Enchantments and Curses: Female Desire and Lesbian Panic Between Christabel and Carmilla

From fairy-tale enchantment to gothic horror, two narrative modes of containing (or liberating) love between women

Christabel and Carmilla: A Gothic Tableau of Lesbian Longing

Abstract

This essay offers a critical comparison between Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel and J. S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla, with the aim of exploring how female desire and so-called lesbian panic are portrayed, contained, or overcome within the two narratives. The analysis focuses on three thematic nuclei: the figure of the supernatural antagonist, the game of doubles, and the relationship between fascination and threat in love between women. The essay challenges the established reading of Geraldine as a proto-vampire, showing how the magical and fairy-tale dimension of Christabel stands in stark contrast to the codified Gothic vampire construction in Carmilla. Unlike Coleridge, Le Fanu manages to transfigure lesbian panic into affective memory, allowing the protagonist to remember Carmilla with love, separating the woman from the monster. This difference is essential to understanding two radically different ways of representing desire between women in Romanticism and Victorianism.

Why Revisit Lesbian Panic in Gothic Fiction Today?

Although both works are deeply rooted in the cultural codes of their respective centuries, the theme that unites them — the so-called “lesbian panic” — remains surprisingly relevant today. The social and literary terror aroused by desire between women continues to resurface, today as then, through metaphors of enchantment, possession, or pathology. Re-reading Christabel and Carmilla through this lens sheds light on both the textual strategies of the time and the persistent narrative forms with which culture attempts to neutralize, romanticize, or confine female desire.

Introduction

The unfinished poem Christabel (1816) and the novella Carmilla (1872) share a thematic framework of a nocturnal encounter between a young woman and an enigmatic female figure endowed with supernatural powers. Both works are often read through a lens that emphasizes the latent eroticism between the protagonists. This apparent thematic convergence conceals profound differences in narrative and symbolic models. In particular, Christabel has generated an interpretative line that identifies Geraldine as an anticipation of the 19th-century vampire, a reading that, although widespread, tends to obscure the fairy-tale originality of the text.

The purpose of this essay is to offer a comparative reading that highlights the differences between the two works, especially in the way they deal with the relationship between female desire and fear. It begins with a critical and philological assumption: in Christabel, the potential lesbian panic is neutralized through the device of the spell, whereas in Carmilla, it is narratively addressed and ultimately overcome, transforming into the protagonist’s emotional memory. This path will also be made explicit in the concluding section, where the different management of desire between women becomes a fundamental interpretative key.

Christabel: The Interrupted Fairy Tale

Coleridge composed Christabel between 1797 and 1800 but did not publish it until 1816. The poem, which ends abruptly after the second part, tells the story of the encounter between the young Christabel and Geraldine, a mysterious creature she meets in a forest. Geraldine claims to have been kidnapped by knights, and Christabel, moved by compassion, takes her into her father’s castle. Geraldine’s presence causes unease: nature seems to rebel at her passing, animals react with fear, and an unidentified mark appears on the woman’s body. Geraldine’s spell gradually creeps into Christabel’s mind and body, but the poem ends before a narrative resolution.

Carmilla: Memory and Curse

In Le Fanu’s story, Laura, a young aristocrat, lives isolated with her father on a remote estate. The arrival of Carmilla, the fictitious victim of a carriage accident, triggers an intense and ambiguous relationship. Carmilla is, in reality, a reincarnated vampire belonging to the cursed Karnstein family. The relationship between the two young women takes on increasingly disturbing overtones: Laura is gradually weakened by dreams, fevers, and night visions. The narrative, told in Laura’s voice, culminates in Carmilla’s physical destruction, but the memory of their love affair persists, leaving ambivalent emotional traces.

Common Themes and Symbolic Omens

Structural and symbolic similarities emerge between Christabel and Carmilla, justifying a critical comparison. Both present:

• Protagonists who are motherless girls raised by emotionally distant, widowed fathers.
• A female guest character of supernatural origin who suddenly enters the protagonist’s life.
• An aura of erotic ambiguity binds the two young women in a relationship of attraction and turmoil.
• Physical and symbolic signs — in bodies, dreams, visions — marking the protagonist’s psychosomatic vulnerability.
• A gothic and closed setting, where the castle or house becomes a place of fascination and imprisonment.

In Christabel, Geraldine’s arrival is accompanied by a dog barking in its sleep, lights going out, and someone being stopped by an iron bar. In Carmilla, Le Fanu uses similar signs: the sentinel animal is a black cat, a typical presence in witchcraft folklore, heralding supernatural disorder.

These elements have led many scholars to interpret Geraldine as a proto-vampire and to consider Christabel as a direct antecedent of Carmilla. However, as will be argued in the following sections, this symbolic continuity does not imply an identity of narrative function: it is in the different elaboration of desire and threat that the two works diverge radically.

