Literary Criticism

Nicole Gehrman
English 263
March 2, 2010

Literary Criticism of Michael Davis’s Gothic’s Enigmatic Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla”


The author of this article, Michael Davis makes a lot of references towards other pieces of gothic work and he heavily mentions the enigma of gothic literature. Davis proposes many of his ideas about ‘Carmilla’ in relation to the ideas of French psychoanalyst, Jean Laplanche and his notion of the enigmatic signifier. Whether or not Davis agrees with Leplanche’s theories is unclear to me throughout my analysis.
Davis begins his analysis by discussing this idea of the enigmatic dream. Enigma can be described as a puzzling or inexplicable occurrence or situation containing a hidden meaning. He relates his theory of dreams to Sigmund Freud’s theory that dreams are wish fulfillments and ultimately those wishes are the result of repressed or frustrated sexual desires. Davis agrees with Freud when he states,
“Similarly, to attend only to the manifest content of the Gothic text is, in many ways, to miss the point. As with the dreams, so the Gothic, of all genres, demands to be read allegorically. Like a rebus, Gothic encodes its meanings; its signifiers form a puzzle that demands to be translated.” He later goes on to say, “to recognize how the Gothic frequently confronts its characters (and readers) with teasing enigmas which, proving ultimately indecipherable, often prove to be traumatizing and, in certain cases, fatal” (223).
Basically what Davis is saying is that there are many things to be translated in the novel, however, there will never be a complete understanding. I concluded this idea because Davis states that, ‘Carmilla’ represents a failure of ‘translation’ a traumatizing failure to decode the enigmatic signifiers received from and indeed implanted, namely Carmilla” (223).
There is a reoccurring theme that caught my attention throughout ‘Carmilla” and the Enigmatic Signifier article, one being the dreams that take place in the story and how they play such a significant role in the plot of the story and two a point that Davis points out; the shadow of a lost object: Laura’s mother. On page 227, Davis says,
“Laura informs us that her mother ‘died in [her] infancy’ (243). This loss, I believe, haunts Le Fanu’s text as an uncanny absent presence. Laura claims that she does not even remember her mother because she lost her ‘so early.’ Initially, it seems, it was Madame Peredon ‘whose care and good nature in part supplied the loss of her mother. But the amnesia that, Laura believes, has left no memory trace is in fact not total. Laura does remember her mother, albeit unconsciously, and this becomes evident in her maternal transference to Carmilla” (227).

I found it interesting that Laura first meets Carmilla in a dream. Dreams seem to portray some sort of critical role throughout the novel so I can’t help but wonder what that role might be. To be honest, I don’t really know that much about Sigmund Freud’s theories about dreams or the significance of their portrayal. Basically, what I have concluded from his theories is that our dreams must mean something and there’s a reason that we construe these dreams from our subconscious. I know that I have heard many things like if you try to scream in a dream and no sound comes out it must mean that you feel suffocated by something in your life etc. I’m not to familiar with what Freud thinks certain things mean, (I’ve heard that they are very strange) but none .the less I think that the point that Davis is trying to make is that our dreams must mean something. So if Laura is having these dreams about repressed feelings and a maternal like figure approaching her bedside, it must mean something, but what? And that is the point that Davis is trying to bring across.
Another passage from Gothic’s Enigmatic Signifier that I found interesting was when Davis was comparing ‘Carmilla’ to Laplanche’s theory about the “otherness.” Davis says,
By the end of Le Fanu’s tale, we know that this element that cannot be metabolized, assigned meaning and assimilated remains actively at work in Laura’s psyche, ‘attacking the ego as agency from thing’ (letter, 108), long after the events she narrates. Like the alien (source-object) inside the subject, and like the Gothic itself, the internal alien other is ‘exciting rather than informing’ (Gothic, 4). And as Laplanche points out, what is not translatable becomes ‘the measure of the quantity of trauma’ (Otherness, 130) (226).

I must have re-read this message ten times and I still don’t understand what it is saying. I decided to challenge myself and slowly pick apart pieces of the passage trying to decipher its meaning. The conclusion that I came to, like Davis’s underlying theme is that the message cannot be fully translated because I don’t think the writer (Le Fanu) wants it to be translated, the message is that even we can’t fully grasp the meaning of our own subconscious. To better understand the meaning of this passage I researched Laplanche’s Otherness. Basically, what I interpreted upon research was that the other is basically the exact opposite of what you are. However, this supposed other tends to have some sort of control over your psyche, as defined in this adult-infant relation, it’s almost as if the perspective is transmitted from the otherness causing your original perspective to radically change.
The word translatable can be defined as to change from one place to another. This brought me back to the description about the ‘internal alien.’ What exactly is the internal alien? Is this the voice of manipulative thoughts from the other? The otherness always seems to be challenging the other. So basically Laura has some bipolar thoughts going on in her head. I know, sounds stupid, but this is what I have interpreted.
The passage that says,

“Carmilla is not just a character in a Gothic text, she is also the excess(ive) and ambiguous (allegorical) figure, or indeed the enigmatic letter(s) of the Gothic itself: Enlightenment’s dark internal foreign body. Indeed Carmilla and her enigmatic messages, together with the anagrammatical lability of her ‘name’, are like the chimeras sold by the hunchback.” Davis goes on to say, “Thus, through the allegorizing selfreflexivity of Le Fanu’s text we see that Carmilla and the Gothic are chimerical” (231).

So is Carmilla just a figment of Laura’s imagination that was developed in her subconsciou because of the repression of her sexuality and loss of a mother? I know I’m probably way off here, I’m not even sure where my thoughts are leading. However, is that the point that Davis is trying to make by comparing Laplanche’s thoughts and ideas about repression and relating Freud and how dreams are suppose to have some sort of hidden meaning etc. So therefore all of Laura’s dreams and daydreams are just illusions because she is so severely jaded by the loss of her mother and about her confused sexuality? So she creates this character in her head that cannot be metabolized so she never realizes the true message from her dreams? Perhaps it’s the word play with the word chimerical, which I looked up and found it to mean: existing only as the product of unchecked imagination, fantastically visionary or improbable (Merriam-Webster) Is Carmilla a character that Laura crafts from her subconscious because she doesn’t understand her true sexuality? I’m probably way off her, but this is what I have concluded from deciphering the words. Even though Davis says on page 223 that the words cannot be deciphered. I think the more I have analyzed the less I understand. Perhaps that is the underlying message.

Works Cited

Davis, Michael. "Gothic's Enigmatic Signifier: The Case of J. Sheridan Le Fanu's 'Carmilla"." Gothic Studies 6 (2004): 223-235. Print.

Fanu, J. Sheridan Le. Carmilla: A Tragic Love Story by J. Sheridan Le Fanu. London, UK: Createspace, 2008. Print.

"Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online." Dictionary and Thesaurus - Merriam-Webster Online. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. .

" Radical Philosophy - Interviews - July/August 2000." Radical Philosophy - Welcome to Radical Philosophy. N.p., n.d. Web. 2 Mar. 2010. .