Nineteenth-Century Contexts Natural history, homeopathy, and the real horrors of Le Fanu’s Carmilla

Table of contents :
Carmilla as natural historian
Carmilla as doctor
Conclusion
Notes
Disclosure statement
Notes on contributor
ORCID
References

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Nineteenth-Century Contexts An Interdisciplinary Journal

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Natural history, homeopathy, and the real horrors of Le Fanu’s Carmilla Rae X. Yan To cite this article: Rae X. Yan (2021) Natural history, homeopathy, and the real horrors of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 43:4, 403-416, DOI: 10.1080/08905495.2021.1888534 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2021.1888534

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NINETEENTH-CENTURY CONTEXTS 2021, VOL. 43, NO. 4, 403–416 https://doi.org/10.1080/08905495.2021.1888534

Natural history, homeopathy, and the real horrors of Le Fanu’s Carmilla Rae X. Yan Department of English, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA

“I nearly reached the point of believing”: that is the formula which sums up the spirit of the fantastic. Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life. — Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1970)

In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella Carmilla (1871–1872), a young woman named Laura is beset by two opposed and relentless forces. On one hand, Laura is romantically pursued by the titular Carmilla, a mysterious guest to her Styrian home. On the other, Laura is inundated by the professional opinions of a whole coterie of medical men – her neighbor General Baron Spielsdorf; the family practitioner Doctor Spielsberg; an alleged vampire expert named Baron Vordenburg; and Laura’s own father – determined to diagnose “that terrible complaint which the peasants call the oupire” spreading across the Austrian countryside (Le Fanu 2013, 52). Yet the medical mystery so important to these men is subsumed quickly by another forceful narrative. A restored painting of the seventeenth-century Countess Mircalla Karnstein allows Laura and her circle to discover an uncanny resemblance between Carmilla and the supposedly long-dead Countess, transforming Carmilla into a supernatural tale by revealing the chestnut of a predictably Gothic plot: that Carmilla is Mircalla, a powerful oupire or vampire, who preys on girls of Styria. After she is accused of having killed the niece of General Baron Spielsdorf under the guise of “Millarca,” Carmilla is vanquished by the four medical men turned vampire hunters. Reflecting on the medical narrative that lies at the heart of Le Fanu’s Carmilla, this essay considers the necessity of hesitating just before the supernatural plot twist condemns Carmilla as vampiric monster. For fomenting interpretive richness and engaging supernatural themes, Le Fanu’s Carmilla has long been viewed as a masterful example of the genre Tzvetan Todorov called “the fantastic”: a genre notable for forcing its readers to what Todorov describes as a “hesitation” between two possible interpretations of events in a particular narrative – most often between the acceptance of an uncanny reality or the marvelous supernatural (1975, 41). Renée Fox and Jarlath Killeen both register this tendency toward “hesitation” in their arguments about Carmilla’s vexed representation of Anglo-Irish identity and Gothic, with Killeen specifically citing Todorov’s “fantastic” as the structure to which Le Fanu turns in writing his narrative (Fox 2013, 110–112; Killeen 2013, 106–107). As Jason Marc Harris (2008, 33), Sally Harris (2003, 27–28), and Mark Wegley (2001, 61) CONTACT Rae X. Yan raeyan@ufl.edu 117310, Gainesville, FL 32611-7310, USA

Department of English, University of Florida, 4008 Turlington Hall, P.O. Box @raexiaoyan

