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Vampires
the Romantic Ideology behind Them
by Xavier Zambrano
The French Revolution constituted for the
conscience of the dominant aristocratic class a fall from innocence, and
upturning of the natural chain of events that resounded all over Europe;
the old regime became, in their imaginary, a paradise lost. This
explains why some romantic poets born in the higher classes were keen on
seeing themselves as faded aristocrats, expelled from their comfortable
milieu by a reverse of fortune or a design of destiny. Byron and Shelley
are the prime instances of this vital pose. In The Giaour he writes on a
vampiric character: "The common crowd but see the gloom/ Of wayward
deeds and fitting doom;/ The close observer can espy/A noble soul, and
lineage high."
Byron departed from England leaving a
trail of scandal over his marital conduct and since then saw himself as
an exiled expatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell in
disgrace by marrying an in-keeper's daughter; he always struggled to
reconcile his origin with his political ideas: "Shelley could find
no way of resolving his own contradictory opinions" (Cronin, 2000).
This icon of the fallen aristocrat is
rooted on another character revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel.
As Mario Praz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choice
among romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of a hideous
Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur of an angel fallen
in disgrace. Many of the byronic heros share with Milton's Satan this
fallen-from-grace condition, such as Lara: "There was in him a
vital scorn of all:/ As if the worst had fall'n which could befall,/
stood a stranger in this breathing world,/An erring spirit from another
hurl'd" ( Lara XVIII 315-16)
There is another social factor that is
behind the formation of the romantic myth of the vampire. In the early
nineteen century, the foundations of what would later become a mass
society were laid; the expansion of the press and of the reading public
produced an increased diffusion for literary works and fostered
movements such as the gothic and the sensation novel. Byron himself
experienced the event of being turned into a proto-bestseller. The
unification of literary taste and preferences that was a correlate to
this social changes could not be more alien to the romantic notion of
individual gusto and original sensibility. In order to combat this
unifying forces, romantic poets revered the individual who stands
outside society and is free from common concerns. Many of Byron's heros
look down on the masses from above, even though they walk among them and
do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature; they achieve to
remain untainted by the masses in a sort of exile within the world akin
to that of a ghost or a dammed spirit. This self-definition of Manfred
is revelatory:
From my youth upwards My spirit walk'd
not with the souls of men,
Nor look'd upon the earth with human
eyes;
The thirst of their ambition was not
mine,
The aim of their existence was not mine;
My joys, my griefs, my passions, and my
powers
Made me a stranger; though I wore the
form,
I had no sympathy with breathing flesh,
(Manfred II, ii, 50-58)
Not only Byron's works contrived to
produce the modern image of the vampire in relation to the Male Seducer
archetype, but also some odd events in his life and the life of those
surrounding him exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundled
with an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001) attributes
to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John William Polidori the
fixation of the "classical images of the literary vampire as a
villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but, above all, perverse and
fascinating for women". Mario Praz, in the same line, also states
that Byron was "largely responsible for the vogue of
vampirism". Polidori was the unfortunate doctor and personal
assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25. The idea for the tale
published in 1819 came from the famous meetings at Villa Diodati on June
1816 between Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what
was probably the most influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the
history of modern literature. In order to pass the stormy and
ether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghost story. Mary
Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during these nights the idea of
what later became Frankenstein and Polidori wrote the tale The Vampire
that he would publish three years later. The story appeared in the New
Monthly Magazine falsely attributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking
advantages of the aura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the
popular view to promote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe
hailed the story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The tale
was, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as the vampire
Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocent girls. Polidori had
introduced in the story fragments from an autobiographical and
revengeful novel called Glenarvon written by Caroline Lamb, an ex-lover
of Byron. The Lord´s reaction was a threat to the editor and the
denouncing of a commercial imposture with his name. Eventually Stoker´s
Dracula (1897) blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition
derived from Polidori´s Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungarian
tales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus the modern
images of the vampire.
