Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy»
Автор статті досліджує інтертекстуальні зв’язки «Камілли» Фану та «Вія» Гоголя крізь призму жіночих демонічних образів.
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Інститут літератури ім. Т.Г. Шевченка НАН України
2009
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| Назва видання: | Гоголезнавчі студії |
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| Назва журналу: | Digital Library of Periodicals of National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine |
| Цитувати: | Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» / M. Romanets // Гоголезнавчі студії. — Ніжин, 2009. — Вип. 18. — С. 264-276. — Бібліогр.: 34 назв. — англ. |
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irk-123456789-278792011-10-23T12:17:24Z Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» Romanets, M. Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства Автор статті досліджує інтертекстуальні зв’язки «Камілли» Фану та «Вія» Гоголя крізь призму жіночих демонічних образів. Автор статьи исследует интертекстуальные связи «Камиллы» Фану и «Вия» Гоголя сквозь призму женских демоничеких образов. The author of the article explores the intertextual connetions in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» through the female demon characters. 2009 Article Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» / M. Romanets // Гоголезнавчі студії. — Ніжин, 2009. — Вип. 18. — С. 264-276. — Бібліогр.: 34 назв. — англ. XXXX-0080 http://dspace.nbuv.gov.ua/handle/123456789/27879 en Гоголезнавчі студії Інститут літератури ім. Т.Г. Шевченка НАН України |
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Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства |
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Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства Romanets, M. Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» Гоголезнавчі студії |
| description |
Автор статті досліджує інтертекстуальні зв’язки «Камілли» Фану та «Вія» Гоголя крізь призму жіночих демонічних образів. |
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Article |
| author |
Romanets, M. |
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Romanets, M. |
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Romanets, M. |
| title |
Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» |
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Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» |
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Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» |
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Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» |
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Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» |
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daughters of darkness: intertextuality in le fanu’s «carmilla» and gogol’s «viy» |
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Інститут літератури ім. Т.Г. Шевченка НАН України |
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2009 |
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Із зарубіжного гоголезнавства |
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http://dspace.nbuv.gov.ua/handle/123456789/27879 |
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Daughters of Darkness: Intertextuality in Le Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» / M. Romanets // Гоголезнавчі студії. — Ніжин, 2009. — Вип. 18. — С. 264-276. — Бібліогр.: 34 назв. — англ. |
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264
Maryna Romanets (Prince George)
DAUGHTERS OF DARKNESS: INTERTEXTUALITY IN
LE FANU’S «CARMILLA» AND GOGOL’S «VIY»
In Carmilla and Viy, Sheridan Le Fanu and Nikolai Gogol
(Ukrainian: Mykola Hohol) manipulate folklore to revitalize the fantastic
and create their own kind of spectacular Gothic. Representing two
peripheral colonial cultures situated at the extreme eastern and western
fringes of Europe, both writers draw respectively on Irish and Ukrainian
nineteenth-century cultural Revivals evolving from the antiquarian
movements of the eighteenth century, movements partially motivated by a
nostalgically desperate desire to document and register the remnants of
what seemed then to be almost extinct cultures. While attempting to
contextualize local aristocracy severed from history by reconstructing its
genealogy [16, р. 45], antiquarianism was also bridging discontinuities,
thus turning out to be politically dangerous for imperial systems as it
ultimately provided for fundamentals of future national and cultural identity
based on collective identities of the past. In addition, as Markman Ellis
writes, in the «antiquarian collection, belief which was fugitive and
unofficial was granted (or assumed) an official imprimatur» [6, р. 175].
Moreover, having started as one whose gaze was retrospective, the move-
ment became much more radical and less romantic, catalyzed by the 1840s
Famine in Ireland [9, р. 316]; a succession of Russian bans and repres-
sions in Ukraine; and the breakout of revolutions throughout Europe in
1848, signifying the «springtime of the peoples» [33, р. 116].
