Reading Group #18 ('The Vampyre')

See post 23 in thread #17 for details. :)

Wonderful. It's all there. The irresistable will of the Vampyre; the polite company of the salon, rife with vice; the coming of age tour of the young gentelman; and, of course, the mark of "The Vampyre". A wonderful story. I really enjoyed it, and I learnt a new word, "mountebank", which I suspected was more raunchy than it actually is before I found it in my dictionary.

Well chosen Jourdain. Thank you!

Read this last night. Actually, the combination of this and a Chinese takeaway that seemed pretty high on the MSG (gave me one of those 'Chinese Restaurant Syndrome' hangovers) made for some weird dreams last night - got to stop reading this stuff in the early hours. Anyway, back to the story: just a couple of first thoughts.

Did anyone else get the idea that it started off badly and then got better - or was that just me gradually getting into it? It struck me at first as quite amateurish, but then it seemed to get into its stride and carry me along with it.

I was slightly surprised to find the title character rather repellent, without that 'bad boy' glamour. All that business of the eyes glancing over people without really 'penetrating', plus the descriptions of appearance, gave him a quite corpse-like feel for me. If he was really based on Byron I assume Polidori was getting his own back for being sacked. If he was Byron, presumably Aubrey represented Polidori?

I didn't think Aubrey's sister was very successful: apart from being too good to be true, I didn't get any real sense of her. I thought the Greek girl much more 'real' (did either have a name?) and I mourned her fate a little but didn't really care about the sister. In that sense, I thought the story peaked too early.

ETA - Was there a bit of old-fashioned British racism and 'classism' there? Would contemporary readers have automatically regarded a Greek innkeeper's daughter as of much less import than an aristocratic English woman?

#3...It struck me at first as quite amateurish, but then it seemed to get into its stride

I know what you mean, but I thought it was more to do with when it was written and that it was written in the style that various writers of gothic tales, even up to this very day, try to emulate.

The social setting reminded me of Guy de Maupassant's stories in Paris.

I didn't think Aubrey's sister was very successful:

She did appear to be a bit wimpish and two, if not one, dimensional. A bit too stereotypical of the swooning maid who adores her brother.

ETA - Was there a bit of old-fashioned British racism and 'classism' there? Would contemporary readers have automatically regarded a Greek innkeeper's daughter as of much less import than an aristocratic English woman?

Certainly. How could one contemplate a serious relationship with a foreigner, and one of such lowly origins?

I think the female characters who suffered at the teeth of the Vampyre were merely fodder to the story. However, I felt the other female characters, those appearing in the earlier parts of the story, were used well to poke a jest at the nature and hypocrisy of society at the time, and the vice ridden salon culture.

The female characters were much more like the "ladish" nature that has become fashionable among many women in the past twenty years; i.e. girls taking a more pro-active role in the hunt. :-)

This is a short read of about 8,000 words, but it packs in a lot of incident. In fact, it almost reads as the synopsis for a novel. It’s hard to tell if this is merely down to the literary style of the time, or if it is because Polidori was not a professional author. Although, that said, when “The Vampyre” was thought to have been written by Lord Byron, Goethe reportedly said it was the best thing Byron had he’d ever written. This suggests that he didn’t see any evidence of amateurishness or weakness in the writing - but then again, I suppose he read it in translation.

The plot mechanisms of imperiled heroines, incarceration, and the suspense of a last-minute rescue (or in this case, the failure to effect a rescue) all put this story squarely in the gothic genre. What’s new, of course, is the synthesis of the disgusting living-dead folkloric vampire (in fact, pretty much the same thing as the modern screen zombie) with the cynical upper-class (indeed “Byronic”) seducer.

I think a big part of the impetus for this story must have been Polidori’s resentment of Byron (and Shelley and party). Apparently Byron’s republican (small “r”), all-men-are-equal political sentiments weren’t always carried through into everyday life. With pgmcc, I read the opening scene as a satire on upper-class society of the time. Regency morals were a lot looser than Victorian morals (or perhaps just less hypocritical - the wealthy and powerful probably always behave badly).

I think I have to disagree with the view that the death of Ianthe indicates any snobbery or discrimination on Polidori’s part. I think she just has to be sacrificed for the sake of the plot, like Mina in Dracula.

Here’s some trivia: Polidori was the uncle of the Rossetti children (Pre-Raphaelite Dante Gabriel and poet Christina, etc.) but of course he died before any of them were born.

And one more: “Ruthven” is pronounced with a short “u” silent “v” - as per Christopher Frayling’s ’90’s documentary series “Nightmare: The Birth of Horror”.

