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Notes
1 Carmilla was originally published as a serial in the London literary magazine The Dark Blue from 1871 to 1872.
2 In the introduction to the Syracuse University Press critical edition of Carmilla, Kathleen Costello-Sullivan (Citation2013, xviii–xxiii) outlines how contemporary literary criticism on Carmilla up to our present moment has depicted a vampire Carmilla as a symbol for a diverse array of threats to nineteenth-century literary and social convention: Carmilla embodies secular materialism following the Enlightenment, the dangerous New Woman, the smothering mother, the racialized Other, Catholic Ireland, ethnized disease, and much more besides. Costello-Sullivan cites such exemplary works as Geary Citation1999; Signorotti Citation1996, 620–624; Michelis Citation2003; McCormack Citation1991; and Willis Citation2008, among many others.
3 The fact that Laura’s father has personally hired the eccentric Mademoiselle De Lofaintaine, who believes in the “odylic and magnetic influence” of the moon partly due to the influence of her own father, “who was a German, assumed to be psychological, metaphysical, and something of a mystic,” suggests that such patriarchs may not themselves be as informed or rigorous in their scientific studies as they would have others believe (Le Fanu Citation2013, 13).
4 I use Barr’s Buffon’s Natural History as one of the most popular English translations available during the nineteenth century, which would have been widely accessible to Le Fanu’s British readers to reference alongside Carmilla. Le Fanu himself would have likely used or referenced the original French.
5 For more on Buffon’s skepticism of scientific methodology as it transformed the work of natural history, see Bowler (Citation1989, 72–77) and Wohl (Citation1960, 189).
6 Despite Buffon’s critique of his fellow naturalists, Buffon’s natural history still represented relatively subjective hierarchies of the animal world along anthropocentric and classist lines – note the emphasis on animal’s utility to man, for example.
7 Uniquely, in her discussion of this Buffonian natural world, Carmilla not only naturalizes the different forms girlhood may take, but also their mutual queer desire; science becomes a way to explain and make queer eroticism natural as opposed to supernatural. Most often when Carmilla is read as vampire, critics focus on how her supernaturalism is read as dangerous, symbolic of the danger posed by the lesbian Other in nineteenth-century imaginations. Sue-Ellen Case, for example, proposes that the vampire might be a figure who “re-enliven[s], as the shadow ‘other’ … the earlier categories of the ‘unnatural’ and ‘sterile’ queer” in her reading of Carmilla, which she calls “the most important work in the dominant tradition” of lesbian vampire story (Citation1991, 11, 7). Sian Macfie notes that within the context of Victorian sexology, lesbians have always been seen as vampiric “psychic sponge[s]” that feed on the emotional and intellectual energies of other women (Citation1991, 60–62). Elizabeth Signorotti argues emphatically that Carmilla tells the story of a patriarchal desire to correct or punish a Sapphic eroticism seen as monstrous (Citation1996, 607).
8 Spielsdorf’s first major conversation with Carmilla’s alleged mother is in the salons of an aristocratic house where a series of fetes are being given for the Grand Duke Charles.
9 While I agree with Helen Stoddart's argument that Carmilla “is seen positing attacks on every front and at every turn” (Citation1991, 28) as the embodiment of a foreign, invading force, I push against Stoddart’s idea that Carmilla threatens because her vampirism reveals aristocratic, foreign, and ancient associations with a pre-enlightened, pre-evolutionary era antithetical to the Victorians as I point to Carmilla’s allegiances to a more materialist Enlightenment thinking.
10 Coincidentally, Eliot’s Middlemarch is published contemporaneously to Le Fanu’s Carmilla and the two works’ joint reflection on “regular” malpractice evinces a general skepticism against medical men during this time.
11 Mark Weatherall’s 2000 monograph Gentlemen, Scientists, and Doctors: Medicine at Cambridge, 1800–1940 is an expanded contemplation on the making of “regular medicine,” though without the direct references from the BMJ cited in the shorter article. Weatherall looks to 1861 copies of the BMJ but notes that there is similar language throughout the history of the journal.
12 For example, Hahnemann argued that Edward Jenner’s use of a cowpox vaccination to prevent smallpox was one of the clearest examples of “like shall cure like” (Hahnemann Citation1849, 118–121).
13 The other major homeopathic journal of the era was The Homeopathic Review.
14 Laura obviously dislikes and distrusts the Baron, given that she labels Baron Vordenburg both “grotesque” and, oddly, “quaint” (93) – a descriptor for someone cunning and crafty, as much as clever (OED “Quaint, Adj., Adv., and n.Citation2” n.d.).
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Rae X. Yan
Rae X. Yan is an Assistant Professor of British Literature from 1830 to 1900 at the University of Florida. Her published articles include “‘Artful Courtship,’ ‘Cruel Love,’ and the Language of Consent in Carmilla” in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, “Robert Louis Stevenson as Philosophical Anatomist” in English Literature in Transition, and “Dickens’s Wild Child: Nurture and Discipline after Peter the Wild Boy” in Dickens Studies Annual. She is currently at work on a book project about anatomizing as a joint literary and scientific practice during the Victorian era.