The Riseof the VAMPIRE
by Dr. Grace Moore

During a wet and unpleasant summer in 1816, a group of young writers gathered at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland. Having been confined to the house for several days by the inclement weather, they sought distraction by reading a series of chilling ghost stories. Stimulated by spine-tingling tales of the supernatural, one of the writers, Lord Byron, proclaimed "We will each write a ghost story." The group, whose members included the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (later Mary Shelley), Mary's half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Byron's private physician, Dr. John Polidori (later to become an uncle of the Pre-Raphaelite writer Christina Rossetti and the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti), set to work on the task with gusto. The assignment turned out to be far more difficult than it had initially appeared. Many years later, in an introduction to an 1831 edition of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley described some of the obstacles the authors faced.
"[Percy] Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course ... he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted."
Percy Shelley and Claire Clairmont both eventually failed to proffer ghost stories, despite their best efforts, and the project's initiator, Lord Byron, came up with only a fragment. Although initially intimidated by the challenge, however, Mary's contribution was to become her most famous work, Frankenstein, while—after the false start outlined above— Dr. Polidori's offering, a short story about a fiendish nobleman named Ruthven entitled "The Vampyre," catapulted stories of the blood-sucking undead into the nineteentii-century literary imagination.
John Polidori's story was first published on April Fool's Day, 1819 in The New Monthly Magazine. The piece had somewhat mysteriously arrived at the magazine offices as part of a bundle of documents which included a letter packed with gossip and speculation about the exploits of a certain unconventional group of writers during the summer of 1816. The story ended up being attributed to Byron rather than Polidori, however, because, according to gothic literature scholars Chris Baldick and Robert Morrison, the magazine's proprietor, Henry Colburn, had seized upon the name Ruthven as a direct reference to a thinly-disguised fictitious representation of Lord Byron in a novel entitled Glenarvon by his spurned former mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb, and had assumed the story must have been penned by Byron.
Acutally, the inspiration for Polidori's story had come from Byron's unfinished piece "Augustus Darvell"—an aborted product of the ghost story contest—but Polidori wrote "The Vampyre" alone, later changing the name of his character from Ruthven to Strongmore in a bid to distance his character from his former associate, the poet reputed to be "mad, bad, and dangerous to know." Both Byron and Polidori, who had by then parted company somewhat acrimoniously, wrote to The New Monthly to set the record straight. The story, meanwhile, became a runaway success, and when it was published in book form in 1819 it went through seven editions almost immediately. "The Vampyre" was turned into a play, widely translated, and even expanded into a novel by the French writer Cyprien Bérard.
In spite of Polidori's protestations, there were many parallels between his alluringly sensual vampire and the charismatic seducer, Lord Byron. Lord Ruthven is an extremely attractive and compelling figure who seems bent on destroying the reputations of innocent society ladies and trapping men into penury through gambling. It is not sufficient for him to compromise his victims. Instead, those he preys upon must become "the partner of his guilt . . . hurled from the pinnacle of unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation." The satanic Ruthven becomes the friend of a young man named Aubrey, who is horrified to learn of the rumors surrounding his companion and rapidly seeks to distance himself from him. While traveling in Europe, the object of Aubrey's affections, the pure and beautiful Ianthe, becomes one of Ruthven's victims, leaving Aubrey distraught. Nevertheless, he and Ruthven are briefly reconciled before they are ambushed by a gang of robbers who appear to mortally wound the vampiric aristocrat. Before he dies Ruthven extracts a promise from Aubrey that he will not reveal his friend's peculiar and sinister history for a year and a day. Aubrey agrees, although he is slightly disquieted when the evil lord's body disappears before it can be buried.
On his return to England following an apparent nervous breakdown, Aubrey finds his sister smitten by a man known as the Earl of Marsden, who he is horrified to discover bears more than a passing resemblance to Ruthven. Polidori emphasized the entrancing qualities of the vampire, who depended not only on superior strength, but also upon gaining complete mastery over his victims:
"Who could resist his power? His tongue had dangers and toils to recount—could speak of himself as an individual having no sympathy with any being on the crowded earth, save with her to whom he addressed himself ... in fine, he knew so well how to use the serpent's art, or such was the will of fate, that he gained her affections."
