Day 4 ‘A Scare a Day’ – ‘The Vampyre’ by Polidori

I’ve read this story a lot and I’ve talked about it a lot. I’ve taught it, I’ve written about it, I’ve recorded myself talking about it… I want to try and not just repeat myself with this blog so I’m going to point you to my latest relevant talk. In this investigation of the relationship between Byron and vampires, I give the story of the origin of this story (contested!) and its publication (confusing!) The potted version is that it goes back to the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati where Byron challenged the others there – the Shelleys, Claire Clairmont (Mary Shelley’s step-sister) and John Polidori (Byron’s doctor) – to write their own tales. It led (famously) to the creation of Frankenstein (1818). it also gave us this story, started by Byron and abandoned. What exactly happened next is a matter of debate but Polidori took the story outline and created his own vampire tale. There’s a lot more to it and I go into that all here.

This story is pivotal to the development of the modern vampire. Polidori branches out from contemporary accounts of the vampyre (you can read some of those accounts here!) I think it’s the first reference to the vampire specifically targeting the neck. Of course, some aspects didn’t really stick. The somewhat confusing law about him having to kill and drain a ‘lovely female’ once a year doesn’t really seem to be followed through in the story (why does he marry Aubrey’s sister? Why does he seem to need to kill Ianthe if the lady he was seducing before disappeared presumably with him?) and doesn’t translate into much later literature. Similarly, the emphasis on randomly popping his body on a mountain top to be seen by the moon… hasn’t become a major part of vampire lore! However, importantly, it’s where we get the vampire as insouciant aristocrat, the superior outsider, the individual and outcast. I do feel though that Polidori might be quite upset with the sexy legacy of his vampire considering how much of the tale is dedicated to showing what a hollow shell the Byronic veneer is and how rotten the heart behind it can be.

Polidori spends a lot of energy in the story specifically deconstructing the ‘romantic idea’ of both novels and the Byronic hero. We’re introduced to Aubrey as a naive young rich guy who had ‘that high romantic feeling of honour and candour, which daily ruins so many milliners’ apprentices’ who thinks ‘the dreams of poets were the realities of life.’ Neither the narrator nor Polidori himself could any more pointed with that bit of commentary. However, Polidori isn’t sure we’ve got it so he makes sure we realise along with Aubrey that ‘there was no foundation in real life for any of that congeries of pleasing pictures and descriptions contained in those volumes.’ Aubrey takes these propensities and applies them wholesale to Lord Ruthven – the mysterious aristocrat who seems so aloof. His particular brand of attractive enigma is catnip to the young Aubrey who ‘soon formed this object into the hero of a romance’. However, it’s not just Aubrey who’s at fault here – it’s the very idea of the romantic hero. Aubrey might be observing ‘the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him’, but everyone else does the same. They all fall for the spiel, the Romantic self-creation, the self-conscious Byronic posture of our villain. After all, ‘who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount – could speak of himself as of an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself; – could tell how, since he knew her, his existence had begun to seem worthy of preservation, if it were merely that he might listen to her soothing accents.’ Polidori takes the elements of the Byronic hero (and Byron’s own self-creation) and attaches them to a monster. Because, underneath it all, Ruthven is an amoral monster who sneers at the world, laughs in exultation at torturing his earnest victim Aubrey, views women as tools in his little cat and mouse game with his youthful friend/enemy, and has no greater pleasure than ruining their morals, their reputations and their lives before sucking the life out of them. Literally.

One of the things that stuck out to me this time of reading is how Polidori doesn’t manage to transcend his villainous material in how he depicts women. Either they ‘sully [domestic virtues] through their vices’ or get to play the innocent and devoted wife/mother/sister/relation of noble young men. His depiction of Ianthe (the Greek girl who Aubrey seems to be in love with) is a strange mix of baffling and nauseating. A ‘frank infantile being’ (gross) who appears to spend her days ‘danc[ing] along the plain or trip[ping] along the mountain’s side’ when she’s not earnestly telling vampire tales of (randomly) chasing butterflies. His sister comes in for some more sober praise as we’re told that ‘her step was not that light footing, which strays where’er a butterfly or a colour may attract.’ Personally, I love it when women are portrayed as being unable to resist pretty colours. Just wandering around pointing at butterflies with glee and crying ‘pink!’ before barbie-skipping across the meadow. This is a book with a surprisingly high number of female characters but they aren’t real to either Ruthven or Aubrey. Nor the narrator. Make of that what you will.