mysterious nocturnal habits. When Ernessa quickly usurps her role as Lucy’s constant companion, the narrator responds first with petulant jealousy, and then with alarm as she begins to note Ernessa’s peculiar resemblance to Carmilla, the title charac- ter of the novella she is reading in her Supernatu- ral Literature class. Even more troubling, Ernessa repeatedly reveals her vampiric nature to the nar- rator alone, thus isolating her from the other stu- dents as she increasingly appears both paranoid and delusional. When Lucy’s health begins to wane and the school is plagued by a series of mysteri- ous deaths, the narrator spirals downward into a morbid preoccupation with death and vampirism, culminating in the revelation of a number of devastating truths.


It is important to note that this plot summary— bearing some resemblance to both LUST FOR A VAMPIRE (covered in VW 183) and LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH—in no way conveys the novel’s narrative ingenuity, its multiple levels of meaning, or the remarkable ways in which it em- ploys Le Fanu’s novella as a springboard to ex- plore subjects as disparate as obsession, suicide, mental illness, Judaism, the gilded cage of social privilege, “mean girl” culture, and the myopic


narcissism of adolescence. The novel’s most obvi- ous similarity to Le Fanu’s Gothic fiction, is, of course, the central dilemma of whether the narrator’s account of the supernatural phenom- ena is accurate or the product of psychiatric ill- ness—here precipitated by her father’s suicide and exacerbated by her growing estrangement from her best friend. Klein proves herself as adept as her predecessor at maintaining this uncertainty with- out ever violating narrative integrity, and it is a credit to her craft that this ambiguity persists even across multiple readings of the novel. Like CARMILLA, DIA- RIES contains a prologue (here written by the now- adult narrator) introducing the journal in the spirit of a psychiatric case study with the names changed to protect the privacy of all involved. But while Dr. Hesselius’ secretary takes pains to assure readers of Laura’s credibility as the narrator of CARMILLA, we are here informed that, at the time of writing, the adolescent narrator was suffering from Bor- derline Personality Disorder (a psychiatric condi- tion characterized by pervasive instability of self-image, emotions, and relationships) compli- cated by clinical depression and psychotic episodes. This characterization of the narrator as unreliable is bolstered by her own confessions throughout


Lily Cole as Ernessa, the dark catalyst of events in Mary Harron’s film of Rachel Klein’s novel THE MOTH DIARIES.


38


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84