Repossessing the body: transgressive desire in "Carmilla" and Dracula - vampire story retold with masculine themes added

Criticism, Fall, 1996 by Elizabeth Signorotti

Of the vampire tales to date, Bram Stoker's Dracula has unquestionably become the most popular and the most critically examined. It constitutes, however, the culmination of a series of nineteenth-century vampire tales that have been overshadowed by Stoker's 1987 novel.(1) To be sure, many of the earlier tales provide little more than a collective history of the vampire lore Stoker incorporated in Dracula,(2) but Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's little known "Carmilla" (1872) is the original tale to which Stoker's Dracula served as a response. In "Carmilla" Le Fanu chronicles the development of a vampiric relationship between two women, in which it becomes increasingly clear that Laura's and Carmilla's lesbian relationship defies the traditional structures of kinship by which men regulate the exchange of women to promote male bonding. On the contrary, Le Fanu allows Laura and Carmilla to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding male participation in the exchange of women, normative as discussed by Claude Levi-Strauss and more recently by Gayle Rubin and Eve Sedgwick.(3) Stoker later responded to Le Fanu's narrative of female empowerment by reinstating male control in the exchange of women. In effect, Dracula seeks to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange, and to correct the reckless unleashing of female desire in Le Fanu's "Carmilla."

In The Elementary Structures of Kinship Levi-Strauss argues that women are "valuables par excellence from both the biological and the social points of view ... without which life is impossible" (481). As "valuables," women are seen "as the object of personal desire, thus exciting sexual and proprietorial instincts . . . [and also as] the subject of the desire of others, . . . binding others through alliance with them" (496). Women, then, become the means of alliance, the "supreme gift" (65) that binds men together and creates social order. For Levi-Strauss, marriage most significantly reveals men's complete control of women. He argues that traditionally "the total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place" (115). As an essential and valuable "sign" to be possessed and exchanged, woman's sole purpose is to provide the passive link between men.

Levi-Strauss's exploration of the role women play in creating male alliance is further examined in Gayle Rubin's "The Traffic in Women" and in Eve Sedgwick's Between Men. Whereas Levi-Strauss ultimately romanticizes the "exchange of women"(4) Rubin examines the specific implications for women resulting from his argument. She states that Levi-Strauss's "exchange of women" is shorthand for expressing the "social relations of a kinship system ... [where] men have certain rights in their female kin ... [and where] women do not have the same rights either to themselves or to their male kin" (177). Since women are "transacted" by men, they become only "a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it" and are denied the "benefits of their own circulation" (174). Rubin further stresses that "compulsory heterosexuality is a product of male kinship" because "women ... can only be properly [valued] by someone 'with a penis' (phallus). Since the girl has no 'phallus,' she has no 'right' to love her mother or another woman" (198, 193-94).In her examination of Levi-Strauss, Rubin underscores woman's historical subjection to male desire and her exclusion from the social order governed by male alliance.

Sedgwick broadens Rubin's argument by investigating "compulsory heterosexuality" as a distinguishing factor in female relationships and in male relationships. She argues that men's relationships are defined by "homosocial desire," that homosocial relationships between men must be distinguished from socially threatening homosexual unions, and the only way to eliminate the homosexual threat between men is to include a woman in the relationship, forming a (safe) triangular configuration rather than a (threatening) linear, male-to-male union. She contends that contrary to women's relationships "patriarchial structures [assure] that obligatory heterosexuality' is built into male-dominated kinship systems, [and] that homophobia is a necessary consequence of ... patriarchal institutions [such] as heterosexual marriage" (3). Women function in this system as signs and tools to ensure the survival of male relationships and to deflect the threat of homosexuality by serving as a link between men.

Sedgwick sums up social perceptions of women's and men's relationships as a "diacritical opposition between the 'homosocial' and the homosexual,'" an opposition that "seems to be much less thorough and dichotomous for women, in our society, than for men" (2). She argues that all women in our society who promote the interests of other women My teaching, nurturing, studying, marching for, or employing) are pursuing congruent and closely related activities. Thus the adjective 'homosocial' as applied to women's bonds . . . need not be pointedly dichotomized as against homosexual,@ it can intelligibly dominate the entire continuum" (3).(5) The unity of the lesbian continuum, "extending over the erotic, social, familial, economic, and political realms, would not be so striking if it were not in strong contrast to the arrangement among males" (3). That arrangement, as Levi-Strauss has defined it, is a system of alliance between men that requires, in some form, the exchange of women to bind men and (as Sedgwick implies) to stave off homosexual anxiety. Sedgwick makes clear that women's relationships are not governed by homophobia; therefore, excluding men from female friendships or from access to women poses more of a threat to male kinship systems than to female. Thus, female homosocial bonds potentially carry tremendous power to subvert or demolish existing patriarchal kinship structures, which is precisely what happens in "Carmilla."