Summary
Chapter 10: Bereaved
The General looks very different than he did ten months ago—he is thinner, and his visage expresses gloom, anxiety, and, notably, anger. After a few minutes in the carriage, he begins to speak. He is filled with bitterness and rage against the “fiend” who destroyed his niece, and wonders how Heaven can allow it.
Laura’s father asks if he might share with them the details but the General says they will not believe him. Laura’s father replies that he is not as dogmatic as he might seem, and trusts the General. The General sighs and says he “has been made the dupe of a preternatural conspiracy” (38). At this, Laura’s father looks a bit concerned, but the General is staring gloomily out into the woods.
The General asks if they are going to Karnstein, and asks if there is a ruined chapel with many tombs of that extinct family. Laura’s father assents and jokingly asks if he wants to claim the title and estates. Without smiling the General replies that he means to unearth some of the people there, and with God’s blessing, “accomplish a pious sacrilege here, which will relieve our earth of certain monsters” (38).
Laura’s father states that the house of Karnstein has long been extinct, and though his wife was descended from them, the name and title do not exist anymore. The General knows this but says he will tell his story in the order it occurred. He begins by saying how dear his niece was to him. Tears spring into his eyes. He knows he might not be long for this earth but hopes to have vengeance.
The carriage approaches the turnoff to Karnstein and Laura’s father urges the General to begin his story.
Chapter 11: The Story
Bertha is very much looking forward to visiting Laura, and in the meantime they visit the General’s friend Count Carlsfeld to attend a series of parties. One evening, there is a magnificent masquerade and all the grounds are filled with lights. It is as nothing experienced even in Paris. There is wonderful music, lilting voices, and glorious fireworks.
The ball begins after the fireworks and Bertha, not wearing a mask, is looking about with pleasure. Another young woman, dressed finely and wearing a mask, is looking at her with interest. An older woman, well-dressed and with a “stately air” (40), accompanies the young woman.
After dancing, Bertha rests and the General stands near. The young woman with the mask sits down next to Bertha. The older woman starts to talk to the General, speaking of things in the General’s life that even he had forgotten. He does not know where he knows her from, and she seems to delight in his perplexed response. In the meantime, the young woman speaks with Bertha, talking like a friend, full of compliments and wit. She lowers her mask to reveal a lovely face.
The General asks the older woman if she might do a kindness and remove her mask but she laughs and says he has no mask to remove so it is not fair. She points to the young woman and says it is her daughter Millarca, so that means she herself cannot be young.
The General asks other questions of her, but she cunningly avoids giving him real answers. At one point, she is interrupted by an elegant man in black with a face as pale as death. He wears no mask. He leans down and asks if he might speak with her. She agrees and walks away, and they talk earnestly.
The General continues to wonder from where he knows her. The woman and the man return. The man says he will inform Madame la Comtesse when her carriage is at the door, and departs.
Chapter 12: A Petition
The old woman asks if he knows her yet and when he says no, she explains that they are older friends, perhaps better than he expects, but she cannot yet declare herself. She says that a piece of startling news has reached her and she must travel immediately. She asks a singular thing—her daughter’s nerves will not let her ride a horse right now, for her mount recently fell on a hunt, and she has nowhere to go. Thus, she asks the extraordinary request to have her daughter stay with them. It is an audacious request but, the General admits, “she in some sort disarmed me, by stating and admitting everything that could be urged against it, and throwing herself entirely upon my chivalry” (43).
At that moment, Bertha comes over and asks if Millarca can stay with them, and the two beautiful girls assail him together. Millarca’s engaging nature charms him and he agrees. The Countess calls her daughter over and tells her, in earshot of the others, that the General is an old and valued friend.
On the old woman’s way out, she implores the General not to try and learn more about her until she has returned. Her daughter will observe the same secrecy. She whispers to her daughter, kisses her, and hurries away.
Millarca moves to the window to watch her mother depart. She sighs that her mother did not look up. Her lovely face moves the General, and he feels badly that he was churlish earlier.
The General, Bertha, and Millarca walk the moonlit grounds. Millarca is very charming, amusing them. The General likes her more and more.
When it is time to leave, Millarca is lost among the bustling crowds on the capacious grounds. The General begins to despair, not knowing how he could have been so foolish to take responsibility for someone he did not know. He and Bertha retire to their rooms at the Grand Duke’s place, wondering how they can return home without Millarca.
Thankfully, around two in the afternoon that day, Millarca shows up, explaining that she had lost them and was distressed, so she waited in a housekeeper’s room and fell asleep. They are grateful to have her, and depart for the General’s schloss.
Analysis
The parallels between Laura and Bertha’s experiences with Carmilla/Millarca are meant to be startingly similar. There is the same elegant older woman asking the male guardian if her daughter can stay for a while; the charming, beautiful, and beguiling young woman; the strange experience of that young woman going missing and possessing odd habits; the growing lassitude and weakness of Laura/Bertha; and the ominous and somewhat ineffectual doctors’ consults.
A difference between the two experiences is that the older woman plays a more central role in the exchange with the General and heightens the mystery by indicating to the General that she knows him from the past. As he has no memory of her, this is no doubt knowledge the woman has tapped into by supernatural means.
The man who comes to tell the woman about the carriage (purportedly) also adds to the strangeness of the situation. Le Fanu describes him as “dressed in black” with a face “the most deadly pale I ever saw, except in death” (42).
When she is seducing Bertha, Carmilla takes the name Millarca, another anagrammatic version of her true name, Mircalla, and purposefully disconnects herself from “Karnstein.” She does so not just to obscure her identity but to make a statement that her ancestry matters little. As Helen Stoddart writes, “Whereas the family name held the symbolic key to aristocratic power—the power of extended families, kinship, and heredity, of armies and economies—Carmilla suppresses her family name. Now the name has no continuity with living bodies at all, only hysterically energized corpses, the flat two-dimensional repetition of faces which make up the family portrait gallery, ghostly voices, and a choice array of grand tombs.” Disconnecting herself from her true name and ancestry also is a pointed way of subverting the male line and all that entails; it is an affront to patriarchy and thus deemed unacceptable by the men in her orbit.
Those men—Laura’s father, the General, Baron Vordenburg, and the Moravian nobleman—all step in to “help” the passive female victims of vampirism, as Stoddart writes. Laura and Bertha are depicted as helpless and “the incredible essence of Victorian snow-driven purity,” and “the fight for Laura’s [and Bertha’s] sexual and imperial rights as a child-bearer and soul-maker will have to be fought for her and not by her.” Laura’s body in particular is “cast as the empty receptable of any desire which must be guarded as a serviceable vessel for masculinist political or sexual desires. She must be possessed and policed vigilantly.” The irony is, of course, that the General and Laura’s father were the ones that opened the domestic sphere up to the forces of vampirism, lesbianism, anti-patriarchy, etc. As Jim Hansen notes, “we witness… patriarchy’s continual failure to protect the sphere over which it has dominion.”
