Sexy vampires: Polidori and Stoker
Jun. 29th, 2008 11:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
naomi_jayLord Byron’s personal physician, John Polidori, published his short story The Vampyre in April 1819. Originally the story was attributed to Byron himself, especially given the name of the protagonist – Lord Ruthven – was also used by Lady Caroline Lamb in her novel Glenarvon, for her thinly-disguised Byron character. Anyway, that’s pretty much beside the point. The Vampyre is quite likely the first example of the sexy vampire, and was a huge success, tapping into the public’s fascination with gothic horror, as well as presenting a very different image of the vampire. The subhuman night-walking horror was replaced with the aristocratic seducer.
Seventy-eight years later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released, cementing the image of the vampire as a charismatic aristocrat concerned largely with tormenting uptight Victorian virgins. That said, I maintain that the Count presented in Dracula, by and large, bears more resemblance to the average Cro-Magnon man than the average Armani model. Hairy palms, pointy ears, mono brow … yeah. You know.
What Stoker did establish in vampire lore was repressed sexuality – a lot of it. Given the generally repressive nature of Victorian society to begin with, the exploration of this theme in a novel was pretty sensational. The transformation of Lucy, for example, from prim virgin to bridge of Satan disturbed readers across the country:
But whatever, there you have it. Polidori and Stoker took the vampire mythos and changed it. From horrific revenant to upper-class deflowerer in under a century. But it doesn’t stop there, my friends, oh no. next: Anne Rice and her metrosexual vampires stamp themselves firmly over the public consciousness.
Seventy-eight years later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was released, cementing the image of the vampire as a charismatic aristocrat concerned largely with tormenting uptight Victorian virgins. That said, I maintain that the Count presented in Dracula, by and large, bears more resemblance to the average Cro-Magnon man than the average Armani model. Hairy palms, pointy ears, mono brow … yeah. You know.
What Stoker did establish in vampire lore was repressed sexuality – a lot of it. Given the generally repressive nature of Victorian society to begin with, the exploration of this theme in a novel was pretty sensational. The transformation of Lucy, for example, from prim virgin to bridge of Satan disturbed readers across the country:
What has become clearer and clearer, particularly in the fin de siècle years of the twentieth century, is that the novel's power has its source in the sexual implications of the blood exchange between the vampire and his victims...Dracula has embedded in it a very disturbing psychosexual allegory whose meaning I am not sure Stoker entirely understood: that there is a demonic force at work in the world whose intent is to eroticize women. In Dracula we see how that force transforms Lucy Westenra, a beautiful nineteen-year-old virgin, into a shameless slut. (Leonard Wol, 1992).Eroticizing women! The very idea! Hide those ankles, ladies, you may well be encouraging men to see you as sexual objects and we all know how that ends. One minute you’re trying to decide between your three beaus, the next you’re letting some crusty old count sink his fangs into your neck in a decidedly sexualised exchange of bodily fluids.
But whatever, there you have it. Polidori and Stoker took the vampire mythos and changed it. From horrific revenant to upper-class deflowerer in under a century. But it doesn’t stop there, my friends, oh no. next: Anne Rice and her metrosexual vampires stamp themselves firmly over the public consciousness.
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no subject
on 2008-06-29 11:15 am (UTC)Stoker's views on sex were decidedly bonkers. Interesting bloke.
no subject
on 2008-06-29 11:20 am (UTC)no subject
on 2008-06-29 12:25 pm (UTC)Botting, Fred: Gothic (Oxon, 1996; reprinted 2005).
Brantlinger, Patrick: The Reading Lesson: the threat of mass literacy in nineteenth century British fiction (Bloomington, 1998).
Byron, Glennis and David Punter: The Gothic (Oxfrod, 2004, reprinted 2005).
Day, William Patrick: In the Circles of Fear and Desire (London, 1985).
Foucault, Michael: Madness and Civilization; a History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, 1967, reprinted 1987).
Greenslade, William: Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Jones, Darryl: Horror: A Thematic History in Fiction and Film (London, 2002).
Otis, Laura: Membranes: Metaphors of Invasion in Nineteenth Century Literature, Science and Politics (John Hopkins University Press, 1999).
Rylance, Rick: Victorian Psychology and British Culture 1850 – 1880 (Oxford, 2000).
Thomas, Ronald R.: Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge, 1999).
Williams, Anne: Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic (Chicago, 1995).
Wood, Jane: Passion and Pathology in Victorian Fiction (Oxford, 2001).
I've bolded the ones that are either most relevant or that I found genuinely thought-provoking; Foucault and Otis fall very much into the latter (Foucault should be read with a heavy dose of salt and an understanding that he is a complete headcase).
Also, if you haven't read The Monk by Matthew Lewis I'd highly recommend it - not vampires but a very early and heavily sexualised gothic work about repressed sexuality and supernatural liberation (much more explicit than any of the other genre works at the time). Makes an interesting comparison to Rice :)
no subject
on 2008-06-30 06:36 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2008-06-30 05:15 pm (UTC)I forget what year it was published, but I could never get over the blatant lesbian vampire porn that was Carmilla. How lucky for Sheridan Le Fanu and his readers that lesbianism never officially existed in Victorian times.
no subject
on 2008-06-30 06:35 pm (UTC)