Blossoming into Monsterhood: Transgressive Sexuality and Liminality in J.S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Emily Harris's 2019 Film Adaptation

Resumen

This paper undertakes an analysis of the transtextual relationship between Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire novella Carmilla and Emily Harris’s 2019 filmic adaptation of the same name. Vampires have often been used in Gothic fiction as a reflection of diverse concerns regarding sexuality, both in the form of decadence and corruption, and as a celebration of marginal sexual identities. This paper considers the ways in which the novella and the film portray the construction of the female Other as monstrous, by exploring how the transgressive sexuality of the female protagonists of both texts is expressed. Furthermore, it is argued that in the negotiation of their own difference, Carmilla and Laura/Lara acquire an aura of liminality, whose ambiguity and indefinability displace Otherness as a meaningful category inside the patriarchal system. Carmilla’s arrival in both stories initiates a transitional process which, consequently, opens up an ambivalent space for the protagonists in which the hierarchical structures and dichotomous categories on which difference is founded are challenged. This space, therefore, creates an opportunity for the characters to redefine themselves away from the restrictive roles that had been assigned to them. This analysis draws on feminist theory, critical conceptualisations of transgression and monstrosity from the perspective of Gothic fiction, and the ideas of liminality and the “Third Space” outlined, respectively, by Victor Tuner and Homi Bhabha.