In an era of feuding religious revival and scientific exposition, the Victorians surfaced many new obsessions, a prominent one being the connection between sex and the supernatural. The supernatural served as vessels that Victorians could express their inner fears, feelings, and desires that they normally would harbor. On one hand, concepts like mesmerism and spiritualism served as solutions to fears, rather than expressions of the self. On the other were concepts like vampirism.
This kind of ideology led into a further suppression of sexual desire, as Victorian women were expected to be “The Angel in the House”. They were expected to be passive, attentive, motherly, pious, and completely submissive to their husbands and God. Carmilla opened readers up to feelings they were required to hide, giving them an outlet for sexual expression. Novels such as Dracula proceeded to follow, furthering the evolution of sexual freedom in literature.
Vampirism was spoken upon in many forms, mainly drawing from fear and negative emotion, until the publication of Carmilla in 1871. Carmilla brought a new vision to the Victorians: one of sexuality. The main character, an English girl by the name of Laura, is drawn to a mysterious girl named Carmilla. She knows nothing of Carmilla’s past, just the lingering sexual throb between the two. Instead of being a terrifying monster, the novel portrays a vampire as a deviant, affecting her victims in a mental state, having them surrender to their inner feelings of unholy eroticism. The Victorian readers were exposed to the raw feelings of homoeroticism, which were taboo at that time. Victorian women especially has a very repressed sense of sexuality. According to philosopher Michel Foucault, Victorian women in particular were affected by the “regression hypothesis”. He defines this as “the rise of the bourgeoisie, any expenditure of energy on purely pleasurable activities has been frowned upon. As a result, sex has been treated as a private, practical affair that only properly takes place between a husband and a wife. Sex outside these confines is not simply prohibited, but repressed. Discourse on sexuality is confined to marriage”.