have before, and come forth to suck human blood in order to satisfy a frightful thirst, bringing terror and desolation to the very bosom of their families.”

This notion that vampires feed primarily upon members of their families was once a convention of vampire literature – note that both Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Polidori’s “The Vampyre” depict their vampires joining the extended families of their protagonists – and it plays a role in The Virgin Vampire.

The story begins in 1815 with Colonel Edouard Delmont leaving Paris with his wife Hélène and children Eugène and Juliette, and starting a new life in a run-down château near Toulouse. His exact reason for doing so is something he keeps secret from his family, and he acts in a strangely furtive manner. This lasts until a situation involving his sister obliges him to return to Paris, leaving his family in the care of his old friend Raoul.

The same day that Colonel Delmont leaves, two newcomers arrive at the village: a beautiful Hungarian woman named Alinska and her pale manservant Ladislas. Alinska turns out to be a woman of strange habits – she dislikes going out during the day, for one – and moreover has a mysterious connection to the Delmont family. As we eventually discover, she is none other than a former lover to Colonel Delmont, and she desires to win him back even after her death.

The book a clear product of a time when meandering novels were in fashion, and gives the overall feeling that the author was – to some extent – making things up as he went along. The story is padded with a tedious subplot involving Raoul secretly writing a letter to the Colonel alerting him to Alinska’s arrival, only for her to tear it up. Even when the thin plot is stretched to breaking-point, however, the novel still gives us some deliciously overripe turns of phrase, preserved with loving care by Stableford’s translation.

“Was it not with the blood in his veins that he signed the promise never to go to the altar with anyone but me?” asks Alinska of her unfaithful lover in one scene. Elsewhere, Raoul finds that another one of his letters has become damaged: “Unparalleled surprise! The paper was covered with large drops of blood, which scarcely permitted the address to be read!” As purple as such moments may be, note that de Lamothe-Langon is finding inventive uses for the motif of blood: the book is a playful example of the still-novel vampire genre.

It is Raoul who first realises that Alinska is a vampire, being familiar with Hungarian tales about “those larvae of Christianity which, according to the accounts of an entire nation, abandon the tombs from which the dead ought no longer to emerge in order to wander the earth of which they are the filth and the horror”. He confronts the vampiress, going up against her servant Ladislas in the process, and her true nature is confirmed:

Alinska made a gesture so imperious that a part of her garment tore, and Raoul was able to perceive beneath it on the Hungarian woman’s left breast, a wound from which a few drops of blood had leaked.
[…]
“Don’t worry about me–my blood can’t flow, for I no longer have any blood; it was drained to the last drop a long time ago. There’s no shortage of that which replaces it–I know where to renew it. Let it flow, without paying any heed to it.”

Ladislas – who, in this sequence, feeds Alinska blood from a bottle – is a curious character. While it is implied that he is a vampire, or at least a supernatural creature of some sort, this is never explored and the author abruptly kills him off, having seemingly run out of purpose for him. Nevertheless, the image of the female vampire with a ghoulish manservant would persist: look at Sandor in the film Dracula’s Daughter, or even Lurch in The Addams Family.

Despite having a servant on hand to provide bottled sustenance, Alinska also goes on the prowl to drink straight from the source. Her first victim in the village is a young woman named Paschale, found in her bedroom dead, completely drained of blood. “No blood! O Heaven!” exclaims Raoul. “The horrors of Hungary are being renewed in France!” While later vampire fiction would home in on Transylvania as the creature’s natural habitat, de Lamothe-Langon instead portrays Hungary as the land of the vampire, as outlined by Raoul:

“You know that Hungary is a vast country, extending from the extremity of Germany to the Turkish frontier. The people of its rural areas are only half-civilized; they are more closely related to beasts than to humans, properly speaking. They spend their lives in a kind of slavery, to which we would have difficulty becoming accustomed–but if they remain submissive to their masters while they’re in this world, they take their revenge when they’re covered with six feet of earth. Some of these, after being interred in their coffins and laid in the grave, rise up in the cold winter nights, with the assistance of the one that Monsieur le Curé calls the Devil, and return to earth, to the misfortune of the living.”

