Summary
Chapter 13: The Woodman
The General continues his tale. He says there are notable issues with Millarca, such as her languor, her locking the door to her room from the inside, her potential walking in her sleep. At this time, his niece also seems to be unwell, losing her looks and her health. She has terrible dreams and sensations, such as needles piercing her below the throat and strangulation.
As the General is recounting this, Laura is listening and feels that this is all quite strange given that she has had similar experiences, and that Millarca has many of the same traits as Carmilla.
The carriage comes out into a vista and they are all suddenly under the chimneys and gables of the ruined village and the tower and battlements of the destroyed castle. The three of them dismount the carriage and silently move into the chambers and corridors of the castle. The General muses aloud that this is the castle of the Karnsteins, who continue to plague the world after death with their “atrocious lusts” (47).
The General points out a chapel in the trees below and says he hears a woodman, who may be able to tell them more and point out the grave of Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein. Laura’s father says they have a portrait of her at home if he’d like to see it, but the General replies grimly that he thinks he has seen the original in person. Laura’s father is incredulous, but says nothing.
The three walk under the arch of the Gothic church and the General restates that his one object in life now is to wreak vengeance on Mircalla. He states frankly that he means to “decapitate the monster” (47) with any tool he can use—a hatchet, a spade, etc.
The General suggests they sit since Laura seems tired, and so that he can continue his story. They do so, and the General calls to the woodman who comes over to them. He knows very little of the monuments but says there is a ranger in this forest who is currently staying with the priest and who can point out the Karnstein monument. He suggests he can borrow their horse and procure him.
Before he does so, Laura’s father asks him how the village came to be deserted. He explains that it was “troubled by revenants” (48) which had to be tracked to their graves and extinguished by decapitation and burning, yet many villagers were killed before this could be finished. Even then, with so many vampires gone, the village was still troubled. A Moravian nobleman was traveling through the region and heard what was happening. He decided to help and ascended on a bright, moonlit evening to the tower of the chapel from which he could see the churchyard below. He watched until he saw a vampire emerge from its grave and glide away. He then went down to its grave and took the creature’s linen wrappings back up into the tower. The vampire returned and howled for its clothes. The Moravian called him up to the tower and as the vampire began to climb the stairs, the Moravian cleaved his skull and tumbled him backwards. He then cut its head off and the villagers impaled and burnt the body. The nobleman had the authority to move the grave of Mircalla, but the new site was forgotten.
At the conclusion of the story, the woodman says he does not know where it is, but it is said Mircalla’s body was removed too. The woodman departs.
Chapter 14: The Meeting
The General continues his tale, saying his niece gets worse and worse and the physician can do nothing for her so he calls in an abler one, Dr. Gratz. The two doctors argue and when the General confronts them, Dr. Gratz maintains his position in the face of the other doctor’s ridicule. The first physician scoffs that Dr. Gratz seems to think they need a conjurer, not a doctor.
The General walks out onto the grounds of his schloss, distracted. Dr. Gratz catches up with him and says he cannot leave without telling him his concerns. He explains that this is no natural disease, that death is near in a day or two if something drastic is not done. When the General asks for more information, the doctor says he has put it in a note. He insists the General take it to the priest and read it only in his presence, and also bring in another learned man on the subject of the letter.
The General finds the priest absent so he reads the letter alone. He is shocked to read that the patient is suffering from a vampire, and that there is no doubt given her descriptions and her wound. The General is a skeptical man but is miserable enough to act on the instructions of the letter. It says for him to go into his niece’s dressing room and watch her at night as she sleeps. He does so, and sees a large dark creature crawling toward Bertha, and when it gets close to her neck, swell into a mass. The General is petrified but springs forward with his sword. The creature contracts and he espies Millarca. He strikes at her but she rematerializes near the door, and is gone. The household is in chaos after this. Millarca is nowhere to be found, and Bertha dies in the morning.
Laura and her father listen to this sad tale. Laura’s father gets up and walks around the tombstones. The General sighs. Among this eerie, abandoned place in the wake of the General’s story, Laura begins to feel a sense of horror steal over her. She is immensely glad, then, to see Carmilla at a distance entering the chapel. As she does though, the General starts up and grabs the woodman’s hatchet. When Carmilla sees him, a terrible, brutalized expression comes over her face. He lunges at her but she dives under his blow and catches his wrist, making him drop the axe. He staggers away and she vanishes.
A moment later Laura shakes off her confusion and hears Madame asking where Carmilla is. Laura points to the door and Madame says no, for she has been standing there. Madame calls out “Carmilla” but no answer comes. When the General hears this, he says that Carmilla is Millarca, the same as Mircalla, Countess Karnstein. He urges her to drive to the clergyman’s house and not leave.
Chapter 15: Ordeal and Execution
Before Laura can do anything, a strange-looking man comes in. He is tall, stooped, dressed in black, has a brown and wrinkled face, an odd shambling gait, and wears gold-rimmed spectacles. The General advances happily toward him, greeting him as the “Baron.” When Laura’s father comes back, he introduces them.
Baron Vordenburg has a plan of the chapel, and he consults a dirty little book. He measures the space, takes the men to a sidewall, and pulls the ivy off to reveal a broad marble tablet. The woodman returns and helps them, and the resting place of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein, is revealed. The General raises his eyes heavenward and says the commissioner will be here tomorrow and the inquisition will happen according to law.
He then shakes the Baron’s hand with gratitude and claims he has delivered them all from a plague. Laura’s father and the General talk quietly with the Baron, and Laura knows they are talking about her case.