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

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note, many of Le Fanu’s other works are also important examples of the fantastic’s ambivalent hermeneutics. Le Fanu’s In a Glass Darkly (1872), a collection of five short stories including “Green Tea,” “The Familiar,” “Mr. Justice Harbottle,” The Room in the Dragon Volant, as well as the capstone story, Carmilla, all fit within Todorov’s generic definition.1 The otherwise loosely connected works are united by a frame narrative that asks readers to make their own inferences about the stories, which have been presented as unresolved “case” studies collected by a fictional German physician and expert in “metaphysical medicine,” Dr. Martin Hesselius (Le Fanu 2008, 6). Evoking both the detective’s case and the medical case history in In a Glass Darkly, Le Fanu’s readers must independently conclude whether each story confirms the existence of supernatural phenomena (such as demonic monkeys, ghosts, doppelgängers) or exposes some more rational cause (the psychology of guilt, the work of confidence men, pharmaceutical tampering). Given that readings of Carmilla as vampire have long dominated studies of Le Fanu’s text, I defer providing readings of the symbolic resonances within the vampiric plotline to emphasize the underdiscussed uncanny realist narrative that equally informs Carmilla’s fantastic plot.2 I argue that the uncanny reality that Le Fanu depicts recounts what must have been a frightening history for those in power during the end of the nineteenth century: a history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century where women and spiritualists shaped the professional direction of medicine and science. Tracing that history, the first section of this paper examines how Le Fanu depicts Carmilla in the role of a woman naturalist aligned with the materialist thinking of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–1788). The second section shows how Carmilla engages with ideas from nineteenth-century alternative medicine, especially the popular homeopathic theories of Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843). Both sections address how Carmilla challenges more traditional notions of male-dominated scientific and medical professionalism. More importantly, the specific medical and scientific contexts that Le Fanu ties into Carmilla’s narrative draw attention to different kinds of suppressions beyond the Gothic: cultural and historical elisions of an era when women held a central role in the promotion of scientific thought and when spiritualist movements were shaping the direction of medical professionalism in some ways more than formal institutions. By recounting these uncannily realist plotlines alongside the Gothic aspects of his work, Le Fanu dramatizes these histories in his framing of the fantastic tale of Carmilla – pushing forward a history of women in science and spiritualism in professional medicine as horrifyingly powerful as a supernatural, centuries-old vampire.

Carmilla as natural historian Though Carmilla has long been associated with the supernatural, readings rarely focus on how Carmilla distinctly engages with contemporary materialist scientific writing. Nonetheless, what is unique in Le Fanu’s work is the specificity with which Carmilla argues a case to Laura about the rhetorical fear-mongering and theological prejudices common among Laura’s familial circle. Carmilla’s differences from the medical men of the text come to light after Laura’s father returns from seeing a young peasant who has been languishing from the supposed influence of the oupire. Dismissing peasant fears, he states that “[a]ll this” – referring to a string of recent illnesses and deaths – “is strictly referable

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to natural causes. These poor people infect one another with their superstitions, and so repeat in imagination the images of terror that have infested their neighbors,” before proceeding to state that “[w]e are in God’s hands; nothing can happen without His permission, and all will end well for those who love Him” (Le Fanu 2013, 36). In Laura’s father’s initial assessment of the case, the disease plaguing Styria is symptomatic of something else: the “condition of the oupire” represents an underlying “terror” of the unknown promoted by an ignorant and superstitious peasantry. The beliefs of the peasantry are seen as infectious, marking them as the source of their own disease that Laura’s father suggests will never touch members of his own household.3 His sense of superiority for understanding the “natural causes” behind the oupire are informed by a discourse of Nature as made by God that reveals his allegiance with natural theology, or the study of Nature to provide arguments for the existence of a Christian God. To that end, Laura’s father’s interpretation of the oupire as “natural” is based on teleological arguments linked to classist as much as theological principles. This teleological mode of thinking about the natural world, as Janis McLarren Caldwell notes, was already considered “theologically arrogant and scientifically unsound” during the early part of the nineteenth century by scientific thinkers including William Whewell, one of the natural theologians who wrote the infamous Bridgewater Treatises (2008, 13). Carmilla evinces considerable incredulity about Laura’s father’s natural theological reading of the local peasantry, especially in terms of the language surrounding “natural causes” and a Christian God’s authority. She pointedly interjects to protest the use of the terms “Creator! Nature!”, emphasizing the linkage of these terms, and does so vociferously enough to shock Laura’s “gentle father” into a stunned silence. In her response back to Laura’s father, Carmilla questions the specific ideas of naturalness presented: “And this disease that invades the country is natural. Nature. All things proceed from Nature – don’t they? All things in the heaven, in the earth, and under the earth, act and live as Nature ordains?” (Le Fanu 2013, 36). While Carmilla’s remarks could partly represent her contempt, as a supernatural creature, for the limited perspective of “Nature” Laura’s father conjures, her interjection also pointedly overturns a natural theological emphasis on the place of the Christian God in Nature. Instead, Carmilla shifts the conversation to emphasize how Nature produces all things without any mention of the Christian God. In rejecting any reference to “God’s hand,” she turns to a more specific language of Nature that repositions the discourse in more materialist terms. Le Fanu makes Carmilla’s relative scientific sophistication quite clear, as Carmilla cites the work of one “Monsieur Buffon” to explain that disease and death are not to be feared. Following the departure of Laura’s father, the two women continue their conversation about Nature and Laura confesses to Carmilla her abiding fear of dying “as those poor people were” in the villages from the mysterious wasting-disease referred to as the oupire. In response, Carmilla asks her young friend to cast off her fears of such death with a startling, odd rejoinder: But to die as lovers may – to die together, so that they may live together. Girls are caterpillars while they live in the world, to be finally butterflies when the summer comes; but in the meantime there are grubs and larvae, don’t you see – each with their peculiar propensities, necessities and structure. So says Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room. (Le Fanu 2013, 37)