Studies in history, ethnography, and language and literature, and
publications of historical chronicles and documents initiated in the
eighteenth century were of great importance both for Ireland and Ukraine in
resisting the tendency common to all the imperial states where «colonialism
did not merely force itself and its laws onto a people’s present and future,
but also on to their past, distorting, mutilating and annihilating it»
[8, р. 311]. Although seemingly uninvolved in politics, being caught
between open liberalism and embedded conservatism, both Le Fanu and
Gogol contributed to the cause of their national Revivals: Le Fanu, when
associated with Dublin University Magazine, which, among other
literary works, published and thus popularized translations from Gaelic
[26, р. 221]; and Gogol, when collecting and recording Ukrainian
265
folklore1 and materials for a Ukrainian dictionary. Both writers revealed
their interest in the pasts of their countries by turning to the genre of the
historical novel: Le Fanu, in The Crock and Anchor (1845), The Fortunes
of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (1847), and The House by the Churchyard
(1863); and Gogol, in Taras Bulba (1835; revised version, 1842).
Reading Gogol against Le Fanu through the lens of Gothicism as a
diverse but still typological strategy for the production of meaning in
colonial literatures might be illuminating since the ever increasing critical
literature on Irish Gothic emphasizes its link to the colonial powers in
Ireland that resulted in psychological ambivalence of predominantly Anglo-
Irish practitioners of the genre [3, р. 109–112]. This «hyphenated culture»
[29, р. 3–10] developed a tradition that privileges uncertainty over certainty
and «refuses to dissolve binaries such as living/dead, inside/outside,
friend/enemy, desire/disgust» [20, par. 20]. Unlike the situation in Irish
studies, so far there have been no attempts among the scholars of Ukrainian
literature to establish a relationship between the colonial condition and the
propagation of Gothic forms in «minor» literature2 – let alone in Gogol, its
major nineteenth-century exponent – constructed within an imperial literary
discourse. Gogol’s oeuvre, however, reflects both what he himself called
«twin-soulness», referring to his connectedness to both Ukrainian and
Russian cultures [23, p. 2–3], and his hesitancy between an imperial
hegemonic cultural logic, the embracing of the future and the «rational»,
and the «anachronisms» of his Ukrainian «past». Similar indeterminacy can
be also observed in his national identification in critical inquiries;
traditionally included in the canon of Russian literature, he has quite
recently, in the last decade of Ukraine’s post-independence period, been
claimed as part of the Ukrainian cultural space. 3
In examining Gogol’s and Le Fanu’s novellas, I am interested in
one particular aspect of Gothic – female characters featured as monsters,
1 See Narodni pisni v zapysakh Mykoly Hoholia, ed. O. I. Dei (Kyïv:
Muzychna Ukraïna, 1985).
2 I use the concept of «minor» literature elaborated upon by Gilles Deleuze
and Félix Guattari in their Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (рр. 16–27).
3 See, for example, Luckyj’s The Anguish of Mykola Hohol; Oleh Ilnytzkyj’s
«Hohol' and the Post-Colonial Context», Krytyka, March 2000, no. 3: рр. 9–13, and
his «Cultural Indeterminacy in the Russian Empire: Nikolai Gogol as a Ukrainian
Post-Colonial Writer», in A World of Slavic Literatures. Essays in Comparative
Slavic Studies in Honour of Edward Mozejko, ed. Paul Duncan Morris
(Bloomington, Indiana: Slavica, 2002), рр. 153–171. For the latest discussions see
Canadian Slavonic Papers (Special Issue: The 200th Anniversary of the Birth of
Nikolai Gogol' / Mykola Hohol' [1809–1852]) 51.2–3 (2009).