All of this is news to the locals. One villager contrasts the dreaded vampires of Hungary with the more familiar spooks and witches of France:

“Are such things possible? I’m sorry I asked you about them, Raoul, although they’ve given me enlightenment I never had before. Thank God, in this land we’ve only encountered fays and spellcasters. There are a few revenants from time to time, but they only occupy themselves with scaring the living, moving the furniture in a house, tormenting shepherds or flocks in the fold, and pigeons in lofts…”

The tenth chapter delves into the characters’ backstory, revealing how Delmont was injured in battle and tended to health by Alinska, the daughter of a local farmer. This flashback shows us a very different Alinska – a doting innocent, rather than the weary figure of the story’s present – and we see how Delmont fell in love with her, even using his own blood to write a vow of marriage:

No one doubts, in Hungary, that by such an act, two lovers are irrevocably bound to one another; any union that is not contracted between the two of them cannot be happy. Eventually, a female virgin affianced in that fashion may rise from the tomb that covers her after her death, in order to torment, in the fashion of a Vampire, the perfidious man who has abandoned her. Delmont, a stranger to the land, was unaware of these superstitious details.

Then, the conflict ended and Delmont was forced to move elsewhere, eventually marrying Hélène instead of Alinska. The implication is that Alinska committed suicide and returned as a vampire, although the novel oddly fails to detail this key incident; in the footnotes to his translation, Brian Stableford points to textual evidence indicating that de Lamothe-Langon wrote or at least planned to write the relevant section, but somehow, it is absent from surviving copies.

Meanwhile, Alinska loses her house in a fire and Hélène graciously invites the homeless Hungarian lady into the family château, despite Raoul’s insistence that she is a vampire. With Alinska effectively becoming part of the extended Delmont family, this is the point at which the novel joins the convention of the time requiring vampires to feed upon family members.

So, the author is to some extent adhering to standard vampire formulae. In one scene Raoul dreams of seeing moonlight fall upon Alinska’s coffin, after which her reanimated cadaver emerges: this is likely lifted from Polidori’s “The Vampyre”, in which Ruthven was likewise resurrected by moonbeams. At the same time, de Lamothe-Langon shows no qualms about dipping into the occasional spot of self-parody. “One might think that you’ve spent the years during which we lost sight of you reading the works of certain contemporary authors who chatter like magpies and never explain anything”, says Raoul to Alinska. “You’d only have to write with exclamation marks to convince me that you’ve learned in their school.”

With Alinska running rampant, the casualties continue to pile up – when Colonel Delmont finally returns, he finds both Raoul and his son Eugene dead – yet Alinska manages to cover her tracks, blaming the deaths on brigands. Even when the villagers find her resting in a coffin, they do not hammer a stake through her heart as a modern reader might expect, but instead conclude (not without logic) that a tragic error has led to her being nearly buried alive.

With the focus shifting to the Colonel’s choice between his ailing wife and the alluring Alinska, the novel slips into the mode of a domestic melodrama. Nearly three quarters of the way into the book, long after Alinska’s vampiric nature has been established, we get a chapter that opens with “At breakfast time, Alinska appeared in the dining room as usual.”

Yet moments of horror remain, even if they seem thinly-spread. The novel includes such iconic touches as Alinska revealing her still-bleeding suicide wound to the Colonel, while various apparitions start to haunt the pages. The shades of Alinska’s victims linger on, and in one scene the Colonel sees Alinska as a winged, blood-dripping figure (the presence of wings is notable: bear in mind that this was decades before Bram Stoker codified the idea that vampires can transform into bats).

Despite the death and destruction that she leaves in her wake, Alinska remains a partly pitiable figure up until the climactic scene in which she finally rots away to nothing. The theme of the sympathetic vampire is not one that Polidori explored in depth, but de Lamothe-Langon was ahead of the curve.

And for all of the novel’s messiness, the author at least had a clear handle on the symbolic potential of the vampire. In his preface, he suggests that the vampires of folklore (“also known as Broucolaques, Upiers, Redivives, etc.”) are perhaps not so far removed from mortal humans:

Are not the insatiable conquerors who are always at war, exhausting their states in consequence, Vampires drunk on our purest blood? Do we not incessantly encounter men avid for our sweat, who always think that the burdens with which they overwhelm us are light? Do you not think that those wretches who wander through towns and the countryside to constrain the popular will with the lure of gain or the fear of suspicion are not real Vampires? And the man who, placed at a high rank, finding virtue in his path, stifles it with embroidered garments or strangles it with a silken ribbon–should we not call him a Vampire?


Next week: a visit from a Viy…

Series Navigation<< Carmilla’s Kindred: Affairs of an Oily-Eyed WomanCarmilla’s Kindred: Gogol and The Viy >>
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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