Bound by his oath and dogged by ill health that leads others to question his sanity, Aubrey is unable to warn his sister about Ruthven's true nature and his attempts to prevent their marriage are thwarted. Unlike later vampire adventures, where the dangerous fiend is always ultimately defeated and contained by a group of committed heroes, Polidori's short story ends with Ruthven's triumph. Miss Aubrey is killed, poor Aubrey himself dies of an ironically significant blood disorder, and the eponymous vampire disappears altogether, presumably to wreak havoc elsewhere within London society.
Although he popularized the vampire story, Polidori did not invent it. One of the earliest references to the vampire in English comes from the anonymous book, Travels of Three English Gentlemen from Venice to Hamburgh, published in 1745 which explains to the unfamiliar reader that:
"These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them."
The origins of the vampire myth are themselves difficult to establish and seem to go back to ancient times. Some scholars hark back to the Lilith story in the Hebrew bible as the first reference to a vampire, while others regard a mythical cannibalistic queen of Libya as the progenitor of the mythical figures. The origins of the word "vampire" are equally difficult to trace. Some linguists suggest that it stems from the Lithuanian word "wempti," which means "to drink," and others think that it is a corruption of the Turkish word "uber" (meaning witch), which was transformed into "upior" when translated into Slavic, and then eventually became "vampyre" or "vampire" when the English form emerged in the 1700s. By that time, the word had also become common in other countries. In Spain, they were known as "vampiros," Germans referred to them as "Blutsaeugers," and the French spoke of "les vampires."
Blood-sucking creatures of the night appealed to many nineteenth-century authors besides Polidori, including Keats and Coleridge and other Romantic writers. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1814-1873)—an Irish writer fascinated by all aspects of the supernatural—picked up on the vampire myth in his novella of 1872, Carmilla. Le Fanu's works were extremely popular and his admirers included such eminent Victorian authors as Henry James and M.R. James. Indeed, M.R. James, the author of some of the nineteenth century's uncanniest and most terrifying tales, commented that Le Fanu stood "absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories."
Like Ruthven, Carmilla preys upon innocent young women, but unlike her precursor, she does not work alone. Instead, Carmilla is introduced to her victims by a woman purporting to be her mother, who takes advantage of their naive hospitality towards the helpless young woman by leaving her in their care while she rushes to the bedside of a sick relation. Although Carmilla is presented as lacking physical strength and vigor, it is soon the young healthy daughters of her caretakers who begin to sicken and die. But everyone is nevertheless taken with her, for Carmilla, like Ruthven, is highly attractive—as the narrator describes:
"Her looks lost nothing in daylight—she was certainly the most beautiful creature I had ever seen, and the unpleasant remembrance of the face presented in my early dream, had lost the effect of the first unexpected recognition."
However, it rapidly becomes clear that there is something highly sinister about the beautiful young woman that goes beyond both the uncanny sense of déjà vu her innocent young victims experience on encountering her, and the unsettling resemblance she bears to a painting of a long-dead noblewoman named Micalla (an anagram, of course, of "Carmilla"), the Countess of Karnstein. Carmilla is a figure people tend to recall seeing in their nightmares and in visions and she has to work hard to surmount the initial distrust she evokes. However, unlike the smooth, urbane Ruthven, Carmilla is volatile and uncontrolled. She loses her temper with a traveling salesman who, rather humourously, offers to grind down her excessively pointed teeth, and she becomes easily agitated when quizzed on religious matters. After a discussion of hymn-singing, Carmilla is almost consumed with anger and revulsion:
"Her face underwent a change that alarmed and even terrified me for a moment. It darkened and became horribly livid; her teeth and hands were clenched, and she frowned and compressed her lips, while she stared down upon the ground at her feet, and trembled all over with a continued shudder as irrepressible as ague. All her energies seemed strained to suppress a fit, with which she was then breathlessly tugging; and at length a low convulsive cry of suffering broke from her, and gradually the hysteria subsided."