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Carmilla’s attempt to divert Laura’s attention could be read as a ploy to redirect Laura’s focus from considering the possibility that Carmilla might be an oupire or vampire. Certainly, Carmilla’s speech has a narrative purpose in serving as yet another example of her erotic desire for Laura in wishing to “die as lovers may” by evoking le petite mort. However, Carmilla’s leap from a discussion of death to a discussion of butterflies is inadequately accounted for unless read with the contextual knowledge of natural history that she evokes. Scientific as much as she is romantic and morbid, Carmilla concludes her command to forget the fear of death with the demand that Laura should turn to “Monsieur Buffon, in his big book, in the next room” in ways that derail typical Gothic plot for a more thoughtful analysis of what natural history uniquely offers for women like Laura and herself. “Monsieur Buffon,” the eighteenth-century French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, was known during his historical era for revolutionizing approaches to the study of natural history. Though Buffon remained within the mainstream of natural philosophic thought in many ways, his direct challenge to contemporary scientific methods and his willingness to accommodate some ideas of transformism and a longer geological timeline for Earth’s existence led the evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin to refer to Buffon as “the first author who in modern times treated [the principles behind natural selection] in a scientific spirit” (1872, xiii). In “his [Buffon’s] big book,” the multi-volume Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière (1749–1767), or Natural History: General and Particular, Buffon emphasized the impossibility of knowing organisms fully, refuting accepted taxonomical systems for categorizing organisms instantiated by other naturalists, particularly in his critiques of the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778). While Linnaeus is known in our contemporary age as the inventor of the binomial system of nomenclature used in the scientific classification of organisms, he is criticized in Buffon’s “big book” for fabricating “arbitrary systems and imaginary hypotheses” as part of his taxonomical approach to natural history (Buffon 1797, VI:131).4 In his first volume of Histoire naturelle, the “Premier discours de la manière d’étudier et de traiter l’histoire naturelle” or “Initial Discourse on the Manner of Studying and Expounding Natural History,” Buffon proclaimed that taxonomical systems, like Linnaeus’s, had to recognize that there was “of necessity an element of arbitrariness” in their production (Buffon 1981, 102). He railed against scientific peers who “led” others to imagine “order and uniformity” through chaotic data points by asking: Isn’t what we are doing in these cases only bringing the abstractions of our limited mind to bear upon the reality of the works of the Creator, and granting to him, so to speak, only such ideas as we possess on the matter? Nevertheless, such poorly founded statements have been made and are repeated every day. Systems are constructed upon uncertain facts which have never been examined, and which only go to show the penchant men have for wishing to find resemblances between most disparate objects, regularity where variety reigns, and order among those things which they perceive only in a confused manner. (Buffon 1981, 101)

For Buffon, the study of nature was only possible through more prolonged and concrete examinations of organisms and the environments in which they lived, coupled with a firm rejection of “poorly founded statements” and “uncertain facts which have never been examined” with absolute certainty.5 He argued that his fellow scientific thinkers needed to consider the impact of an organism’s habits and psychology by including in

