27 pages • 54 minutes read
John PolidoriThe Vampyre
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1819A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Good Versus Evil
Characters in The Vampyre exist at two extremes of morality: Those who are pure good such as Aubrey, his sister, Ianthe, and Ruthven’s unnamed victims; And the extreme evil of Ruthven. Gothic fiction, as an offshoot of Romanticism, is concerned with the inherent corruption of society and the opportunities it provides for evil forces to prey on the innocent. Ruthven’s evil symbolizes the ills of Polidori’s society, which is why Ruthven revels in destroying good people while also exuding magnetic charisma.
Ruthven’s evil nature is apparent before his nature is revealed. As an allegory for the degradation of society’s morals, Ruthven is drawn to gambling tables to both ruin those who gamble all their money and fuel the gambling of the reckless by intentionally losing. Ruthven’s moments of charity are supernaturally fatal and “cursed”; Those he gambles with are “either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery” (34). Ruthven’s corruption is described as an inevitable force of nature, reinforcing his identity as an ultimate evil. Polidori uses heavy foreshadowing to reveal the source of Ruthven’s evil: His unnatural vampirism. Ruthven’s gambling habits and the dead women left in the wake of his travels with Aubrey allude to his true nature, while Ianthe’s death and vampire folklore alert the reader to the reveal of Ruthven’s true identity. Ruthven’s supernatural identity, which is beyond logic and rationalism, cements his evilness as a force of nature beyond human control.
Those who represent goodness in The Vampyre are morally pure by the standards of upper-class English Georgians/Victorians. These fallible humans are powerless in the face of Ruthven’s force-of-nature evil. In Romanticism, humans are often portrayed as transient and unimportant in the face of nature and the supernatural. This relationship between humans and nature/the supernatural is often called “the Sublime” in Romanticism studies, referencing the feelings of overwhelming awe and fear one may feel witnessing nature that Romantics often evoked. In Romantic tradition, the morally pure characters of Polidori’s story struggle against the absolute evil of Ruthven to no avail. Unlike many later stories of gothic horror, the order of goodness and upper-class sensibilities is not restored at the end of The Vampyre. When Aubrey’s guardians check on his sister, it is “too late” and Ruthven is free to continue sowing evil. The novel argues for a fatalistic view in the struggle between good and evil: The evil manifestation of society’s ills cannot be harmed by good people.
Power and Corruption
Ruthven is an aristocrat, and in The Vampyre most members of the aristocracy are depicted as morally lax. Gothic fiction arises at a time when the power of European nobility was waning and the upper-middle business classes, the bourgeoise, were beginning to take power in society. These upper-middle class consumers and writers of Gothic fiction often located their ideas about moral decay in the aristocratic holdovers from Mercantilism and Feudalism. The aristocracy of The Vampyre is bored, un-industrious, and courts disaster; They invite Ruthven to all of their households in the hope that he will relieve them of their ennui, exposing themselves to his corrupting influence. The Vampyre connects societal power with inevitable corruption of the individual through the amoral behavior of the aristocracy.
The story suggests that many of the aristocrats are publicly-known adulterers. Lady Mercer, whose tries to seduce Ruthven, is “the mockery of every monster shewn in drawing-rooms since her marriage,” reflecting her moral corruption through a comparison with monsters (28-29). Moral degradation is an open secret within the aristocratic circles, signaling their corruption as a class in society.
The corrupting power of Ruthven is tied closely to his power as an aristocrat; His evilness spreads through the resources and connections that such a powerful station offers to him, and those who fall prey to him most easily are also aristocrats. Ianthe, who is not part of the aristocracy, knows vampire folklore. Her wisdom symbolizes her lower-class status compared to the main cast of characters. Ianthe is positioned as the only character with knowledge to undo Ruthven’s machinations; Her position outside the aristocracy gives her knowledge about the corruption lurking amongst its ranks.