Narrative Diversity: Enchantment, Reflection, and Monstrosity

Geraldine appears as a magical entity, closer to the tradition of dangerous fairies than to vampire genealogy. The forest, the druidic symbols, and the indeterminacy of her supernatural status link her to the fairy-tale dimension rather than the gothic one. Her nature is never made explicit: she is an apparition, a natural force disguised as a woman, perhaps a mental projection.

Carmilla, on the other hand, is a vampire in every sense of the word, with a lineage, motivations, and transformations recognizable in the Gothic canon. Her curse makes her susceptible to vampires, which is not hereditary but comes from a demon, an external agent. Her ambivalent behavior and narrative function are central to the reflection on deviant desire.

The Logic of Duality

In Carmilla, duality is fundamental: mirrors, reincarnations, reflections, and multiple identities construct a narrative world in which the protagonist and antagonist are linked by a mirror-like bond. Laura continuously identifies with and separates herself from Carmilla.

In Christabel, on the other hand, Geraldine is not a double, but an external agent. There is no mirroring, but rather invasion. Geraldine bursts into Christabel’s life as a disturbing element, without suggesting an inner conflict, but provoking one through her irresistible fascination.

Desire, Violence, Enchantment

In Christabel, desire is transformed into enchantment: there is no inner turmoil, only hypnotic fascination. Lesbian panic is neutralized by the fairy-tale register. This mechanism is the same as that found in the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast, in its original version by Villeneuve (1740), in which transformation and love are made acceptable precisely through enchantment.

An emblematic example of love between women justified through enchantment can also be found in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, specifically in Canto XXXVII. Here, Bradamante and Marfisa — two female paladins unaware of each other’s identity and both disguised as knights — fall in love because of a spell cast by a magical figure. The spell acts on the perceptual and sensory level: each believes the other to be a man.

Ariosto constructs an ambiguous and ironic situation, where homosexual desire between women is represented but immediately translated into a magical misunderstanding. The comic tone does not exclude a deeper reading: the author plays with themes of identity, disguise, and desire, confirming how, in the Renaissance context, love between women could only be narratively tolerable if set in a framework of illusion or enchantment. This pattern — desire justified by magical disguise — reveals how much literary culture was forced to translate the bond between women into fantastical language to represent it without scandal. We find this strategy again, albeit in darker forms, in Coleridge.

In Hoffmann, too, desire between women (or toward irregular female figures) is mediated through dreams, hallucinations, or hypnosis. In stories such as The Sandman and The Automaton, emotional or erotic bonds arise from an altered state of perception. This is not conscious love, but an attraction caused by an external and disturbing force. The protagonists do not choose; they are chosen and dominated.

This is particularly relevant when compared to the dynamic between Geraldine and Christabel: here too, attraction takes the form of paralysis, of a dream that imposes itself on reality and deprives the young woman of her will. In both cases, lesbian panic is not addressed directly, but channeled into a fantastical and hypnotic dimension, which makes it symbolically harmless and places it in a framework of non-reality. Gothic terror thus becomes the language through which Romantic culture manages to represent — and at the same time exorcise — non-conforming female desire.

Actualization and Symbolic Survival

What unites the two works is the difficulty of representing female love outside exceptional circumstances. In Coleridge, it is supernatural enchantment that legitimizes the relationship; in Le Fanu, it is clinical language that makes it expressible. But the results are the opposite. In Christabel, love remains ambiguous, never elaborated, shrouded in a spell that dissolves without consequences. In Carmilla, on the other hand, the feeling survives the death and physical destruction of the monster: Laura continues to love Carmilla, as a woman, in her memory. The initial panic is transcended through the emotional power of memory.

This conclusion is based on the text itself, particularly on Laura’s last words, which reflect an ambivalent memory, but one imbued with persistent affection:

“To this hour the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations — sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.”

(Carmilla, cap. 16, In a Glass Darkly, 1872)

Here, it is not horror that dominates, but nostalgia. Laura does not erase Carmilla: she evokes her, dreams of her, searches for her. Although the lexicon of “ambiguity” is necessary to make the narrative acceptable to Victorian male readers — and to the doctors she addresses — the memory is not suppressed. It is a love that, although disguised as trauma, escapes definitive condemnation. Carmilla is therefore a rare example in 19th-century Gothic fiction in which lesbian panic is not only represented but ultimately redeemed through the filter of female memory.

Conclusion

In these two stories, desire between women is conveyed through symbolic devices that regulate its accessibility: the fairy-tale spell in Christabel, the clinical diagnosis in Carmilla. But while Coleridge’s text remains paralyzed and unfinished, unable to transform attraction into recognizable feelings, Carmilla takes a different path. Le Fanu constructs a narrative apparatus that apparently represses desire, but in reality makes it memorable, emotionally acceptable, even redemptive. Laura remembers Carmilla as her beloved, not as a monster.

In this sense, Carmilla not only represents lesbian panic, but also traverses and transcends it: the monster dies, but love remains. And precisely in her symbolic and emotional survival, Carmilla asserts — albeit within the confines of nineteenth-century censorship — the narrative dignity of desire between women.

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