Sickness or Modern Women

A play on the reversal of male ideas of femininity. The housewife and mother Carmilla who is defined by her reproductive skills is turned into a vampire by the lesbian nurse, writer and vampire Emily (an homage to Emily Brontë). In the end, she even goes after her own children. But an escape from the closed system of male attributions still fails, just as does Carmilla’s attempt to redefine the non-place she finds herself in (“I am ill, therefore I am”), as it just reconfirms stereotypical female ideals. In the play, Vampirism is a metaphor for female existence which, since women are simultaneously a part of the ruling order and excluded from it, is always a transient existence. On the other hand, it can also be interpreted as a metaphor for a kind of writing which, when interwoven with traditional texts, violently misappropriates them and puts them into a new context.