Laura’s father comes over to her and says before they go home they must add the priest to their party. This is easily done, and they return to the schloss. Laura is saddened that there is no trace of Carmilla.
That evening, two servants and Madame stay in Laura’s room, with the priest and her father in the neighboring dressing room. The priest performs solemn rites that night but Laura does not understand them. Interestingly though, Laura finds that the disappearance of Carmilla is also the disappearance of her nightly sufferings.
The next day, the formal proceedings take place at the Chapel of Karnstein. The grave is opened, and the General and Laura’s father recognize the face of Carmilla. Though it has been one hundred and fifty years, her features are warm, her eyes open, and the coffin is lacking a cadaverous smell. Two medical men with them say there is some respiration and heartbeat. Her limbs are flexible; “the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed” (52).
The body is raised, a stake is driven through the heart, and the woman shrieks. They strike off her head and burn it and her body to ashes that are then thrown away on the river. No vampire has ever plagued the region since.
Laura’s father has a report from the Imperial Commission with the signatures of all who were present, which is where she gets her information to summarize this last scene.
Chapter 16: Conclusion
Though Laura says she narrates this with composure, she is still haunted and agitated by it. Days and nights after her deliverance were utterly dreadful. She now gives a brief account of Baron Vordenburg. He lives on a pittance on the former estates of his family, and devotes himself to the tradition of Vampirism. He possesses volumes and volumes of studies and accounts and judicial cases, some of which he lends to Laura’s father. She learns many things, such as the fact that they look alive in their coffins and when they are in the world. It is unknown how they escape and return to their graves. They are sustained by renewed slumber there. Their bloodlust “supplies the vigor of its waking existence” and it will “never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim” (53). In some cases, it takes its time, seemingly yearning for courtship, sympathy, and consent. Some seem to have special conditions, like Carmilla/Millarca/Mircalla being names made of the same letters.
The Baron stays with them for a few weeks and responds to Laura’s father’s recounting of the story of the Moravian nobleman and the eradication of the vampire at the Karnstein churchyard. He smiles and says he has journals and entries that speak of that man, a distant relative who seems to have been a passionate lover of Mircalla. Her early death plunged him into grief. He knew that vampirism would sometimes start with a suicide, and then that vampire would pursue the living and then when they died, they would become vampires. This happened to Mircalla, who was haunted by a demon. The nobleman knew Mircalla might have this happen to her and he became consumed by his horror of this possibility of his beloved entering a more terrible life than death. He pretended to remove her remains and obliterate her monument. Then, in his older years, he felt immense guilt for this and left notes that guided the Baron to this very spot. He wrote a confession and perhaps meant to do something about it but death took him. Thus, his descendant carried out justice, but too late for some.
The Baron adds that one sign of the vampire is the strength of its hands, which clearly closed on the General’s with immense power. It then leaves a numbness in the limbs, which may never recover fully.
The next spring, Laura’s father takes her to Italy and they stay away for over a year. The image of Carmilla returns to her with “ambiguous alternations—sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church” (54). And, horribly, Laura says that “often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door” (54).
Analysis
If there was any doubt remaining that Carmilla, Millarca, and Mircalla are the same person, it is eradicated in the face of the General’s recognition of the “fiend” who killed his niece. With the help of the other men, especially the famed vampire hunter Baron Vordenburg, he is able to locate Mircalla’s tomb and prepare to eliminate her with the full force of the law. This elimination is vicious, thorough, and a literal and symbolic destruction of what Carmilla represents—a threat to the patriarchy, lesbianism, fungible boundaries of self, and effrontery to ancestry.
Part of the destruction of Mircalla that bears mentioning is the eradication of the Karnstein line, which Laura’s mother is descended from. This maternal line is seen as one of “atrocious lusts” (47), as the General puts it. Jim Hansen says that Le Fanu suggests that “the powerful weakness of the maternal line cannot be contained by the weakened power of the paternal one,” something perhaps unconsciously known by the men that categorically endeavor to destroy the threat(s) to their power.
Helen Stoddart writes that while “every possible mode of attack is wreaked on the vampire Carmilla’s body” (a “sharp stake [was] driven through the heart of the vampire,” “the head was struck off,” and “the body and head was next placed on a pile of wood, and reduced to ashes which were thrown upon the river and borne away” [52]) to assure us that Carmilla is really gone, “never in the Gothic horror story can the assurance that the disease is cured, the monster is extinguished, or indeed that it is without progeny be taken as cast-iron.”
Thus, there are numerous questions left at the end of the novella. Elizabeth Signorotti notes that “the frame that opens the tale is never closed.” Doctor Hesselius’s essay is not included, nor does the aide preparing his case studies say anything else. Laura’s father takes her to Italy to recover, but she cannot forget Carmilla and says that “often from a reverie I have started fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.” We do not know if Carmilla is somehow still “alive,” how Laura died, or if Laura became a vampire and thus perpetuated Carmilla’s bloodthirsty seductions.
Even if we believe that Carmilla is completely gone and Laura is not a vampire, Carmilla lives on in another way—through Laura’s mind, whether we consider it traumatized or merely transformed. Returning to Angelica Michelis’s discussion of the dissolution of the boundaries of the self (see earlier analyses), “Carmilla refuses to take her place in the realm of death and the past of the tale’s discursive order. She still reigns supremely as a constant reminder of the relevance of splitting and the dissolution of separateness as underlying the concept and construction of identity, and here in particular, femininity itself.” She isn’t dead if she still lives on in Laura’s psyche.