266
specifically vampires – figures situated amidst two conflicting modes of
representation since the vampire novel is a genre that depends, according
to Matthew Gibson, «upon a tension between naturalism and the
supernatural» [17, p. 11]. In addition to the politics of representation,
Gibson’s Dracula and the Eastern Question further explores wider
implications of vampire narratives in the nineteenth-century European
context, arriving at the conclusion that Gothic is capable of transposing the
«appalling superstition of native people» into a national allegory and of
casting «this superstition about revenants from the dead, who suck blood of
the young and spread sexual perversity, as symbolic of a political
allegory» [17, p. 51]. Without ignoring the conventional European vampire
resonance, numerous literary treatments of vampirism and their socio-
cultural impact, I would like to stress the significance of local sources,
which were brought to light by the nineteenth-century Irish and Ukrainian
cultural Revivals, that nourish the fearsome power of both writers’ fictions,
awakening the dormant world of monsters: Irish folklore of the Undead and
drinkers of human blood found, for example, in a discussion of the neamh-
mhairbh in Seathrún Céitinn’s seventeenth-century Foras Feasa ar Éirinn
[19, p. 384], or Ukrainian tales about blood-thirsty upyri [18, p. 430–497].
By featuring the female vampire, both writers implicitly recreate the
colonial gendered power matrix and establish the relationship between sex,
violence, and death. In both works, blood, «as a vital element, also refers to
women, fertility, and the assurance of fecundation. It thus becomes a
fascinating semantic crossroads, the propitious place for abjection»
[Kristeva qtd. in 5, р. 59]. Both works contributed towards the formation of
distinct iconography and attributes of the vampire novel that were fixed by
the end of the nineteenth century4 and further developed in contemporary
culture where the female vampire’s world has come to signify «darkness,
the undead, moon, the tomb/womb, blood, oral sadism, bodily wounds and
violation of the law» [5, p. 71]. Yet, although Le Fanu and Gogol relocate
vampirism from the forests and mountains of folklore to inhabited spaces,
thus rooting their narratives in a quasi-realist fictional context, neither
makes any attempts to rationalize the paranormal, thus leaving the division
between the real and the supernatural in place. In both novellas, though, the
representations of the power of the anomalous involve a dynamic of limit
and transgression that, because of their shifting borderlines, results in
4 Robert Mighall argues that the text that solidified and fixed the stock
features in vampires’ representations is Bram Stoker’s Dracula published in 1897;
see his «’A pestilence which walketh in darkness’: Diagnosing the Victorian
Vampire», in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, ed. Glennis Byron
and David Punter (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2009), р. 109.
267
radical instability and divisibility of identity enveloping several dimensions.
In both, forbidden figures, the emanations of the terror of a split society,
thrive as an apt metaphor to conceal the abomination of the existing order.
Right at the beginning, the prologue to Carmilla introduces the
subject of dualities by citing the note from Doctor Hesselius that refers to
«some of the profoundest arcane of our dual existence, and its
intermediates» [22, p. 243]. The suggested life/death dichotomy puts
fissiparating binaries in motion; their reproduction and re-division render
all boundaries uncertain and thus destabilize discrete or finite meanings in
the novella. When meeting Carmilla, an enticingly beautiful and mysterious
visitor to the schloss located in a forlorn and «primitive place» [22, p. 244]
in Styria, Le Fanu’s narrator Laura experiences an eerie feeling of dream-
come-true, which intensifies in the process of their first liminal encounter.
At the threshold between dream and reality, Laura sees, or fancies she sees
[22, p. 278], a sinister, sooty-black monstrous cat: «I felt it spring lightly on
the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a
stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into
my breast» [22, p. 278]. After what the narrator perceives as awakening, the
phantom of her nightmare – the shifting and nebulous animal-like shape –
morphs into a female figure in a dark loose dress: a «block of stone could
not have been more still» [22, p. 278]. The ambivalence of the episode opens
up an indeterminate zone in which the differences between imagination and
actuality are no longer secure. The demarcation line between the two, «in
here» and «out there», is blurred, and, as Lucie Armitt writes elsewhere, the
distinctions between the «interior nightmare realm and the outside world of
so-called daylight are called into question» [2, p. 53]. Furthermore, in
addition to the porous borderline in the fantasy/reality dyad, Le Fanu’s
shape-shifting vampire also transgresses other boundaries, those that can
guarantee a stable identity whose definition is based on binary logic –
human/animal, culture/nature, self/other. These dualities are presumably
based on the parity of terms, but in fact, European thought implicitly
privileges the former over the latter, thus tipping the balance. Gothic pushes
this undercurrent disparity to the extreme and makes it volatile. The
traversing identity of Laura’s nocturnal tormentor, which puts the
boundaries between the bodies of animals and humans into perpetual flux,
reflects her infringing, violent, and voluptuous nature.
