Vampires
By Xavier Zambrano, Fri Dec 9th

The French Revolution constituted for the conscience of thedominant aristocratic class a fall from innocence, and upturningof the natural chain of events that resounded all over Europe;the old regime became, in their imaginary, a paradise lost. Thisexplains why some romantic poets born in the higher classes werekeen on seeing themselves as faded aristocrats, expelled fromtheir comfortable milieu by a reverse of fortune or a design ofdestiny. Byron and Shelley are the prime instances of this vitalpose. In The Giaour he writes on a vampiric character: "Thecommon crowd but see the gloom/ Of wayward deeds and fittingdoom;/ The close observer can espy/A noble soul, and lineagehigh."

Byron departed from England leaving a trail of scandal over hismarital conduct and since then saw himself as an exiledexpatriate. Shelley was expelled from Oxford and he fell indisgrace by marrying an in-keeper's daughter; he alwaysstruggled to reconcile his origin with his political ideas:"Shelley could find no way of resolving his own contradictoryopinions" (Cronin, 2000).

This icon of the fallen aristocrat is rooted on anothercharacter revered by romantic poets: the fallen angel. As MarioPraz proves, miltonic Satan became the rebel figure of choiceamong romantic poets. Milton reversed the medieval idea of ahideous Satan and wrapped its figure with the epic grandeur ofan angel fallen in disgrace. Many of the byronic heros sharewith Milton's Satan this fallen-from-grace condition, such asLara: "There was in him a vital scorn of all:/ As if the worsthad fall'n which could befall,/ stood a stranger in thisbreathing world,/An erring spirit from another hurl'd" ( LaraXVIII 315-16)

There is another social factor that is behind the formation ofthe romantic myth of the vampire. In the early nineteen century,the foundations of what would later become a mass society werelaid; the expansion of the press and of the reading publicproduced an increased diffusion for literary works and fosteredmovements such as the gothic and the sensation novel. Byronhimself experienced the event of being turned into aproto-bestseller. The unification of literary taste andpreferences that was a correlate to this social changes couldnot be more alien to the romantic notion of individual gusto andoriginal sensibility. In order to combat this unifying forces,romantic poets revered the individual who stands outside societyand is free from common concerns. Many of Byron's heros lookdown on the masses from above, even though they walk among themand do not lean towards wordsworthian escapades into nature;they achieve to remain untainted by the masses in a sort ofexile within the world akin to that of a ghost or a dammedspirit. 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 ofthe vampire in relation to the Male Seducer archetype, but alsosome odd events in his life and the life of those surroundinghim exercised a decisive influence. A critical study bundledwith an anthology of vampire tales (Conde de Siruela, 2001)attributes to the short story The Vampire (1819) by John WilliamPolidori the fixation of the "classical images of the literaryvampire as a villanious, cold and enigmatic aristocrat; but,above all, perverse and fascinating for women". Mario Praz, inthe same line, also states that Byron was "largely responsiblefor the vogue of vampirism". Polidori was the unfortunate doctorand personal assistant of Lord Byron who died half-crazy at 25.The idea for the tale published in 1819 came from the famousmeetings at Villa Diodati on June 1816 between Byron, PercyShelley, Mary Shelley and Polidori, in what was probably themost influential gathering for fantastic fiction in the historyof modern literature. In order to pass the stormy andether-fuelled nights, they agreed to write each one a ghoststory. Mary Shelley (who was then 17 years old) got during thesenights the idea of what later became Frankenstein and Polidoriwrote the tale The Vampire that he would publish three yearslater. The story appeared in the New Monthly Magazine falselyattributed by the editor to Lord Byron (taking advantages of theaura of Satanism that surrounded the poet in the popular view topromote the sales of the magazine). A misguided Goethe hailedthe story as the best that Lord Byron had ever written. The talewas, actually, a covert portrait of Lord Byron disguised as thevampire Lord Ruthven, a cruel gambler and killer of innocentgirls. Polidori had introduced in the story fragments from anautobiographical and revengeful novel called Glenarvon writtenby Caroline

Lamb, an ex-lover of Byron. The Lord´s reaction wasa threat to the editor and the denouncing of a commercialimposture with his name. Eventually Stoker´s Dracula (1897)blended, according to Siruela (2001), this tradition derivedfrom Polidori´s Lord Ruthven with some old romano-hungariantales of wandering dead and enchanted castles, fixating thus themodern images of the vampire.