The vampire is closely linked to another
romantic archetype: the dissatisfied lover. Rafael Argullol summarizes
its traits: "el enamorado romántico reconoce en la consumación
amorosa el punto de inflexión a partir del cual la pasión muestra su
faz desposedora y exterminadora.". The romantic lover begins to
feel a sense of dissatisfaction, caducity and mortality at the very
moment when his passion is fulfilled. This feeling prompts him to embark
in a sentimental rollercoaster where each peak of satisfaction is
followed by a valley of despair and the impulse to seek satisfaction in
a new object of love in order to renew the faded passion (the extreme of
this attitude is the character of Don Juan). The vampire goes one step
further than the seducer: for him the loved one stands as an image of
his own dissatisfaction and it must be destroyed at the very moment when
the longing for her disappears; at the instant of consummation. Again
Byron in Manfred expresses this transference, which Argullol opportunely
labels as romantic self-mirroring: "I loved her, and destroy'd her!
(211)". Keats conveys in his Ode on Melancholy the feeling of
mortality that is hidden in the moment of pleasure for the romantic:
"Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:/ Ay, in the very
temple of Delight/Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen
of none save him whose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy's grape against
his palate fine". La belle dame sans merci is according to Argullol
also a poem where "vida y muerte se vivifican y complementan
mutuamente [...] se hallan en total simbiosis". But there is a
crucial difference between Byron and Keats in their approach to the
fatal lover: Byron's characters are fatal males, epitomized in the
vampire, while Keats' characters are femmes fatales. This difference
underlines a different attitude to gender issues: Byron liked to emanate
a dominant masculinity which is imprinted in all his leading characters.
Keats, however, had a passive approach to love, his poetic personas like
to be seduced even if that means, as we have seen, to be killed. Byron
is the male aristocrat who thinks all women are naturally his, they are
his possessions and, as such, disposable at will. Keats, who disliked
Byron's Don Juan - in a letter to his brother, he referred to it as
"Lord Byron's last flash poem", announces a more modern and
non-patriarchal approach to love where the woman is free to be the
seducer. Nevertheless, as we have seen, they both share the extreme
notion of love as creation and destruction at the same time; and their
characters, though of different gender, are vampire lovers. This
different attitude is not only personal but it mirrors a wider and
epochal distinction. Mario Praz has observed how the fatal and cruel
lovers of the first half of the nineteenth century are chiefly males,
while in the second half of the century the roles are gradually inverted
until late century decadentism is dominated by femmes fatales. This
literary process mirrors the advancement of social changes throughout
the century, and the slow but continuous emancipation of love from
patriarchal standards. Gender issues shift focus, but power and
domination remain at the core of the portrayals of love even in the
fully bourgeoisie society of the late nineteenth century. Goodland
(2000) has explored the role of women as a redundant class subject to
another classes and the gender/class dialectic found in the vampire.
Not only Byron and Keats were fascinated
by the myth of the vampire, but we can find its presence in most
romantic poets, even in the proto-romantic early Goethe. A list of
authors who use such characters made by Twitchell (1981) comprises:
Southey in Thalaba the destroyer, Coleridge in Christabel and Wordsworth
in The Leech Gatherer.
As we have seen throughout this paper the
figure of the vampire is shaped in the romantic period under the form of
an ideological knot where many social forces converge: the French
Revolution, an embryonic mass society, the decline of aristocracy and
the gradual shifting apart of gender divisions from the patriarchal
model. Therefore, it constitutes a myth that may be read as a
battleground for the play of discourses of its era, shedding light on
other romantic attitudes towards existence. As such it is subject to an
analysis that, as new historicisms maintain, is aware of the historicity
of a text and the textuality of history.
About the Author
Xavier Zambrano has a degree in English
Philology and is the webmaster of the blog A Picture and a Sentence
that blends painting and literary quotes and is updated on a daily
basis:
Painting
and Quotes
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