Gogol’s protagonist Khoma Brut, a student of philosophy, is
indirectly introduced to the vampiric aspect of an old Cossack captain’s
daughter, a stunning beauty who, like Le Fanu’s Carmilla, is at the center of
mystery in Viy. The inset story relates the metamorphosis of a howling dog
into a pannochka (a young lady of the estate) who snatches a baby from the
268
cradle, sucks its blood, and then attacks its horror-stricken mother. Gogol
uses demonic personification of the beautiful woman, who turns «all blue …
her eyes glowing like coals» [15, p. 218], to embody the terrors of vampiric
visitations that plague the vicinity. Both Le Fanu’s and Gogol’s vampires
assault their victims, depleting their bodies of vital fluids, in zoomorphic
forms. On the one hand, such becoming-animal may test the limits of
corporeal logic; on the other, it may reveal the bestial within the human,
signifying the return of animalistic, instinctual habits. In addition, shifting
shape along the species line in Carmilla арреаrs to draw on Celtic fith-fath
legendry and spells, which made it possible to transfigure someone into
different forms, women usually into a cat or hare [25, p. 153]. Used as a
means of survival or to facilitate rebirth, among other things, such charms
have long been associated with witchcraft. Viy, in its turn, idiosyncratically
revamps Ukrainian folk tales about the supernatural powers of
metamorphosis attributed to witches, who often turn into dogs [18, p. 453–
460] and who, after they die, become vampires [18, p. 487]. Thus, while
continually feeding on the objects of their malevolent desire with
omnivorous appetite, Carmilla and the pannochka, in their supplemental
alliance with witch figures, metaphorically propagate by transmogrifying
into an animalistic frame of their familiars, the evil minions of darkness.
Carmilla’s appearance in the castle, accompanied by her nighttime
visitations of Laura’s bedroom, causes the narrator’s melancholy as she is
mysteriously fading, being immersed in dim «thoughts of death» [22, p. 281].
Carmilla is also featured, in an inset story recounted by General Spielsdorf,
as Millarca – each act of naming, Carmilla, Millarca, Mircalla, reiterates
and reinstates her foundational, albeit every time different, identity – who
drains life from his beloved niece and ward. Gogol’s blood-craving
pannochka likewise targets young girls who are reported to lose quarts of
blood [15, p. 219]. However, while Le Fanu’s story reveals, as James B.
Twitchell argues, the «psychodynamics of perversion», being the «story of
a lesbian entanglement, a story of a sterile love of homosexuality expressed
through the analogy of vampirism» [34, p. 129], or, as Margot Backus
contends, a «paradigm of female sexual development within the Anglo-
Irish settler colonial order» [3, p. 128] (both interpretations focusing on
different aspects of homoeroticism), sexual desire in Viy betrays itself in a
slanted way, through violence that can be seen as a sadistic response to the
erotic in the framework of the opposition of the sexes. Whereas Le Fanu’s
maidens fall prey to Carmilla’s devilish charms, recognizing them as
«hateful and yet overpowering» [22, p. 264], Khoma resists all the stages in
the pannochka’s metamorphoses: the «witch’s sexual advances, the sensual
allure of the beauty she becomes, and her clutches as a demonically
269
possessed corpse» [27, p. 202]. It is repressive censors of feelings that keep
him under control, and his panicky self-restraint borders on misogyny.
