27 pages • 54 minutes read
John PolidoriThe Vampyre
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1819A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: John Polidori
The Vampyre is the first published prose work by John William Polidori (1795-1821), who was not a writer by profession. He was a medical doctor traveling with Lord Byron as the poet’s personal physician. In the summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, Polidori participated with house guests in a ghost-story writing contest proposed by Byron. The guests included poet Percy Shelley and author Mary Shelley. Polidori told a story about a skull-headed woman who peered through a keyhole, while Mary Shelley penned the beginnings of her seminal novel Frankenstein. Byron’s contribution to the contest was an incomplete vampire story later published as “A Fragment” in 1819.
Polidori used “A Fragment” as the framework for The Vampyre, published the same year as Byron’s fragment. Byron’s tale is narrated in the form of a letter written in 1816 by the younger traveling companion of Augustus Darvell, an enigmatic and emotionally remote man. During their journey east, the narrator observes that Darvell appears to be wasting away. Just before he dies, Darvell makes the narrator swear that he will conceal his friend’s death and perform a ritual involving Darvell’s ornate ring. In the introduction to his novel Ernestus Berchtold, Polidori recalled more about the plot of Byron’s tale than the poet committed to paper:
Two friends were to travel from England into Greece; while there, one of them should die, but before his death, should obtain from his friend an oath of secrecy with regard to his decease. Some short time after, the remaining traveller returning to his native country, should be startled at perceiving his former companion moving about in society, and should be horrified at finding that he made love to his former friend’s sister (Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1819).
The Vampyre was first published in the April 1, 1819, issue of the New Monthly Magazine, where it was misattributed as “A Tale by Lord Byron,” due to the text’s internal references to Byron’s persona in Ruthven. Polidori published a letter in the same magazine claiming ownership, yet the story continued to be misconstrued as Byron’s work for decades after its publication. Polidori compounded the misattribution by modeling Lord Ruthven, the story’s titular vampire, on Byron and his reputation as a rake and libertine.
Literary Context: Gothic Fiction and Vampires
Gothic fiction is a type of genre fiction that began in the mid-18th-century with the publication of Englishman Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, whose second edition was subtitled “A Gothic Story.” The novel features ghosts, the supernatural, excessive sin and vices, and corrupted aristocracies. Gothic fiction is named so for the Gothic architecture prominent throughout Europe. The Gothic Revival movement began in the 1840s. This nouveau-Gothic architecture inspired the descriptions and atmosphere of the titular castle in Otranto. Gothic fiction, like all horror subgenres, operates on culturally-contextual fears. Scholars often consider the core fear of gothic horror to be an empire’s ethnocentric fear about its borders and the supposed moral degradation present in the empire’s peripheral territories. The beginning of The Vampyre tells that vampiric lore comes from “the East” and “Arabians,” placing the origin of vampirism in locations colonized, and feared, by Europeans on the peripheries of their empires.
Gothic fiction typically features aristocracies in decay, rampant vice and sin, supernatural occurrences, and crumbling castles and cathedrals far away from Western Europe’s cities. Otranto was purported to be a manuscript from an “ancient Catholic family” in the “North of England,” placing the titular aristocratic family on the margins of English society, both as Catholics amongst protestants and along the Scottish border, considered a “frontier” by the English. Classical gothic literature frequently takes place in or near eastern Europe, or in colonies. Other foundational texts for Gothic fiction are The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis, and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). Gothic fiction’s fixation on irrationality, sin, and the supernatural is a reaction against the logic, science, and rationality of the Enlightenment.
In his study Vampires: Genesis and Resurrection from Count Dracula to Vampirella, scholar Christopher Frayling credits The Vampyre with being “the first story successfully to fuse the disparate elements of vampirism into a coherent literary genre” (Thames & Hudson, 2016). Before the publication of Polidori’s story, the vampire was a folklore figure—typically, a reanimated corpse with a ravenous thirst for blood. The folkloric vampire was inhuman and more like modern-day notions of zombies.
Polidori drew on eastern and continental folklore concerned with the legendary vampire and applied it to the character of the gothic villain, who traditionally is depicted as a seducer and/or defiler of innocent young women. By giving his villain a supernatural pedigree, Polidori launched gothic literature’s vampire subgenre and introduced conventions that would become fixtures in fiction. These include the fatal attractiveness of the vampire villain, the vampire’s predatory behavior toward female victims, the vampire’s need to drink blood to sustain his own unnatural life, and the resurrection of the vampire from the dead as a living corpse.
Polidori’s Ruthven combines the hallmarks of vampire folklore with the archetypal gothic villain: An aristocratic man with a history of morally suspect behavior who endangers innocent women. Ruthven’s resurrection from the dead is supernatural, yet the deaths of the women in the short story are violently stylized depictions of the classic gothic villain’s penchant for attacking women’s social prestige by implying illicit sexual affairs between Ruthven and the women. The vampire is innovative as a gothic villain because the vampire is not confined to the margins of Europe’s empire, unlike traditional gothic villains. Where Otranto occurs in a remote location, Ruthven invades the imperial core and corrupts the morals of people within the heart of the empire. Aubrey learns of Ruthven’s true nature in Greece and Rome, places considered “periphery” by the imperial powers of Polidori’s time (England, France, and the Netherlands). Ruthven, like Dracula, is implied to be an external interloper who brings his moral decay into the places that were thought to be the most safe and secure in England’s core territory. Polidori’s Ruthven began a sensationalist obsession with the image of the vampire because of the vampire’s ability to bring the Gothic home to territory familiar to Polidori’s contemporary readers. The vampire condensed gothic motifs of hedonism and rampant sexuality into an individual antagonist.
Ruthven has traits that set him apart from many vampire characters that appear after The Vampyre: He is as active during daylight hours as at night, and he is vulnerable to injuries that are just as fatal to mortals. Polidori makes no mention of whether a vampire might be killed in a way that would prevent his resurrection. As the foundational literary vampire, Polidori’s Ruthven is the framework that later writers would build on and alter to serve the purposes of their stories.
