Symbol: The General's Sword
The General narrates that when he waited in his niece's room at night and saw Millarca there, he lunged at her with his sword, which "flew to shivers against the door" (50). The sword is a phallic symbol, but here the female figure of Millarca is easily shattering it and revealing the General's impotence.
Symbol: Portrait of Mircalla
Critic Elizabeth Signorotti points to the symbolism of Carmilla/Millarca/Mircalla's portrait being unframed, suggesting that the lack of a frame/boundary emphasizes her freedom, sexuality, and, ultimately, "her infectious refusal to remain bound by male forms." This is the main danger this vampire poses—she cannot be contained.
Motif: Black
Blackness is everywhere in the novella, indicative of horror, the void, and evil: the woman in the carriage, the attire of Carmilla's mother, the creature in Laura's room, the "object" that menaces the sleeping Bertha. It is, as critic Nelson Browne writes (quoted by Signorotti), "all-pervading," and against it, "the crimson arterial blood spurts and congeals horribly, and the sickening smell of it is in our nostrils always."
Symbol: Blood
Laura has a frightening vision of Carmilla in which she is wearing a white nightdress "bathed, from her chin to feet, in one great stain of blood" (30). Blood is a symbol of death and rupture, of violation and abjection. For Laura to see Carmilla bathed in blood, she is seeing her deepest, unconscious fears about what is going to happen to her.
Symbol: Cat
Laura sees the creature haunting her room as something that "resembled a monstrous cat" (26). The cat is a classic symbol of the supernatural, of mystery and magic, of cunning and grace, of the sexual, and of the feminine. This cat in Laura's room attacks her while she lies in bed and then turns into a female figure, all of which is suggestive of a sexual encounter.