Gogol extensively develops the witch aspect of his vampire
character. At the beginning of his voyage, Khoma is cornered, mounted,
and ridden by a mysterious old woman during the night he spends at a
solitary farm. First appearing as a recognizable female monster from legend
and folk tales, she is shortly transformed along the bipolar temporal axis:
hideous old hag/beautiful young maiden, another case of the polymorphous
representations of unstable identity and, by extension, female sexuality.
This shape-shifting formula is reminiscent of numerous hags in Irish
mythology and folklore who, like an ugly hag from the origin-myth about
Nial, undergo extraordinary changes and become beautiful young women
[24, p. 94–95]. In the description of this disturbing event, Gogol hybridizes
two types of witches from Ukrainian demonology: that of a conventional,
iconic old hag with one of a young enchantresses, iarytnytsia, who is
dangerously alluring, aggressively engages in risky amorous pursuits
[21, p. 601], and represents a less common witch-aspect. The shift initiating
phantasmagoric blurring of the real and the supernatural that supercharges
Khoma’s fatal adventure generates the questions obsessively flashing
through his mind: «Was he awake or dreaming? … [W]as it really an old
woman?» [15, p. 199]. Not unlike in Carmilla, because of the uncertainty
of various frontiers, the reader is left unsure whether this uncanny
occurrence depicts an unsettling return of repressed fears and desires or
psychological disturbance, or, as Fred Botting observes in his analysis of
the nineteenth-century Gothic literature, «wider upheavals within
formations of reality and normality» [4, p. 11].
Khoma’s night adversary is one of the «ladies of darkness» who
terrifies and inspires. While flying through the nigh sky with the creepy
rider on his back, he becomes acutely «aware of an exhausting, unpleasant,
and at the same time voluptuous sensation assailing his heart» [15, p. 198].
The intensity of this mixed emotion is emphasized through the repetition of
key words, which paradoxically provide the only point of stability in
Khoma’s alarming experience, as he, again, though seized by despair, was
«aware of a fiendishly voluptuous feeling[;] he felt a stabbing, exhaustingly
terrible delight. It often seemed to him as though his heart had melted away,
and with terror he clutched at it» [15, p. 199]. In Le Fanu, Laura’s feelings
towards Carmilla are also perplexing – at times, she «experienced a strange
tumultuous excitement that was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a
vague sense of fear and disgust … [and] was conscious of a love growing into
adoration, and also of abhorrence» [22, p. 264]. Although torn by powerful
mutually contradictory feelings, both characters are affected by what David
270
Punter calls «dreadful pleasure», that is, «pleasure which is felt when
meddling with components of life which are outside the pale of ‘civilised
discourse’» [32, p. 190]. Here, transgressive Gothic energies come into play
since the unlicensed emotions of those who cross the line between the
cultured and the barbaric threaten to violate proper limits of social order,
and the unleashing of forbidden passions and desires destabilizes the mores
and manners of decent, and acceptable, social conduct.
Vacillating between desire and disgust, Khoma’s nightmarish
«nuptial» escapade also manifests what has been termed a «mythic fear of
woman» [7, p. 192] and the fear of crossing gender boundaries. By turning
him into a means for her nocturnal transvection, the demon-rider makes an
incursion into the conventionally male dominion. She is seen as a usurper
because, as Joseph Andriano argues in his study of feminine demonology,
such a demonic agent «insidiously attempts to exert her influence, to
feminize the male» [1, p. 5]. At last, the philosopher manages to re-
establish his manliness by switching the rider/ridden and, correspondingly,
the dominatrix/dominated positions – shifts that invariably accompany and
complement hag/beauty transformation. He mercilessly whacks his
mysterious nightrider, on this turn of the spiral reversing the
victimizer/victim roles, to compensate for his humiliation and loss of
control. Being carried away by the brutal outbreak of violence, the
philosopher suddenly sees the old woman transform into a «lovely creature
with luxuriant tresses all in disorder and eyelashes as long as arrows.