The two morally good aristocrats are Aubrey and his sister: Aubrey owing to his inexperience and romantic feelings, and his sister owing to her youthful naïveté as a typical ingénue character. Aubrey is described as “handsome, frank, and rich” and having “that high romantic feeling of honour and candour,” attributes that ultimately prove his undoing. When he discovers that his sister is betrothed to Ruthven, he understands that it occurred through an “evil power” (36) that he has recognized in Ruthven. Unlike the two innocent aristocrats, Ruthven possesses the typical traits associated with a morally decrepit aristocracy in Gothic fiction: He is prone to gambling and reckless spending, he seduces married women and ruins marriages, and he has a silver tongue. Ruthven is the ultimate corruption of the aristocracy, which the bourgeois of Polidori’s time often chalked up to their idleness; Ruthven wreaks havoc because he has no concerns beyond preying upon his next meal. Ruthven’s presence corrupts the only members of the aristocracy portrayed positively, removing the negligible presence of moral purity within the story’s aristocratic society.
Women’s Sexuality and Social Roles
The Vampyre was written in the waning years of the Georgian Era, which led into the Victorian Era in 1837. This transitional period sees the emergence of the Victorian’s ideas and cultural norms out of the old Georgian ones. The shift from Georgian to Victorian culture was marked by the Romantic movement in the arts, which valued emotion, the internal psyche, and superstition over the Enlightenment’s rationalism. The shift into Victorian culture also brought extremely tightened gender roles and ideas about gender for upper-class women. The excess produced by the Industrial Revolution, enslaved labor, and colonization led to material luxury and ease for Western Europe’s upper-classes, which led to new ideas about how society should be ran in these patriarchal empires. The Victorians conceived of society as comprised of two spheres: The public sphere, ruled by men, politics, and business; and the private sphere of domesticity, where chaste and innocent housewives oversaw domestic duties, servants, and childrearing.
These upper-classes, who were the primary consumers and drivers of the literature market, vilified open expression of women’s sexuality and placed women’s worth in their sexual fidelity to their husbands. Upper-class women were valued for their ability to hold intelligent conversation, bear children in wedlock, and organize social gatherings. Women were thought to have little to no interest in sex. Any sign of desire outside of strict procreation was a malady to be cured by doctors. Gothic villains, and the vampire especially, threaten this social order by seducing women and destroying their worth in Georgian/Victorian society.
Polidori depicts women as playing one of two roles in his story: adulteresses, whose seductions Ruthven resists, or morally pure victims. Ruthven’s treatment of both beguiles those who observe him:
They were moved by his apparent hatred of vice, he was as often among those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices (29).
Observers believe Ruthven resists the immorality of so-called fallen women because he is virtuous. This fatal irony is because, in Polidori’s society, sexually liberated women did not have a social reputation to ruin or “morals” to corrupt, which is the aim of the gothic villain.
The vampire, unlike other gothic villains, is a figure of horror due to their ability to move amongst polite society and the eroticism of their attacks. As renowned gothic scholar Carol Senf notes:
While the vampire in most folklore versions had been simply a hungry corpse with no special preferences about the choice of victim, Polidori suggests an erotic attachment—often perversely so—between vampire and victim (The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature, University of Wisconsin Press, 1988).
Ruthven’s fixation upon virginal women is consistent with his character as a traditional gothic villain, but it also suggests an unusual erotic relationship between vampire and victim that plays on the fears of Polidori’s high-society. Late Georgian/early Victorian upper-classes viewed virginity and chastity as a woman’s greatest asset in her life’s quest to secure a reputable husband and have children for the country’s benefit. The death of Ruthven’s victims symbolizes the deaths of the women’s social reputation after indulging in their sexuality. In the case Aubrey’s sister, she is a woman abandoned by her husband without virginity to offer to another husband. Like other dead women, her social worth and reputation is ruined. The gothic plays on the fears of the Victorian upper-classes and reaffirms their worldviews on women’s sexuality and their place in society by harming women who transgress social taboos around sex and self-expression.
