3 - The Bourgeois Vampire and Nineteenth-Century Identity Theft

Summary

Entlightenment works that employed the word “vampire” did not present a creature with much personality; the name was above all a term of ridicule — a pejorative designation for someone who held power abusively. Romantic fictions, on the other hand, made this figure of moral bankruptcy and spiritual destitution the very opposite of what it had been: the vampire became an emblem of anguished consciousness, representing psychological interiority as a kind of bottomless pit of imperfectly disavowed culpability. This chapter examines both the chronological and the symbolic middle ground between the “empty” vampires of Enlightenment polemic and the “overfull” vampires of Romantic lyricism. The key to this transformation, we will see, lies in the rise of a new social class. The vampire's newfound character is a reflection of the bourgeoisie's ascendancy — a fact illustrated by the fortunes and misfortunes of one Lord Ruthven and his ill-starred creator.

A gathering in 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva, where Percy Bysshe Shelley and his young mistress Mary Godwin joined Lord Byron and his physician John Polidori, has become the stuff of literary legend.1 Famously, the group whiled away time reading German tales of the fantastic in French translation until Byron proposed that everyone write his or her own supernatural narrative. The celebrity of the figures invented by Shelley's teenage girlfriend and Byron's consort has eclipsed the works that two of the greatest English Romantics wrote on the occasion.