Senseless, she tossed her bare white arms and moaned, looking upwards
with eyes full of tears» [15, p. 200]. Completely shattered by having
beaten the hag into the gorgeous young woman, Khoma returns back to
school in Kyiv.
However, by an uncanny twist of fate, a daughter of one of the
richest and most influential military officers in the area, who was viciously
attacked and badly hurt while taking a walk, is on the verge of death. She
has expressed her specific wish that Khoma «should read the prayers over
her and psalms for three days after her death» [15, p. 201]. Although having
no idea who she is, and being haunted by premonitions of imminent
disaster, Khoma is apprehensive about going to the estate, but the rector of
the seminary forces him to do so. Having arrived in a secluded church
whose macabre and gloomy atmosphere and grotesquely ornamented
interior outwardly collude with the darkness of his anxieties, Khoma
discovers that the dead girl in the casket is the transmogrifier he
encountered previously. He is simultaneously smitten by the «terrible»,
«brilliant», and «striking» beauty of the corpse and overwhelmed with
«panic fear» [15, p. 221] because the most horrifying thing about the dead
271
maiden is that she is actually undead: «there was in her features nothing
faded, tarnished, dead; her face was living» [15, p. 221].
Likewise, Le Fanu stages the final encounter with an enchanting
vampire in the solitary ruins, the burial crypt in the Chapel of Karnstein, the
«haunted spot», a «triste and ominous scene» [22, p. 311] that horrifies
Laura with its aura of the spectral and the diabolical. Both her father and
the General recognize in Countess Karnstein, like the protagonist in Viy,
their «perfidious and beautiful guest» [22, p. 315] lying in the coffin.
Similar to Gogol’s pannochka, her features «were tinted with the warmth of
life[;] … there was a faint but appreciable respiration, and a corresponding
action of the heart. The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic»
[22, p. 315]. It is tempting to think here about a monstrosity that engages in
contestations of natural order, in Slavoj Žižek’s metaphorical terms: «The
paradox of the vampires is that, precisely as ‘living dead,’ they are far more
alive than us, mortified by the symbolic network . . . the real ‘living dead’
are we, common mortals, condemned to vegetate in the Symbolic» [qtd. in
14, p. 56]. This maneuver in the narrative, despite replicating formulaic
attributes of the genre, also reveals the representation’s elasticity and
uncertainty through its capacity to reverse the relationship of life and death.
Furthermore, the bizarre oxymoronic duality adds an additional twist to the
dispersion and multiplication of meanings in vampires’ quest for eternal
life, demonstrating the continuous presence of conventional fears related to
sexuality, to the primitive not only from the past but also in the present, and
to history with its fatal grip, to name but a few.
It is noteworthy that Carmilla’s character is invested with
malicious subjectivity that manifests itself in her ability to express her
selfhood in and through language. Sweet-voiced Carmilla [22, p. 255] is
very articulate about her thoughts, moods, and emotions. When Laura tries
to satisfy her curiosity about any aspect related to Carmilla’s life, she
constantly faces her guest’s «ever wakeful reserve» [22, p. 262]. Being very
evasive about her history, Carmilla effusively explains the nature of her
attitude to Laura, who is genuinely hurt by her strange companion’s
secrecy. Carmilla’s «rhapsody» professing love contains disturbing
connotations as she verbalizes her desires in terms of blood, corruption,
sacrificial death, and lethal possession. This utterance reiterates and
expands upon her earlier laconic, almost point-form, arcane reasoning about
a past love experience: a «cruel love – strange love, that would have taken
my life. Love will have its sacrifices. No sacrifice without blood» [22,
p. 277]. Being centered on the images of a lacerated, oozing heart and on a
warped co-dependency within the life/death dyad, Carmilla’s discourse
obliquely alludes to what creatures of the night feed off and also tacitly
assumes the transference of her vampiric powers to Laura:
272
Dearest, your little heart is wounded; think me not cruel because I
obey the irresistible law of my strength and weakness; if your dear
heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with you. In the rapture of my
enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die–die,
sweetly die–into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in
your turn, will draw near to others, and then learn the rapture of that
cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me
and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit [22, p. 263].
