From the lonely castles of nineteenth-century gothic fiction to the glittering skies of twenty-first-century Oz, stories of female outsiders have been told with equal parts fascination and fear. Sheridan Le Fanu’s landmark vampire novella Carmilla (1872) and Gregory Maguire’s revisionist fantasy Wicked (1995), along with its monumental stage and film adaptations, stand as powerful exemplars of this tradition. Each reimagines the archetypal “monster” not as a soulless villain but as a complex figure defined by her capacity for love. In both tales, the outsider’s profound bond with another young woman hints at the possibility of solidarity across profound cultural barriers: Carmilla and Laura find intimacy in whispered confessions, while Elphaba and Galinda forge a genuine, if awkward, friendship. For a moment, we glimpse the hope that love, not violence, might offer a resolution.

This hope, however, is structurally designed to be denied. In Carmilla, a patriarchal order intervenes to violently destroy the vampire, leaving Laura hauted but safely re-assimilated. In Wicked, Galinda ascends to a position of beloved authority while Elphaba is vilified and exiled, her difference transformed into a public legend of wickedness. The intimacy that once seemed redemptive collapses into erasure and tragedy, and what is left is not a new harmony but the stark reassertion of the existing social hierarchy.

At the heart of this comparative analysis, therefore, lies a potent and recurring narrative pattern: both Carmilla and Wicked, despite their temporal and generic distance, meticulously stage the radical possibility of solidarity between a female protagonist and a “monstrous” other, only to deliberately foreclose that union in order to reaffirm the dominant social order. Through an examination of shared motifs — the stigma of origin, the formation of a forbidden bond, the assertion of outsider power, and the manipulation of public fear — this essay will argue that the tragic severance of this relationship is not a failure of plotting but the narrative’s central ideological function. In these stories, society imagines loving the monster, but ultimately cannot allow her to survive.

The Illegitimate Spark: How Forbidden Bonds Are Forged

The relationships at the heart of both Wicked and Carmilla are founded on a violation of social norms from their very inception, as each bond is forged directly from the stigma that defines the outsider. Both Elphaba and Carmilla enter their respective narratives already marked as illegitimate beings whose very existence challenges the established order. Elphaba is a biological and social aberration, her green skin an undeniable sign of her mother’s infidelity and a visible marker of her exclusion from normative society in Oz. Her otherness is public and political from birth. Carmilla’s otherness is more spectral and insidious; her arrival at Laura’s schloss is steeped in the gothic taboo of the uncanny, a supernatural continuity that links her mysteriously to Laura’s childhood dreams and the unresolved absence of her mother. As Elizabeth Signorotti notes, the novella “creates a triangle of desire between Laura, Carmilla, and the absent mother” that destabilizes patriarchal authority while foregrounding female intimacy.¹ Whether the mark is biological or supernatural, it serves the same function: to cast the outsider as a figure who exists outside the bounds of legitimate society before she has even acted.

By all logic, this inherent stigma should provoke repulsion and ensure exclusion. Yet, in both narratives, what society deems monstrous or unnatural becomes the very source of a powerful, magnetic intimacy. The forced proximity of Elphaba and the popular Galinda as roommates at Shiz University should, by all accounts, solidify Elphaba’s status as a pariah. Instead, their comic hostility unexpectedly melts into a genuine, if fraught, affection. Galinda’s frivolous attempts to “improve” Elphaba in the song “Popular” begin as an assertion of social superiority but end as an act of authentic care, acknowledging the outsider as someone worthy of attention. Similarly, Carmilla’s strangeness — her nocturnal habits, her passionate declarations, and her physical languor — oscillates between threat and tenderness. For Laura, whose existence in a secluded Styrian schloss is defined by isolation, Carmilla’s unsettling presence fills a profound void. Terry Castle famously observes that the novella dramatizes “a lesbian panic” in which desire is both irresistible and terrifying.² The terror of Carmilla’s vampiric nature becomes inseparable from a deep, seductive attraction.