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his natural histories facts about each organism’s conception, time of gestation, birth, number of young, parenting, education, instinct, emotional capacities, natural environments, habits, and services to their population and to man, in addition to anatomical studies of their bodies (Buffon 1981, 111).6 Buffon’s work attempted to study the full material world, looking to the characteristics of whole species, their development and growth over time, and especially in terms of the particular environments in which they were found. By recommending Buffon’s work to Laura, Carmilla brings forward a tradition of skepticism about scientific objectivity and epistemology for Laura’s consideration, prompting the young narrator to reflect on a more radical natural world than one described by natural theologians, including her father. As caterpillar-like creatures that “live in the world,” Carmilla suggests that Laura and Carmilla may have the same capacities to metamorphize and embody other forms, such as “grubs and larvae” that are no less important than caterpillars or butterflies. Given the significance of such creatures’ “peculiar propensities, necessities and structures” for an understanding of the natural world, Carmilla challenges a static notion of girlhood and womanhood to propose that caterpillar-like girls like Laura could better recognize their “peculiar propensities.”7 Shortly thereafter Carmilla goes on to reject the authority of the present medical and scientific authorities – which includes Laura’s father, given that he “pique [s] himself on being something of a physician” – in stating that “Doctors never did me any good” (Le Fanu 2013, 16, 36). She argues to her would-be lover, Laura, that the girl’s father merely “like[s] to frighten us,” all the while suggesting that Laura reconsider the authority of his grasp on “Nature” by turning to Buffon as a more contemporary writing on natural history (37). In effect, Carmilla seduces Laura with new ideas and methods of thinking from a natural history that encouraged women, specifically, to become engaged in interpreting the natural world and concepts of naturalness. Reception of Buffon’s work frequently reflected a gendered divide. During the eighteenth century, Buffon’s Histoire naturelle was the distinguished, if controversial, bestseller of the era: the first three volumes sold out within six weeks of their first printing – with 250 copies reserved exclusively for Louis XV – and several subsequent reprintings and editions followed the initial publication run (Loveland 2001, 12). Histoire naturelle’s print runs even overshadowed rival texts by equally influential figures of the eighteenth century, such as Denis Diderot (1713–1784) and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s (1717–1783) Encyclopédie (1751–1772), as well as some of the major works by the philosophers Voltaire and Rousseau (Roger 1997, 184). Despite the strong sales of the Histoire naturelle both domestically in France and abroad across the Continent and British Isles, the text was received with critical disdain by many within the scientific elite. As Jeff Loveland emphasizes in his study of Buffon and eighteenth-century intellectual communities, critics argued that the success of Buffon’s series on natural history could be attributed largely to its popularity amongst women readers, who the scientific elite argued were buying Buffon’s works for its sumptuous printed illustrations and gossipy polemical rhetoric against the scientific establishment. These women, ensconced in their salons, were understood as major actors in the popularization of scientific theories; as such, they were perceived as particularly threatening to an increasingly professionalized scientific community. Salonnières were often belittled for merely seeking new fashions and frivolities in which to engage; yet as Loveland and historian Dena Goodman maintain, it

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was the women of the Parisian salons who often led discussions about significant scientific discovery and evolutions of thought (Goodman 1996, 70–74; Loveland 2001, 11–12). Thus, Carmilla – whose family circle, according to General Spielsdorf himself, is primarily composed of women that speak “pure French” and frequent the salons – evokes the fashionable Parisian ladies and their salon as sites of intellectualism and popular scientific discourse when she calls upon the authority of Buffon (Le Fanu 2013, 70).8 Laura herself cannot help but recognize that her friend Carmilla is the embodiment of this type of sophisticated woman, as much as a possibly vampiric one. When Laura tries to recount Carmilla’s more supernatural habits, she remembers her late-rising, seeming “lassitude,” dainty eating, queer desire, intellectual vivacity – and in doing so notes that the traits that mark Carmilla as monster also suggest her modernity in contrast to more provincial and traditional thought. Writing to her unnamed interlocutor who serves as the imagined audience of Laura’s epistolary narrative, Laura admits that though she thought Carmilla’s “habits were odd,” her habits were “perhaps not so singular in the opinion of a town lady like you, as they appeared to us rustic people” (Le Fanu 2013, 30). In these terms, Laura suggests that Carmilla may, in fact, have just been a cosmopolitan, which would mark her a certain kind of threat, though not supernatural, to the novella’s social world. Carmilla associates herself with a different and perhaps more modern, for the time, scientific epistemology through her admiration of “Monsieur Buffon.” Le Fanu’s characterization of Carmilla as a Buffonian materialist also counters the idea of the vampire as a pre-Enlightenment figure, an ancient foe pitted against modern science.9 Rather, the author reimagines Carmilla as a different kind of horrific nemesis for the would-be medical professionals who wish to vanquish her. Carmilla directs Laura to attend to Buffon’s theories of how to examine and describe the world holistically in ways that undermine the men who otherwise shape and control Laura’s stagnant life. In the process, Carmilla reveals the significant role of girls and women in scientific and cultural endeavors in ways that mirror the role of spiritualism in the professionalization of science as discipline.

