the journal that she is prone to lying—sometimes by omission, sometimes by commission—to the other characters as well as to the imagined reader. Clues to her unreliability are sometimes quite subtle (such as when she misidentifies the author of THE KING IN YELLOW), but often far more explicit, such as when she deviates from the narrative to tell the story of a former classmate who fabricated a se- ries of increasingly vicious assaults to gain the sym- pathy and attention of her fellow students. But lest one become too tempted to engage in wholesale dismissal of the account offered, the reader is also forced to confront a good deal of contrary evi- dence—not the least of which are a narrative co- herence incompatible with psychosis, and the fact that the deaths described did indeed occur (as implied by the narrator’s psychiatrist’s endorsement of the publication of the journal) and led to the termination of the school’s boarder program. Al- though the epilogue written by the narrator as an adult makes no overt reference to the supernatu- ral, her decisions in naming the characters (Lucy being not only Dracula’s first victim but also the center of a love triangle in that novel, and Ernessa’s last name being familiar to any devotee of horror fiction) suggests that she still endorses her original depiction of the events described.


Surprisingly, the novel confounds reader expec- tations by largely avoiding any significant lesbian content, focusing instead on emotional, rather than sexual obsession. But the narrator does share Le Fanu’s suspicion of sexuality in general, as all of the relatively few sexual relationships depicted are both unhealthy and unfulfilling. This is because, as the title (taken from Carmilla’s assertion that girls are like caterpillars) makes clear, the novel at its core is not about interpersonal relationships as much as it is about the painful process of becom- ing. Similar to Laura in Le Fanu’s novella, the Brangwyn girls (the school’s name summons as- sociations with D.H. Lawrence’s WOMEN IN LOVE) are lonely castaways, marooned within the stifling confines of the school by parental abandonment, divorce, death, or dysfunction. Like larvae, they can only eat (or feed off one another) and dream of their eventual birth into the world. The confines of their cocoon, importantly, leave no room for other- directed sexuality. The adult narrator explains in her epilogue that, trapped within the hermetically sealed confines of both the campus and their own adolescent narcissism, the girls seek in their books, philosophies, and relationships that are only re- flections of themselves. Ernessa, the narrator sus- pects, does not love Lucy, but is overcome by loneliness at being the only one of her kind, and


chooses Lucy because she has been primed by her abusive father to serve as a compliant victim. But even the narrator’s obsession is similarly nar- cissistic, as she repeatedly makes clear that Lucy is not particularly pretty, intelligent or interesting. Rather, she has come to rely upon Lucy as a sort of life-force that redirects her attention from her father’s suicide and thus makes her feel “normal”— thus feeding off her in a manner similar to Ernessa’s more stereotypical vampirism. As the narrator her- self states: “Maybe a vampire is just someone who wants to take over someone else, to see their reflec- tion not in a mirror, but in another person’s face.” Although DIARIES eschews LeFanu’s preoccu- pation with elaborate confidence schemes, it does share his distrust of authority, and here, like in CARMILLA, the young girls are constantly at the mercy of authority figures who are absent, dam- aged, abusive, incompetent, or predatory. These include not only the teachers, who are portrayed as a collection of misfits who presume to usher their charges into adulthood despite their own in- ability to leave the confines of the school, but also the parents, who are portrayed as debilitated by alcoholism, divorce, grief, or disinterest. The young Mr. Davies, an English teacher and budding poet, at first appears to be a viable role-model, but soon proves parasitic by insinuating himself into the narrator’s life first as a means of attaching himself to her father’s literary legacy, and then for the pur- pose of sexual predation. But the adults who loom largest in the narrative are the narrator’s and Ernessa’s fathers, both of them artists and the vic- tims of suicide. Employing Le Fanu’s assertion of the link between vampirism and suicide, Klein here presents the refusal to “live out one’s allotted years” not only as a cause of vampirism, but also as the ultimate form of parental betrayal, which curses one’s children with an indissoluble bond to the world of the dead. Despite her repeated attempts to por- tray her father as a tragic hero, the narrator is plagued by nightmares in which her father attempts to drag her into the netherworld, and it is her on- going attachment to him that prevents her from fully engaging with the world. Ernessa’s bond to her father (who may, in fact, still be roaming the earth) is even stronger, as evidenced by her tele- pathic revelation to the drug-addled narrator that she was unable to resist her deceased father’s call, and thus ended her own life in the Brangwyn Ho- tel, transforming herself into a vampire in the pro- cess. In keeping with the theme of narcissistic self-absorption described above, it is not surprising that suicide—the ultimate act of self-indulgence—is portrayed as the gateway to eternal youth.


39


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