"What if a boyish lover had found his way into the house?" Lesbian masculinity in Carmilla

In this essay, I will investigate the ways in which the titular character of the vampire novella Carmilla is masculinized within the text—both by adhering to and going against—Victorian standards of masculinity. I will also view Carmilla’s hybridized, masculine and feminine gender through the lens of Judith Butler’s theory of gender performance. Carmilla’s hybridized performance of gender would have made Victorian readers very uncomfortable due to strict gender roles in the period, and therefore, Carmilla perfectly embodies Butler’s idea that performing one’s gender incorrectly creates change. Finally, I will incorporate lesbian scholarship from the twentieth century into my essay to demonstrate how the stereotyping of masculine women as predators still haunts masculine women today just as it did in the nineteenth century. Like Carmilla, many masculine women today are punished in various ways—including by being pushed out of spaces for women and even sometimes through their deaths—for their “incorrect” performance of gender.