Ultimately, these bonds are not forged in spite of difference, but because of it. Elphaba’s fierce intelligence and moral clarity offer a substance that the superficial world of Shiz University lacks, providing an anchor for Galinda’s otherwise flighty character. Carmilla’s forbidden, aristocratic allure awakens a passion in Laura that her highly structured, patriarchal world seeks to repress. In both cases, the insider is drawn to the outsider precisely because she represents an alternative to the rigid social order they inhabit. This spark of affection is therefore inherently transgressive — an illegitimate bond that poses an immediate, if unrecognized, threat to the worlds of Oz and Styria.

The Outsider’s Power and Society’s Backlash

The turning point in both tales occurs when the outsider’s latent power becomes manifest, forcing society to react. This is not a gradual evolution but a catalytic moment of self-realization that makes the outsider’s threat to the status quo undeniable. For Elphaba, this transformation is a literal and spectacular ascent. In the climactic anthem “Defying Gravity,” she sheds her victimhood, embraces her magic, and physically rises above the corrupt authority of the Wizard. It is a public declaration of independence and a powerful act of political rebellion. In parallel, Carmilla’s power emerges in the gothic intimacy of the bedchamber. As her vampiric influence over Laura deepens — a quiet, nocturnal dominion of shared breaths and seductive whispers — she asserts a form of ownership that defies patriarchal control. Her power is not political and public, but it is no less absolute, representing an intimate sovereignty over Laura’s body, mind, and desires.

This very assertion of power — whether public or private — triggers an immediate and defensive backlash from the dominant order. The authorities in both narratives are forced to neutralize this emergent female agency, and their primary weapon is narrative itself. It is Elphaba’s heroic defiance that directly prompts the Wizard’s propaganda machine to officially brand her the “Wicked Witch of the West.” Her act of liberation is systematically reframed as an act of pure evil, transforming a political dissident into a public monster to unify the citizens of Oz through fear. Likewise, as the male authority figures in Carmilla — Laura’s father, General Spielsdorf, and the vampire hunter Baron Vordenburg — begin to comprehend the supernatural power Carmilla holds over Laura, they mobilize to define her. They consult ancient texts and interpret her actions through the pre-existing script of the demonic vampire, casting her not as a complex individual or a lover, but as a monstrous parasite, a spiritual contagion that must be ritually purged.

This construction of the monster is bolstered by the reassertion of a socially sanctioned, heteronormative order. In Oz, the romantic subplot involving the dashing prince Fiyero serves to triangulate and thus contain the radical potential of the bond between Elphaba and Galinda. Fiyero becomes a symbol of legitimacy, and the conflict over his affections reframes their relationship within a familiar, less threatening romantic rivalry, ultimately validating Galinda’s position within the social hierarchy. In Carmilla, this function is served not by a single rival but by the entire edifice of patriarchy. The collective authority of the fathers and generals represents a rigid order that cannot sanction, or even comprehend, a sapphic, supernatural intimacy. This patriarchal structure defines Carmilla’s love as a corrupting disease precisely because it operates outside their control. In both cases, this heteronormative framework serves the same structural purpose: it delegitimizes the threatening bond between the women and provides the social and moral justification for its inevitable severance.

The Architecture of Foreclosure: How Harmony Is Dismantled

At their emotional apex, both narratives offer a powerful, sincere glimpse of reconciliation. In Wicked, the duet “For Good” presents a moment of profound mutual recognition, where Elphaba and Galinda acknowledge that their lives have been irrevocably changed for the better by their bond. In Carmilla, Laura’s deep, though anxious, affection for her companion blossoms into a confession of love, suggesting a future of shared devotion. Yet, this promise of harmony is a deliberate narrative feint, a high point from which the fall will be all the more devastating. Ultimately, this possibility is not just denied but systematically dismantled, and the methods employed in each story reveal the distinct logics of their respective social orders.