Carmilla as doctor No doubt, Le Fanu’s Carmilla has long been imbricated in nineteenth-century discourses of medicine; after all, the story of Carmilla comprises, essentially, Laura’s personal illness narrative. The medical men’s aggressive treatment of Carmilla as the perceived cause of illness mirrors the practices of nineteenth-century “regular” medicine, which is defined by its direct application of pharmaceutical and surgical intervention in the treatment of symptoms and disease. As the nemesis of these medical men, Carmilla reflects noteworthy ambivalence towards “regular” practices and positions herself as an advocate of a more homeopathic turn in medical practice, as this section will argue. Homeopathic medicine was a growing field during the nineteenth century, popular for its disavowal of intrusive surgical intervention or heavy medication of patients common in regular practice. Roy and Dorothy Porter (1989), Porter and Porter (1988), William F. Bynum (1994), Irvine Loudon (1986), and A. J. Youngson (1979), among many other scholars, have directly addressed the distrust of regular medical professionals during the course of the nineteenth century, who, like Doctors Peacock and Wrench in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872), profited from the sale of medicaments and the soothing of patient

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anxieties through over-prescription.10 Often dialectically positioned against regular medicine by being referred to using the more pejorative term of “irregular medicine,” homeopathic or “complementary” medicine was a response to the over-prescription of medicaments common among those who studied orthodox medical science from teaching hospitals, and embraced by both patients and medical practitioners themselves. Homeopathy’s entrance into the field of medicine generated a strong competitive and defensive response. As Mark Weatherall finds in studying the history of how medicine became “scientific,” regular practitioners of the British Medical Association during the Victorian era made active efforts to directly attack homeopaths as vampiric “parasites of medicine,” as “social evil[s],” who would “taint the whole moral atmosphere of medicine” and thus needed “excommunication” from medicine itself (1996, 186).11 Carmilla’s depiction as a similar kind of vampiric force who must be destroyed can be understood within this larger medical discourse that villainized alternative practices of healing. Carmilla is, after all, the only individual in the novella who attempts to refute the supposed medical authorities’ diagnoses of Laura and the villagers of Styria. Indeed, using a materialist scientific perspective, Carmilla reasons that the mysterious disease working its way through the local villagers is neither the result of faulty imagination nor immorality, as Laura’s father would have them believe, but a more material natural disease: malaria. She makes the argument when the two young women are visited by a traveling mountebank who sells them an amulet against the oupire made of “oblong slips of vellum, with cabalistic ciphers and diagrams upon them” (Le Fanu 2013, 35). When the girls begin to suffer from fitful nights of sleep, haunted by bad dreams, Carmilla convinces Laura to trust in the power of these amulets, not because they have any particular mystic powers, but because she argues they must have some organic preventative properties. While discussing the properties of a charm that they have been given to ward off vampirism, Carmilla makes the argument that the charm’s utility is not in its application of magic “cabalistic ciphers,” but more likely because “[i]t has been fumigated or immersed in some drug, and is an antidote against the malaria” (50). Teasing Laura for her susceptibility to tall tales perpetuated by her father about the oupire, which Carmilla states are merely meant “to frighten us,” Carmilla rationalizes “you don’t suppose that evil spirits are frightened by bits of ribbon, or the perfumes of a druggist’s shop? … It is nothing magical, it is simply natural” (50). Carmilla’s suggestion that such a “natural” disease can be treated by “simply natural” means evokes the language of the founder of the homeopathic movement, the German physician Samuel Hahnemann (1755–1843). Hahnemann came to pursue homeopathy in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century following a prolonged career as a village doctor in Saxony, where he had become dissatisfied with invasive medical practices, particularly with what he saw as the barbaric practice of bloodletting. In our contemporary moment, we may be more familiar with homeopathy through familiarity with homeopathic prescriptions that ascribe to Hahnemann’s second Law of Homeopathy, the Law of Infinitesimals, which argues for the dilution of medicine to 1:100,000,000 parts. However, nineteenth-century homeopaths who found Hahnemann’s work a progressive movement forward in modern medicine were more interested in Hahnemann’s first Law of Homeopathy, evoked by the Latinate phrase similia similibus curantur, or roughly “like shall cure like.” Hahnemann’s development of this first Law of Homeopathy came from research into malaria. Knowing that cinchona, a flowering plant

