Van Egmont’s staged scene and Eurocentric characters suggest Cleopatra’s flair for the theatrical and her cultural fluidity. In the tapestry, van Egmont has rendered Cleopatra, the last active pharaoh of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, as a royal European. Such opulence mirrors the stateliness of Carmilla’s chamber and the grand depiction of the schloss.

The border of the scene, with its floral arrangements, fruit, and cherubs, is replete with decadence. She and her two maidservants are robed in flowing silks and covered with jewels and pearls. The Flemish tapestry is luxurious–Cleopatra sits in her bedchamber beneath a rich, tasselled velvet curtain. The iconography of van Egmont’s tapestry, like that of Le Fanu’s depiction of Carmilla, participates in a mythologizing of both women. I argue that this invocation of Cleopatra emphasizes Carmilla’s mysterious, almost-mythical presence in an attempt to highlight the ambiguity of gender in the Victorian age. Both tapestry and text paint Carmilla and Cleopatra as languid femme fatales. Though there is no evidence to suggest that Le Fanu was aware of or saw van Egmont’s 1650 Flemish tapestry, such a tapestry could have been the one imagined in Carmilla’s bedchamber. Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artstor, /asset/GETTY_GGTAP_1031174580. Death of Cleopatra, Story of Cleopatra and Mark Antony, 1650. Justus van Egmont, seventeenth-century painter and tapestry designer, designed a series of tapestries titled “The Story of Antony and Cleopatra,” one of which bears the name, “The Death of Cleopatra” (Figure 1).Įgmont, Justus van.

What might Cleopatra’s “shadow” and this “reminder” suggest about Carmilla? To answer this question, it is perhaps helpful to analyze a tapestry depicting Cleopatra’s death. Barbara Lonnquist in “Paler by Comparison” explains that, during the Victorian period, the legacy of Cleopatra’s “myth survived, in dismembered or disembodied forms,” and “the pallid vampire” is one of “her shadows, and reminders of a more glorious, or at least more human, feminine past” (73). I’m intrigued by this invocation of Cleopatra and her death in connection with Carmilla. There was a sombre piece of tapestry opposite the foot of the bed, representing Cleopatra with the asps to her bosom and other solemn classic scenes were displayed, a little faded, upon the other walls” (Le Fanu 22-3). Carmilla, the languid, beautiful vampire, is invited to stay at Laura’s father’s schloss in Styria, where she is placed in an ornate bedroom to recover from a carriage accident: “Our visitor lay in one of the handsomest rooms in the schloss. Carmilla, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Victorian Gothic novel published in four installments in The Dark Bluein 1871-1872, is an early vampire tale.

Carmilla joseph sheridan