The vampire is closely linked to another romantic archetype: thedissatisfied lover. Rafael Argullol summarizes its traits: "elenamorado romántico reconoce en la consumación amorosa el puntode inflexión a partir del cual la pasión muestra su fazdesposedora y exterminadora.". The romantic lover begins to feela sense of dissatisfaction, caducity and mortality at the verymoment when his passion is fulfilled. This feeling prompts himto embark in a sentimental rollercoaster where each peak ofsatisfaction is followed by a valley of despair and the impulseto seek satisfaction in a new object of love in order to renewthe faded passion (the extreme of this attitude is the characterof Don Juan). The vampire goes one step further than theseducer: for him the loved one stands as an image of his owndissatisfaction and it must be destroyed at the very moment whenthe longing for her disappears; at the instant of consummation.Again Byron in Manfred expresses this transference, whichArgullol opportunely labels as romantic self-mirroring: "I lovedher, and destroy'd her! (211)". Keats conveys in his Ode onMelancholy the feeling of mortality that is hidden in the momentof pleasure for the romantic: "Turning to poison while thebee-mouth sips:/ Ay, in the very temple of Delight/Veil'dMelancholy has her sovran shrine,/ Though seen of none save himwhose strenuous tongue/Can burst Joy's grape against his palatefine". La belle dame sans merci is according to Argullol also apoem where "vida y muerte se vivifican y complementan mutuamente[...] se hallan en total simbiosis". But there is a crucialdifference between Byron and Keats in their approach to thefatal lover: Byron's characters are fatal males, epitomized inthe vampire, while Keats' characters are femmes fatales. Thisdifference underlines a different attitude to gender issues:Byron liked to emanate a dominant masculinity which is imprintedin all his leading characters. Keats, however, had a passiveapproach to love, his poetic personas like to be seduced even ifthat means, as we have seen, to be killed. Byron is the malearistocrat who thinks all women are naturally his, they are hispossessions and, as such, disposable at will. Keats, whodisliked Byron's Don Juan - in a letter to his brother, hereferred to it as "Lord Byron's last flash poem", announces amore modern and non-patriarchal approach to love where the womanis free to be the seducer. Nevertheless, as we have seen, theyboth share the extreme notion of love as creation anddestruction at the same time; and their characters, though ofdifferent gender, are vampire lovers. This different attitude isnot only personal but it mirrors a wider and epochaldistinction. Mario Praz has observed how the fatal and cruellovers of the first half of the nineteenth century are chieflymales, while in the second half of the century the roles aregradually inverted until late century decadentism is dominatedby femmes fatales. This literary process mirrors the advancementof social changes throughout the century, and the slow butcontinuous emancipation of love from patriarchal standards.Gender issues shift focus, but power and domination remain atthe core of the portrayals of love even in the fully bourgeoisiesociety of the late nineteenth century. Goodland (2000) hasexplored the role of women as a redundant class subject toanother classes and the gender/class dialectic found in thevampire.

Not only Byron and Keats were fascinated by the myth of thevampire, but we can find its presence in most romantic poets,even in the proto-romantic early Goethe. A list of authors whouse such characters made by Twitchell (1981) comprises: Southeyin Thalaba the destroyer, Coleridge in Christabel and Wordsworthin The Leech Gatherer.

As we have seen throughout this paper the figure of the vampireis shaped in the romantic period under the form of anideological knot where many social forces converge: the FrenchRevolution, an embryonic mass society, the decline ofaristocracy and the gradual shifting apart of gender divisionsfrom the patriarchal model. Therefore, it constitutes a myththat may be read as a battleground for the play of discourses ofits era, shedding light on other romantic attitudes towardsexistence. As such it is subject to an analysis that, as newhistoricisms maintain, is aware of the historicity of a text andthe textuality of history.

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About the author:Xavier Zambrano has a degree in English Philology and is thewebmaster of the blog A Picture and a Sentence thatblends painting and literary quotes and is updated on a dailybasis:

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