Wicked employs a modern, insidious strategy of political and narrative erasure. Elphaba is not simply killed; she is exiled into myth, her history actively rewritten by the powerful state she opposed. The severance is achieved through propaganda. The ruling regime transforms her complex identity into the one-dimensional caricature of the “Wicked Witch,” a public enemy whose legend serves to unify the citizenry of Oz and legitimize Galinda’s rule. As “Galinda the Good,” she becomes a willing, if sorrowful, accomplice in this erasure. Her survival and her celebrated status are contingent upon her acceptance of this false history. The emotional sincerity of “For Good” thus masks a deep structural betrayal, where the bond is publicly severed and its memory weaponized by the state. Yet, the faint ambiguity of Elphaba’s disappearance — the possibility that she survives beyond the myth — offers a residue of resistance, a shadowed reminder that the monster may endure in hidden form.

Carmilla, on the other hand, relies on the brutal, pre-modern logic of ritualistic violence. There is no bittersweet farewell or political maneuvering; there is a staking, a decapitation, and a burning. The patriarchal order does not bother to rewrite Carmilla’s story for public consumption — it annihilates her body to “purify” Laura and restore the natural, male-dominated order. Yet even here, foreclosure is not total. Laura’s haunting narration, tinged with sorrow and lingering affection, suggests that the bond resists erasure through memory. As she recounts her tale years later, Carmilla lives on not as a mere monster but as a deeply loved presence, destabilizing the neat closure the men attempted to enforce.

Though the methods differ starkly — one a modern act of political narrative control, the other an ancient spectacle of physical purgation — the ideological outcome is nearly identical. Whether the outsider is erased through myth or immolation, the result is the attempted neutralization of the revolutionary potential of her bond with the insider. The social order, be it the polished authoritarianism of Oz or the rigid patriarchy of Styria, reasserts its dominance. Yet both endings also contain cracks: a vanishing witch who may yet live, and a survivor who cannot forget. These fissures complicate the triumph of the social order, suggesting that even in tragedy, forbidden affection leaves traces that cannot be wholly contained.

A Tragedy Imposed

From Gregory Maguire’s emerald-skinned outcast to Sheridan Le Fanu’s nocturnal aristocrat, both Wicked and Carmilla radically reimagine the female monster as a figure who longs not for destruction, but for love. Each narrative opens a door to the revolutionary possibility of solidarity, forging a profound bond between an outsider and an insider that momentarily promises a world where difference is not annihilated but embraced. As we have traced, however, this door is opened only so that it may be decisively shut. The arc of this tragedy is both consistent and ideologically potent: an illegitimate bond is forged in defiance of social stigma, but the moment the outsider’s power becomes manifest, the dominant order mobilizes to construct her as a monster, neutralize her agency, and justify her removal.

Ultimately, both texts recoil from the radical vision they create. The promise of harmony collapses under the weight of a social order that cannot accommodate it. In Wicked, Elphaba soars in defiance only to be exiled into a villainous myth, a narrative erasure that secures Galinda’s legitimate rule. In Carmilla, the vampire’s undeniable passion is met with the unyielding violence of a patriarchy that must physically annihilate what it cannot control. Whether the method is the modern scalpel of political propaganda or the ancient stake of ritualistic purification, the function is the same: the insider survives, the outsider is destroyed, and the bond that might have rewritten the terms of social belonging is tragically and purposefully severed. Yet, in both stories, memory and ambiguity refuse to die quietly, ensuring that the monster remains mourned, remembered, or imagined beyond her destruction.

This recurring pattern, visible across a century and a half of storytelling, reveals a deep and persistent cultural anxiety about any form of female solidarity — be it queer, political, or racial — that challenges a patriarchal and heteronormative status quo. These stories allow us to mourn the monster, but they also hint that the social order’s victory is never as total as it claims. In the gaps — Laura’s haunted recollections, or Elphaba’s shadowy survival — remains the possibility that love of the outsider cannot be fully extinguished.

Notes

Elizabeth Signorotti, “Repossessing the Body: Transgressive Desire in Carmilla and Dracula,” Criticism 38, no. 4 (1996): 607–632.

Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 53–54.

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