Homosexualism In La Fanu's Carmilla

When presented with the Labouchere Amendment, Queen Victoria removed the clause about homosexual women as she sniffed “Women didn’t do such things” and so lesbianism never became illegal in Great Britain. It’s an entertaining story and one that fits with the idea that Victorianism is a byword “for a rigorous moralism centred on sexual repression” (A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, P.127), but it’s also not true but a story that began circulating in the 1970s. We don’t know Queen Victoria’s views on lesbianism, but we do know she had a fulfilling sexual relationship with her husband that proved remarkably fecund. Scientists and psychologists were busy determining definitions for sexual behaviours, the New Woman was emerging …show more content…
An innocent young woman is seduced by her female friend “breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover” and “her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever”. Carmilla’s romantic onslaught of Laura so confuses her as she has no awareness of homosexuality that she wonders if Carmilla may be a boy in disguise? “What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house, and sought to prosecute his suit in masquerade”. Though Laura is unaware of lesbianism, she certainly knows when someone is trying to woo her romantically, as Richard J. Evans talks about in his lecture on Victorians and gender and sexuality “Butler and her fellow-campaigners were harshly criticized by supporters of the Acts not least fortheir violation of the unwritten code that declared that respectable women should not speak ofsuch things in public, indeed should not really know about them in the first place. As Lord Elphinstone declared, ‘I look upon these women who have taken up this matter as worse than the prostitutes.’ though it’s not as if La Fanu tries to disguise it in any code “I have been in love with no one, and never shall,” she whispered, “unless it should be with you”. Laura may profess to feel slightly repulsed and bemused by Carmilla’s advances, but in the end she remains enthralled with her female (maybe only) lover years after her death, calling her “the playful, languid, beautiful girl” and imagining she hears her her “light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door”. Consequently, Le Fanu challenged the establishment of Victorian morals with this overt piece of lesbian