The same preoccupation with inflicted wounds and death is revealed in a
completely different context when Carmilla remarks, with angry resentment
and hauteur, on a funerary procession of peasants and their singing of a
religious hymn: «[H]ow can you tell that your religion and mine are the
same; your forms wound me, and I hate funerals. What a fuss! Why you
must die–everyone must die; and all are happier when they do» [22, p. 266].
It is ironic that the deceased girl, as it becomes evident from Laura’s
comments, is one of the local victims of Carmilla’s phlebotomizing passion
who was forced to make a sacrificial contribution to the vampire’s everlasting
life by «dying into» it.
As opposed to Carmilla’s eloquence, the demonic agency and
supernatural power of Gogol’s young lady are not translated into the power
of speech. She is profoundly excluded from the verbal production of
meaning and thus is staged only as a sinister body. In the shape of the old
woman, she tries to capture Khoma in embrace with a peculiar «glitter in
her eye» but «without uttering a word» [15, p. 197]. When she is turned
from the rider into the ridden and he assaults her in rage, she at first
produces «wild howls», angry and menacing, that gradually grow «fainter,
sweeter, clearer» to fade into the melody of «delicate silver bells that
stabbed him to the heart» [15, p. 199]. This change of the voice register
provides a soundtrack for her wordless transition from the repulsive hag
into explicitly sexualized beauty. The pannochka’s «hollow mutter», when
she replicates her earlier appalling effort to catch Khoma during his night
vigil at her coffin, is incomprehensible; her words «gurgled hoarsely like
the bubbling of boiling pitch. He could not have said what they meant;
but there was something fearful in them» [15, p. 225]. On the third night
of his frightful service, Khoma is exposed to her incantatory «wild shrieks»
[15, p. 232], which echo Carmilla’s «piercing shriek» [22, p. 315] in the
shocking scene of the vampire’s extermination and which give voice to the
unspeakable hidden beyond the shifting frontiers of consciousness.
Carmilla ends with the vampire’s destruction that complies with
the traditional measures of decapitation and a sharp stake driven through
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the heart, which is, according to Botting, a «perfectly natural end in the story
in which superstition, legend and folklore are part of the everyday reality»
[4, p. 144]. The final fixity and motionlessness of Carmilla’s body parallel the
moments of her deadly standstills in the text and are consistent with the
stability of her positioning as the demon lover throughout the story. In
opposition, Gogol’s vampiric fiend, indestructibly rising in her coffin,
summons to her aid the most terrifying supreme creature of preternatural
primordial evil, Viy, who reveals Khoma to his horrifying entourage that
«pounced upon the philosopher. He fell expiring to the ground, and his soul
fled from his body in terror» [15, p. 233]. In the denouement, Khoma’s
becomes an increasingly subjective state dominated by what gives an
impression of being fantasy and hallucination, and his imagination tortured in
this monster-infested claustrophobic space – the abode of an indescribable
agony and dread, the simulacra of hell – reaches its own collapse, whereas the
pannochka turns into an avenging demon, a fearsome power instrumental in
his demise. This provides yet another dimension to Viy’s multidimensional
space, making it, among other things, a tale of chillingly executed vengeance
of feminine element rejected by masculinist order.