Although she is unable to disguise her evil, a number of people die from a mysterious wasting illness before Carmilla is finally ensnared and her true history discovered. She turns out to have been the victim of a tragic love story, and the reader is left with the sense that her entrapment may offer her some form of relief from centuries of suffering and anguish.
Dracula, the creation of another Irish writer, Bram Stoker, in his 1897 novel of the same name, is probably the best-known of all nineteenth-century vampires. The character has assumed a life of its own far beyond the confines of the novel, appearing in movies, cartoons, and even on cereal boxes. Indeed, the name Dracula has become almost synonymous with the word "vampire" in the public mind. Even those who have never read Stoker's novel are nonetheless familiar with the character, who has been immortalized and reinterpreted in many well-known films, including the original silent vampire movie Nosferatu (1922), the Hammer horror films of the 1960s, and, more recently, Francis Ford
Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula (1994). More than a hundred years after his initial appearance, Dracula's popularity shows no sign of abating, and the novel remains a bestseller.
Count Dracula was in fact a real person, and not simply a figment of Stoker's extraordinary imagination. Known as "Vlad the Impaler," owing to his fondness for impaling his enemies on stakes, Vlad Tepes was born in what is now Romania in 1431, the son of the "voivode," or ruler of the region of Wallachia. The name "Dracula" seems to have come from his father Vlad's membership in a chivalric order known as "The Order of the Dragon" which aimed to defend Christianity against Turkish invaders. Vlad senior assumed the name Dracul (from the Latin "draco," meaning "dragon") and his son became Dracula, meaning "son of Dracul." Following the assassinations of both his father and his elder brother around 1448, Vlad became voivode for the first time, although he was swiftly overthrown by the Turks. He succeeded in returning to power twice. In 1856 he managed to rule for six years before being defeated in battles against his Turkish enemies and retreating into Transylvania, where he was apparently captured and became a prisoner of the Hungarian monarch. He reclaimed the throne one last time in 1476, but was killed in battle during the same year. Although considered a freedom fighter by his own people, Vlad the Impaler acquired a ferocious reputation across Europe during his lifetime. Dracula expert Elizabeth Miller suggests that purportedly biographical pamphlets printed in Germany with titles like The Frightening and Truly Extraordinary Story of a Wicked Blood-Drinking Tyrant Called Prince Dracula were largely responsible for creating an aura of terror around the voivode. Miller also takes pains to remind readers that there is no evidence to suggest that the historical Dracula was ever accused of vampirism.
The details of Bram Stoker's own familiarity with the historical Dracula are rather sketchy. Although his papers tell us that he had originally planned to entitle the novel Count Wampyr and that he did a small amount of research into the life of "Voivode Dracula," it is difficult to ascertain exactly how much Stoker really knew about his model for the Count. In Stoker's book, Dracula certainly catalogues a series of important battles to his somewhat unwilling guest, the English solicitor Jonathan Harker, and he clearly exhibits great pride in his noble lineage. It is also possible that Stoker adapted the impaler myth and turned it around so that instead of killing people with stakes, his Dracula could only be destroyed by being staked through the heart—a part of the vampire myth that originated in 1897 with Stoker's story. Stoker's knowledge of Eastern European folklore was, though, not sufficiently strong enough to build an entire novel around and it is perhaps for this reason that he rapidly removed his aristocratic villain to a more familiar cityscape.