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whose bark yields the alkaloid quinine, could successfully treat patients of malaria, Hahnemann pursued a series of experiments to understand malaria that allowed him to “discover” that regular treatments and applications of cinchona on a healthy body would produce the same symptoms of malaria which included fever and general listlessness. He thus came to conclude that any treatments or drug that produced symptoms similar to those associated with a particular disease would likely be the correct treatment or drug useful in treating that disease. Hahnemann would go on to “prove” his theory by citing other recent medical advancements that seemed to show the same result in his long treatise on homeopathic practice, the Organon of Homeopathic Medicine.12 Carmilla’s reference to the medical complaint of malaria evokes the origin story of homeopathic practice. Likewise, Carmilla’s treatment, a natural preventative measure, resonates with homeopathy’s emphasis on preventative medical practice. Positioning Carmilla as a homeopath allows Le Fanu to suggest her relative professionalism in relation to other medical practitioners in the texts given that homeopaths of the nineteenth century continually argued for their investment in professional conduct against and compared to regular practitioners. The ideas of nineteenthcentury British homeopaths were most clearly delineated in the specialist journal The Journal of the British Homœopathic Society, which became a central voice for the homeopathic community in Britain.13 From its inaugural publication in 1846, the British Homœopathic Society insisted that its practitioners need be the most highly qualified experts. The Society, in fact, anticipated by more than a decade the call to professionalization promoted via the ratification of the 1858 Medical Act, a parliamentary motion that created a board, the General Medical Council, to regulate the qualification of medical practitioners and standardize medical training and practice. According to the Laws and Regulations of the British Homœopathic Society, all “Ordinary Members must be Medical Men … and members of some recognized University, College of Surgeons, or Licensing Body” who had to submit a “Degree or Diploma or the Certificate of Registration” for examination by the society’s president, along with “a specified curriculum of study and personal examination” for review by board-members. Further, fellows needed proof of “having been in practice for seven years, five of which must have been devoted to Homeœopathy,” and had need of the completion of “one Dissertation, and two or more original Communications,” also to be reviewed by committee (British Homœopathic Society 1846, 1:ii–iii). The initial 1858 Medical Act itself did not contain such specificity of formal requirements as outlined in the British Homœopathic Society’s Laws and Regulations. The British Homœopathic Society’s president and founder, the English physician Frederic Hervey Foster Quin (1799–1878), who first translated Hahnemann’s works into English and brought them to the British Isles in 1827, was particularly instrumental in pushing the Homœopathic Society to emphasize its modernity, professionalism, and adherence to scientific rigor. In the first issue of the Journal, Quin argued that “[t]he stringency of our laws with respect to unprofessional conduct and discreditable methods of obtaining practice … are additional guarantees to the public of the honour and respectability of its members” (British Homœopathic Society 1846, 1:6). Quin along with other homeopaths maintained that they were pushing medical practice to develop the most empirical approaches and were fundamentally not that different from “regular” practitioners. William Bayes (1828–1882), a prominent British Homœopathic Society physician, wrote in his treatise Truth in Medicine (1856)