Although both authors construct the seductions of their female
demons as supernatural, Le Fanu’s uncanny threat in the guise of the
vampire is eventually contained by rationalism represented by the group of
proliferating parental figures, doctors, and scholars involved in endless
consultations through which the «vampire can be diagnosed and managed»
[14, p. 50]. It is interesting that the authoritative structure they form is
quintessentially patriarchal, the law of the father being ultimately
reinforced through the «ritualized killing of vampires [that] reconstitutes
properly patriarchal order and fixed cultural and symbolic meaning»
[4, p. 151]. Conversely, the matrilineal connections in the story lead to one
transgressive nexus – all the maternal figures are the descendants of the
Karnstein clan that makes Carmilla their progenitress. If not suppressed,
women might have compromised and overturned mainstream male
authority, challenging the norms promoted by social and domestic ideology
by comprising a separate tribe co-functioning by contagion and thus
threatening to spread endlessly. As Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
suggest while emphasizing the preeminence of the «epidemic» nature of the
vampire phenomenon over the hereditary, the vampire «does not filiate, it
infects» [12, p. 242]. Whereas Le Fanu offers the reader moral resolution,
Gogol does not conclude the narrative with any sacred or rational expulsion
of evil, leaving his novella open to the play of ambivalence. The societal
defenses – either knowledge, skepticism, Christian scriptures, or chanting
274
exorcisms – used by Khoma fail, and his fall seems to showcase Deleuze’s
and Guattari’s idea that it is not the «slumber of reason that engenders
monsters, but vigilant and insomniac rationality» [13, p. 112]. The ill-fated
philosopher left face-to-face with the urges that rage through his diabolical
foe, without any network of fabricated supremacy to seek advice from,
turns out to be unprotected from uncontrollable supranormal forces
invading and desecrating the church, and the vampire, symbolically
«unmanaged», vanishes at dawn as if laying the scene for an onset of
another return.
In both Carmilla and Viy, the horrid creatures of destruction
engage in a complex interplay of appearances, shifting identities, past and
present, and superstition and reality. The creation of the monstrous
feminine through the dark and macabre imagery of the return of the dead
signifies the disruption of categories and the elimination of boundaries as it
consistently exceeds any coherent system of identification. Suggesting
numerous societal and identitarian splits and fissures, it reveals, all over
again, the archetypal terror of the alien and the unknown, of spaces where
disturbingly ambivalent blood-sucking revenants foster compelling
challenges by questioning representations of the transparent and the
communicable experience. As Brian D. Palmer writes in his Cultures of
Darkness, however often the «monster may be sacrificed on the altar of
literary convention, it remains a fearful earthly and earthy presence, the
metaphorical power of terror residing less in the imagery of horror than in
the horrible realities of human social relations. Haunting humanity, the
monster – the desires it awakens and nightmares it induces – «disappears
into the darkness» [31, p. 119].
The appearance of the Gothic vampire trope in Le Fanu’s and
Gogol’s works, being evoked by myth and providing a metaphor to express
the unresolved conflict between the imperial power and the colony, is
symptomatic, culturally and politically, of a long struggle against the
powerful historical dysfunctions of Irish and Ukrainian societies and of
manifest as well as repressed evidence of their abusive character. Here
Gothic becomes almost an ideal mode of representing the paranoiac
colonial psyche, with its lurking fears and buried desires, and the
disjunctive, fragmented, dislocated, and diasporic agency of those who
have suffered the sentence of history – subjugation and displacement in the
supplementary spaces of the colonial world; the «missing people», to use
Deleuze’s expression [11, p. 4], who did not get to parade in the imperial
progressive march of history and whose own history was erased, but not
completely, only to haunt them as ghostly apparitions from the pasts.
275
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Анотація
Автор статті досліджує інтертекстуальні зв’язки «Камілли»
Фану та «Вія» Гоголя крізь призму жіночих демонічних образів.
Ключові слова: жіночі демонічні образи, «дочки темряви»,
фантастика, фольклор, готика.
Аннотация
Автор статьи исследует интертекстуальные связи «Камил-
лы» Фану и «Вия» Гоголя сквозь призму женских демоничеких образов.
Ключевые слова: женские демонические образы, «дочери
темноты», фантастика, фольклор, готика.
Summary
The author of the article explores the intertextual connetions in Le
Fanu’s «Carmilla» and Gogol’s «Viy» through the female demon characters.
Keywords: female demon characters, «daughters of darkness»,
fantastic, folklore, Gothicism.
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