The Facts: Lesbian Vampires Predate Dracula

Sometimes we must go where few in women’s history tread. Did you know that Bram Stocker’s Dracula was not the first modern vampire novel; and that the first modern vampire novel was about a lesbian vampire? Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu 1872 novel Carmilla predates Dracula by twenty-five years. Instead of focusing on the usual alpha male bloodsucker preying on frail, newly post-pubescent women, the novel Carmilla was about a woman vampire of aristocratic lineage who seduces an upper class young woman and her friends.

Also fascinating was the fact that a female character, Laura, narrates the novel. Laura’s savvy descriptions and interpretations of her experiences endow the novel with a strong sense of the intelligence of women at the dawn of the industrial age. The novel’s chief event concerns the extent to which Laura is smitten (and bitten) by the charms of Carmilla, the erstwhile vampiress. Furthermore, the novel features the first-ever mad doctor (Dr. Hesselius) who is fascinated by black magic (a character trope well-worn in popular literature and film). Despite the fact that Carmilla’s vampirism may mark her as an antagonist, the novel is frank in its descriptions of the lesbian relations between Carmilla and Laura (and other characters) and the details can be interpreted to suggest some empathy for Carmilla as an outsider drawn to an unacceptable form of desire. Many of the novel’s set pieces have become well-worn tropes of bloodsucker books and films (like the resident vampire expert who in Carmilla is named Baron Vordenburg).
Moreover, Carmilla is the founding narrative in a long, long line of lesbian vampire stories, from the great lesbian novelist Jewelle Gomez’s The Gilda Stories to the drag queen, actor and playwright Charles Busch’s Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. Film buffs may also remember that a legendary (and legendarily sexploitative) vampire lesbian movie produced by the British Hammer Film studio in 1970 was based on the novel Carmilla. The film (directed by Roy Ward Baker and predictably starring Peter Cushing as the vampire expert) is called The Vampire Lovers and it also starred a ravishing Ingrid Pitt at the peak of her theatrical powers as the lead woman-loving vampire, Carmilla.
What would all the young girls who are obsessed with Twilight, the recent vampire film based on Stephenie Meyer’s novel of the same title, think of the 1872 novel Carmilla? What is the significance of the fact that the arguable first modern vampire tale was a lesbian narrative? As for the lack of statistics in the last FactorWomen post on the myth of women’s physical strength, sometimes we suck–sorry, gals and gents.