Hungerstone by Kat Dunn
A very sexy and angry 'Carmilla' retelling
"To be a woman is a horror I can little comprehend."
I’ve been very excited about this book ever since I heard of it because ‘Carmilla’ by Sheridan Le Fanu is one of my favourite works of 19th century literature, for very obvious reasons. I read it when I was too old to be considered a teenager but too young to be considered any kind of adult. It was very formative and I read it because I saw a review comparing it to Dracula, which also has a lot of homoerotic subtext. It tickled me to find out that the vampire is somewhat distantly related to the protagonist, Laura, because it seemed like a nod to the incest trope in gothic literature. But lesbian vampirism aside, what stuck in my head from all those years ago was how the vampire’s name was not a fixed thing: Carmilla becomes Mircalla becomes Millarca. The shifting aspect of her name interested me precisely because no matter how the configuration changes, she still stuck to the same set of letters, which suggests that there is something unchanging at her core, something essential and central to her being that remains the same throughout the centuries. One way I thought about it was that she represented a kind of primal evil that is present even in the most innocent of children (this is the homophobic interpretation) but if we view her as symbolic of transgressive desire, then her consistency across time could be read as an acknowledgment of desire’s staying power—you can never fully repress or wipe out lesbianism.
In ‘Hungerstone,’ the figure of Carmilla makes an appearance here as a grown woman and fleshed-out character. She is discovered on the roadside by a married couple, Lenore and Henry, who are travelling to their new home in Nethershaw. Having lost her parents to a carriage accident herself and worried about maintaining Henry’s reputation, Lenore takes Carmilla into her new home and calls for a doctor. The doctor says that Carmilla needs to stay to recuperate because she has a debilitating heart condition. Lenore finds herself drawn to Carmilla from the outset, but Henry seems to find her intolerable for no reason. Lenore’s bimbotic friend, Cora, also suddenly shows up and gets involved in their matters, setting the stage for drama. Before long, strange things are happening to the women in the area—they grow ravenous and devour whatever they can get their hands on: meat pies, a live chicken, a man's arm. When caught, their reason is that they were so terribly hungry. Strange things are also happening to Lenore as she has nightmares every night, sleeps poorly, and can no longer keep food down.
The breaking point comes when Lenore finds out that Henry is cheating on her, possibly with Cora, but regardless of with who or whether she knew it was coming, she feels betrayed and humiliated. When searching for the diamonds that he bought for another woman, she finds out that he has been slowly poisoning her by coating her candy with arsenic. The plans seems to be to present his ailing wife to the party so that her death comes as no surprise later on, and then replacing her with someone younger since she has outlived her usefulness. She kept his secret from early in their marriage—that he shot a man dead after he insulted him—and figures out his latest reputation-wrecking secret: that his metalworks company has not compensated any of the injured workers or their families and that Henry is a cruel and unethical businessman. The revelations melt away her inhibitions at last and she allows herself to act on her desire for Carmilla.
When Lenore rages at Henry during dinner, he has her locked up for days before a doctor arrives to assess her condition. Carmilla breaks her out of the window and they run away to the city for a night of fun and revelry. Lenore spots Henry womanising and decides to formulate a revenge, so she sneaks back into her room and performs sanity for the doctor who arrives in the morning.
Most interesting to me was the language used to describe Carmilla in the early weeks when Lenore gazes upon her—the language of eyes, teeth, lips, skin, heat, cold, states of undress, a hypnotic voice, tearing meat, pointed words arrowed across the dinner table—which shows how much every interaction with her guest whether big or small affects her. Two-thirds of this book is a slow-burn with liberation as its end-goal. I don't mind that Carmilla is largely a plot device, a seductive and seducing character placed in Lenore's path to kickstart her enlightenment and awaken her own desire for life and pleasure. In many ways, I think vampires in fiction have always done that; they're not monsters and rarely the true villains, which are usually shitty men. The monster is in your home and in your bed, and you are financially dependent on him.
Carmilla constantly questions Lenore on her desires, so tamped down after an abusive childhood pipelined to an abusive marriage that even the thought of entertaining her own wants, let alone articulating them, triggers her flight or freeze responses. Lenore gradually realises that there is nothing wrong or bad with feeling angry, hungry, bored, irritated, and letting people know, not masking over her emotions at her own expense. Her repression takes the form of constantly checking herself to make sure she is behaving correctly so no one can fault her for a lapse in etiquette, a hangover from when she was mere self-taught teenager who had to handle her own debut and learn all she could from books. Lenore’s marriage to Henry was also a calculation on her part, a deal struck between who individuals who had use of each other if they wanted to rise up in society.
"I did not marry happiness. I married the shape of something that could look like it. But I knew its bones: security, certainty, mastery. Whatever the cost."
Lenore’s sense of inferiority compounds when she fails to conceive or bear children for Henry. She understands that there are benefits to childlessness, such as maintaining her good looks and figure, but it is scant consolation for what she believes to be her duty in this marriage. With no friends in society and no family to depend on, Henry is all she has in her life, so she spends all her waking moments making sure that she does not shame him or disappoint him; she walks on eggshells and becomes adept at reading his moods so she can adjust her behaviour to avoid incurring his ire, which is obviously an abusive situation for her. He praises her for keeping her emotions in check (meaning: repressed) because it makes her more convenient to live with:
"You are not some hysterical woman. That is your great strength: you are more like a man emotionally."
Upon their move to Nethershaw, where the climate is so damp that the house is literally rotting to pieces before their very eyes, Henry tasks her with the onerous task of renovating the entire house in a short amount of time so he can host a shooting party to make himself look good. Anyone who's had to be in charge of large-scale house renovations will know how stressful it is, but instead of helping, Henry spends his time starting an affair with her friend. Thematically, the rotting waterlogged house that Lenore is tasked to magically restore parallels her marriage with Henry—all her efforts at wallpapering over defects are futile because anyone with enough sense could see that the wood is literally scoopable and the plaster disintegrates with just the slightest touch. No amount of covering up can salvage what is already crumbling and unsalvageable.
“Before, I . . . thought the solution to the burden of myself was to end it all. How foolish that seems now. How futile. I could go, and no one would care.
How much better to make them all regret knowing me.”
I also read echoes of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ when Lenore starts tearing off parts of her room to stuff into her mouth in a bid to sate her insatiable hunger for something she does not yet know. There’s also a little of Jean Rhys’ ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ in the way Lenore must outsmart her husband who, failing to murder or imprison her, wants her committed to an asylum. The scene of Carmilla’s return was also reminiscent of Peter Pan—she just appears outside her upper-storey window as if gravity does not apply to her and whisks Lenore away to a better place, both physically and mentally.
Lenore’s reciprocal and honest relationship with Carmilla is what sets her free from the chains that she has lived with all her life, first as a neglected child, then a neglected orphan, and more recently a neglected wife. The natural next step is: revenge. I liked best how Lenore carries out her plan alone with no help from the supernatural. When she comes into her power, she does so as a hot-blooded fully human woman for whom the last straw propels her towards taking matters into her own hands, very literally—men think women weak but they forget that women have nails and teeth aplenty. he final act of this book was delicious and I relished every page. It’s always so gratifying to see a woman’s rage honed into a sharp weapon, so precise and exacting in its moves.