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that “allopathic” (i.e. “regular”) practitioners had need to see their homeopathic brothers – many of whom had begun as regular practitioners themselves, only to make decisive turns in their later careers – as “fellow-labourers in the cause of truth and progress in the science of medicine” (1856, 15). Le Fanu’s narrative reflects homeopathic rhetoric presented in the Journal of the British Homœopathic Society that argued for regular practitioners’ relative unprofessionalism compared to their homeopathic peers in other ways as well. Carmilla positions its readers to suspect these regular medical men are less efficacious because such regular practitioners are, in fact, overly influenced by their personal feelings and biases, being uninclined to pursue more verifiable empirical evidence. Laura passively notes this lack of distance and objectivity early on in General Spielsdorf, who proclaims that he is going to resolve the complaint of the oupire by a surgical act – a decapitation – an idea that excites him to such an extent that he is left “trembling with rage” so shocking to his compatriots that it “bewilder[s]” (Le Fanu 2013, 81–82). Laura’s description of a near hysterical General aids in throwing doubt on his ability to make rational choices, a point she emphasizes when she speaks to his bloodthirstiness and emotional fragility brought about by an unwillingness to confront his own grief over his niece’s sudden passing. Having been encouraged by Carmilla to reconsider the authoritative grasp of the doctors and supposed medical professionals surrounding her, Laura herself begins to evince stronger suspicions of her male guardians by the text’s end. The fact that General Spielsdorf has engaged Baron Vordenburg as an authoritative source of knowledge about the “marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism” is subjected to further scrutiny when Laura notes that the Baron, a supposed vampire expert, was “living on a mere pittance” as a supposedly fallen heir to once princely estates, before he joined the General on the General’s quest (93).14 Vordenburg benefits from this effort to destroy Carmilla by taking advantage of the support he receives as a guest in their home for several weeks after Carmilla’s destruction and his highly suspect position presents the possibility that he might be a quack. Suggesting the possibility of his own susceptibility to quackery and other forms of dishonesty under emotional duress, the General ponders “into what quackeries will not people rush for a last chance, where all accustomed means have failed, and the life of a beloved object is at stake” himself, as he discloses the full account behind the loss of his niece Bertha (85). By the story’s end, Laura evinces even more considerable doubts about the medical men among whom she lives and the so-called “marvelously authenticated tradition of Vampirism” to which they expose her. In her narrative, she suggests her father’s inadequate amateurism in describing him as a man who only “piqued himself on being something of a physician” when he rushes to Carmilla’s side after her carriage accident; argues that “grief had unsettled” the mind General Spielsdorf; and describes the alleged vampire expert Baron Vordenburg as a “grotesque” man (Le Fanu 2013, 16, 11, 95, emphasis mine). Laura also evinces some skepticism about the sources that make up the bulk of their combined knowledge of vampirism by calling the notebook that Baron Vordenburg uses to review his vampiric knowledge, as William Veeder notes, a “dirty little book” (Veeder 1980, 207; Le Fanu 2013, 89). None of Vordenburg’s other archival resources on vampires seem much better. Laura informs her reader that Vordenburg relies on texts including “Magia Posthuma,” “Phlegon de Mirabilibus,” “Augustinus de curâ pro Mortius,” “Philosophicae et Christianae Cogitationes de

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Vampire,” and “a voluminous digest of all judicial cases” related to “the condition of the vampire” (93). His resources are every kind of text but medical or scientific: ancient magic books, books on miracles, books on decorum surrounding death, and court cases. Vordenburg admits that these sources may not be the best choices for diagnosing Laura’s disease either, as he agrees that his primary source on oupires “of course, discolors and distorts a little” of the truth (95). His confession recalls the critique levied by Buffon against “the penchant men have for wishing to find resemblances between most disparate objects, regularity where variety reigns, and order among those things which they perceive only in a confused manner.” Keeping the history of competition between irregular and regular medicine in mind exposes a critique of medical and scientific practice within Le Fanu’s Carmilla that equally shapes the stakes of the conflict between Carmilla and the medical men of the text for Laura’s body and soul.