Although associated with creepy gothic castles in Transylvania, very little of the action in Dracula actually takes place in Eastern Europe. Instead, the plot centers around the fear that, having purchased property in London, Dracula intends to transplant himself to the capital and turn the metropolis into a city of the undead. In her excellent book Our Vampires, Ourselves (1997), Victorian scholar Nina Auerbach points out that Dracula signals an interesting departure from previous vampire fiction. In earlier nineteenth-century narratives the vampire had always been a friend to his or her victim, rather than a stranger. However, Stoker's vampire exploits the anonymity of turn-of-the-century London, losing himself in the enormous crowds and relishing the prospect of preying on the masses. Dracula is an elegant, urbane man who summons Jonathan Harker from his offices in Exeter to cross the Carpathian Mountains and visit him at Castle Dracula, and who, initially at least, has a purely professional relationship with Harker. Jonathan's account of his arrival at Castle Dracula is chilling in the extreme, and it is clear that the local peasants are terrified of his final destination. After he notices a number of oddities, such as the fact that his host has no reflection, and that the wealthy Count has no servants to look after him and sleeps in a coffin by day, Jonathan panics. He tries to escape and is imprisoned by the Count, who then removes himself to the property Jonathan has acquired for him in Britain.
The story is innovative in that it does not have a single narrator, but is rather pieced together from several protagonists' diaries, letters, and memoranda. In many ways it is a thoroughly modern narrative in that no authentic testimony to the truth of the story remains, as all documents have been destroyed by Dracula. Instead, events have been painstakingly transcribed and typed up in triplicate, leaving a question mark over their "truth" and the sanity of their authors.
Jonathan Harker's initial account gives way to that of his fiancee, Mina Murray, a strong independent young woman of the fin de siècle, who works for her living, is in control of her life, and possesses important talents such as the ability to type and memorize railway timetables. In many ways Mina is the epitome of the emancipated and radical "New Woman" of the late nineteenth century. She is interestingly juxtaposed with a number of less impressive women who are notable for their voracity and sensual desires, and she presents a striking contrast to the three female vampires encountered by Jonathan at the beginning of the story:
"Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count's, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon. The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great, wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires ... All three had brilliant white teeth, that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear."
These women seem to represent late nineteenth-century fears about the excesses of liberated women. It is telling that later in the story, Mina becomes a much more domesticated figure out of her fear becoming one of Dracula's victims herself.
While she is at first preoccupied by Jonathan's disappearance in Eastern Europe, and then busy caring for him as he recovers from an apparent hysterical breakdown he suffered after his escape from Castle Dracula, Mina's attentions are soon diverted by the flagging health of her dear friend Lucy Westenra. Lucy, it later transpires, has been preyed upon by Dracula. Although she appears to die of a wasting disease not unlike that suffered by Carmilla's unfortunate victims, she in fact had succumbed to the kiss of the vampire, and comes back as one of the "undead." A group of Lucy's friends band together to become what the critic Christopher Craft has dubbed "the crew of light," and while their initial aim is to save Lucy's immortal soul, they soon become embroiled in a bid to prevent Dracula from populating London with his victims. Led by the slightly insane Professor Van Helsing, the crew's exploits involve breaking into the vampire's London home and a dramatic chase to the death across Eastern Europe at the end of the novel.
Interestingly, a large number of nineteenth-century vampires were members of the aristocracy. Ruthven, Carmilla, and Dracula are no exception. There is a clear analogy to be drawn between blood-sucking vampires and parasitical aristocrats who enjoyed luxury but did not work for a living—no longer seeming to have a role to play in a growing industrial society where an increasingly powerful manufacturing middle class had achieved economic and political dominance through sheer hard work. Dracula is certainly wealthy. (In fact, at one point in the story—in a rather blatant metaphor—he even bleeds gold coins rather than red blood after he is attacked with a knife.) And he is pitted against a group of predominantly middle-class characters, all of whom value hard work and are deeply suspicious of idleness. This is merely one interpretation of the story. There are many others. Dracula has become one of the most allegorized figures of nineteenth-century literature, with Marxists, feminists, and other marginalized social groups each interpreting the vampire in a different light. Although originally classified as "popular" fiction, nineteenth-century vampire stories have now been re-evaluated and the artistic talents and creativity of their authors recognized. Beyond the classroom, the vampire remains a favorite—appealing to our desire to be terrified on dark winter nights and leading us to think twice whenever we see a bat hovering outside our windows.