Carmilla

Vampirism has often been interpreted as a metaphorical expression of repressed unconscious sexual desires. For instance, the insertion of vampiric fangs into a victim—as in Carmilla’s practice of biting her victims in the chest—can be read as a kind of perverse sexual intercourse. That Laura’s susceptibility to the vampire Carmilla always occurs when she is asleep or dreaming is indicative of the unconscious nature of her sexual attraction towards Carmilla. Laura’s dreams are certainly very sexually charged:

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 […] My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn; a sobbing, that rose into a sense of strangulation, supervened, and turned into a dreadful convulsion (54).

We see in this passage a twining of the concepts of sex and death, in that a strangulation is described in sensual, almost orgasmical terms. Carmilla herself equates love and death, as when she talks of dying “as lovers may—to die together, so that they may live together” (39). The concept of le petite mort, in which the sexual release of an orgasm is likened to a kind of deathly loss of consciousness, may be useful when analyzing this conflation of sex with death in Carmilla.