#5 - The pronunciation of Ruthven seems a bit of a contentious issue. I've found at least four pronunciations online, but the one I like best is 'Riwen', which presumably sounds much the same as 'ruin' - which I think is quite appropriate for our story.

> 7 Ah - the name reveals the character, in the same way that Lovelace in Clarissa is pronounced "Loveless".

Still need to get around to reading this before we move on. I had three papers due this past Friday AND three shows this weekend and it's been...a hell of a week...

Looking forward to unwinding with this later. I'll be back with thoughts tomorrow or Monday...

#8 - Burning the candle at how many ends?

Haven't got around to this just yet, but I'm posting a new selection for those of you ready to move on. Poe, again, and my favorite of his works (and one of my favorite pieces of fiction ever, actually): 'The Masque of the Red Death.' New thread is up.

Just finished The Vampyre. My kindle downloaded version had a short defense of Lord Byron tacked onto the end that was obviously written back then. I find that addition interesting & suppose it was inserted after The Vampyre proved too damning To Byron's image. I thought the sister was weak and I found the narrative itself weak - sort of describing a story rather than immersing the reader in it. But I sure am glad I finally read this precedent-setting story. Good pick! I enjoyed it.

#11 - Fascinating, Naima: I'll try to hunt out that addition - I'll be interested to read it.

Going back to the story, I've been intending (without ever quite managing it) a re-read - I think I was half asleep on the first one. So I'll try to get round to it this weekend and give the story a bit more thought than I've done so far.

I've finally got round to re-reading this. I've also read Byron's 'Fragment of a Novel'.

I have to say that I found the Byron just plain 'better' - much more skillful and polished. And very frustrating in its incompletion. There's no indication in Byron's text that Darvell - his Ruthven - is a vampire or, even, definitely evil. Did Byron ever say that he intended a vampire tale?

I also read, in some academic discussion of the texts (http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/2005/v/n36-37/011135ar.html), about alleged homosexual subtexts in them (and, also, hints of some sort of homosexual element to the relationship between Byron and Polidori).

I really don't know what to think of this: I'm a little persuaded and a little sceptical.

It doesn't help that, on re-reading, I don't think Aubrey's attraction to Ruthven really works and I thought Polidori was at his best with the depictions of the interaction between Aubrey and Ianthe where he gave me the impression of being on surer ground as if he was really writing from his own feelings. With all that kittenish, playful innocence and virgin (presumably) beauty, Ianthe is an example of a quite common male fantasy, of course - all very heterosexual.

Not that he couldn't have been bisexual, I suppose - but then Polidori is supposed to have become unpopular with Byron and his set partly because of his straight-laced nature. The academics seem to want to catch them both ways - the writer as either seething with repressed homosexual desire or haunted by his homophobia - and probably both.

I can't work out whether the academic is saying that the subtexts are so 'sub' that the writers are totally unaware of them - that they're actually artefacts of culture-wide undercurrents, as it were.

Just a thought off the top of my head - and one that I haven't actually done any reading on ("must read some biographies; must read some biographies; must read some biographies ..."):

Is there an interesting parallel between the two relationships - Polidori and Byron, Stoker and Irving?

> 14

Based, not on a scholarly biography, but on Ken Russell's 'Gothic'(!), I'd suggest it would be a compare-and-contrast exercise. In the film (at the start in any event) Polidori is represented as modelling himself on Byron to the extent of trying to rival him.

Stoker, on the other hand, seems to have been all too happy to take a subservient role in his relationship with Irving.

>16 frahealee: Have you read Carmilla yet?

Carmilla was written before Dracula and it is thought amongst scholars that Carmilla was a key influence on Stoker to write Dracula. One chapter of the original manuscript of Dracula was pulled by the editor as it was feared it could be considered as having been copied from Carmilla.

>20 frahealee: I have read Green Tea, The Familiar, and Carmilla.

I do not know if Le Fanu spent any time in Italy.

>16 frahealee:
Varney, be warned, is an enormously long potboiler of a serial. It was originally issued in weekly instalments.

There are some good vampire-themed anthologies out there. I'll see if I can find the names of some commonly-included stories.

>20 frahealee:

Can't remember my Le Fanu reading, offhand, but I believe Carmilla started off in Ireland and then got transferred for publication reasons.

>18 frahealee:

I don't want to discourage you, but it would be a real stretch to call The Lair of the White Worm a 'gem'. It's probably one of Stoker's worst ...

>25 alaudacorax:

Actually, The Lair of the White Worm is so bad in places that there's a perverse sort of fun to be had out of reading in it critically.