Conclusion The novel concludes on a note of ambiguity that disavows the idea of remembering Carmilla as vampire only. After all, as Laura reveals, she never directly witnesses the death of Carmilla that would conclusively prove that the young woman was a vampire and that the “marvelously authenticated tradition” was true, but instead relies on the less conclusive evidence derived from “a copy of the report of the Imperial Commission, with the signatures of all who were present at these proceedings, attached in verification of the statement” (Le Fanu 2013, 92). Prior to the revelation that “[i]t is from this official paper that I have summarized my account of this last shocking scene” (92), she additionally states that: If human testimony, taken with every care and solemnity, judicially, before commissions innumerable, each consisting of many members, all chosen for integrity and intelligence, and constituting reports more voluminous perhaps than exist upon any one other class of cases, is worth anything, it is difficult to deny, or even to doubt the existence of such a phenomenon as the Vampire. (91)

However, given the instances where Carmilla and eventually Laura undermine the authority of the medical men who participate in the “Imperial Commission,” Laura’s arguments about the validity of “human testimony” as prescribed “judicially” by “commissions innumerable” is suspect. The matter of who chooses those of “integrity and intelligence” and what constitutes those terms in a world where “grotesque” men like Baron Vordenburg are considered experts limits the possibility that a fair ruling will be made. The fact that Laura’s statement is riddled with conditional phrasing – “If human testimony … is worth anything,” “it is difficult” but not impossible “to deny” – suggests a continual hesitation in her thinking that disallows her from fully castigating Carmilla as the villain of this tale. This hesitation profoundly shapes how the reader must ultimately accept the “truth” about Carmilla. In the closing few lines of her illness narrative, Laura confesses that 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. (Le Fanu 2013, 96)

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With these few closing sentences, Le Fanu forces the point that an understanding of Carmilla is to remain suspended in “ambiguous alternations”: while readers may also remember a “writhing fiend,” they cannot forget that Carmilla is equally a “playful, languid, beautiful girl.” Such a reminder of the alternative way to read Carmilla forces readers to hesitate always at the brink of making a decision about what real horrors she may actually embody and additionally contemplate the real horrific consequences met unto her as a woman naturalist and homeopath. After brutally impaling, beheading, burning, and casting Carmilla’s body into a fast-flowing river, the Imperial Commission records that she “uttered a piercing shriek at the moment, in all respects such as might escape from a living person in the last agony” in chilling terms if we consider the possibility that Carmilla could be “a living person” after all (92). In studies of Carmilla as vampire, it is always her seductive, strong, mysterious, Othered body that reads as a threat. Significant for my reading of Carmilla is the idea that such readings of the work sometimes render the worlds of possibilities encouraged by the fantastic into simpler dichotomies of surface and depth, appearance and reality. The narrative that gets reproduced often too readily positions its readers to imagine the realist narrative as always a more conservative one – that is, as a world that denies the existence and succeeds in hiding from view, or forcing underground, more liberative truth – in ways that obscure a more complex possibility. In reading Carmilla as a woman naturalist and homeopath I want to name the open intellectual and psychic threat that Carmilla represents to Le Fanu’s Victorian audiences. Reading Carmilla as a woman naturalist and homeopath unravels assumed divides between male professionals and women dilettantes, medicine and spirituality. In facing the tale’s setting in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth centuries, Le Fanu’s readers are made to recall a liberative period before the study of science and medicine were violently pulled away from the reach of women and made esoteric through its professionalization. By evoking a history of women in science and reminding readers of their place as both tastemakers and intellectuals, Le Fanu’s narrative presents the possibility that Carmilla may not have been the monster of the story at all, but a victim of the supernatural narrative herself, subject to its villainization. Indeed, in this narrative of the “real” there lies the possibility that Carmilla is no paranormal evil, no vampire, but that worst possible conclusion: that Carmilla might be a “real” scientific thinker and doctor, just as Buffon’s scientific thought may have been a real challenge to natural history and homeopathic medicine a real part of nineteenth-century medical efforts to pursue more empiricist, reflective, and professional directions.

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 (2013, 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 1999; Signorotti 1996, 620–624; Michelis 2003; McCormack 1991; and Willis 2008, among many others.

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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 2013, 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 (1989, 72–77) and Wohl (1960, 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 (1991, 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 (1991, 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 (1996, 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” (1991, 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 1849, 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.2” n.d.).

Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributor 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.

ORCID Rae X. Yan

http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6645-1558

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