Byron and Polidori John Polidori\'s

Byron and Polidori

John Polidori's book the Vampyre, as is well-known, was written as part of a challenge one summer, a challenge that also produced Mary W. Shelley's Frankenstein. Lord Byron was among the party that summer, and his Giaour, a lengthy poem with a vampiric theme, served as inspiration for Polidori. Polidori acknowledged as much in his introduction and drew on a number of themes and other elements in the formation of his own story of vampirism.

The Giaour of the title is a warrior, and he avenges the murder of his beloved Leila. She is a harem girl who is killed by her master for being unfaithful, killed by being thrown into the sea. The poem has a cross-cultural setting in that the Giaour is a European who is fighting in the East. He is alien to the Muslim culture in which he finds himself, and ultimately he is cursed so that he is "on earth as Vampire sent, / Thy course shall from its tomb be rent: / Then ghastly haunt thy native place, / and suck the blood of all thy race" (755-58). In terms of vampirism, this poem addresses how the vampire is created in this particular case, and being a vampire is seen as a punishment for some deed.

Polidori's Vampyre drew so clearly on Byron's works that the first publisher thought the manuscript had been written by Byron and so advertised it. The relationship to the Giaour were not noted so much as the fact that the vampire's name was Ruthven, and Lady Caroline Lamb had recently fictionalized Byron as Clarence de Ruthven, Lord Glenarvon in the novel Glenarvon (1816).

Giaour is a stranger among people of a different culture, and Ruthven is also depicted as a stranger in the midst of London society. Polidori says that he is "remarkable for his singularities" and that he looks at the proceedings around him "as if he could not participate therein." This sense of being an outsider links the two characters from the first. Ruthven is invited everywhere because of his foreign-ness rather than in spite of it, and he is pursued by women like Lady Mercer because he is so prized and so different.

Both works also involve a sort of outside observer who becomes a biographer for the main character. In the Giaour, this individual is a Muslim who observes and marvels at the Westerner in their midst: "I know thee not, I loathe thy race, / but in thy lineaments I trace / What time shall strengthen, not efface" (222-224). Of course, Byron includes other narrators in the course of the poem, and at times they speak at cross-purposes. They also come from different traditions, with the Muslim observer having one point-of-view, while the Christian Friar near the end has another. In a similar manner, Polidori presents the character of Aubrey, the young man who observes Ruthven and who is also fascinated by the man. Indeed, he becomes a companion to the man. It would seem that this character is similar to Polidori himself, a young man attached to an older man who has a sordid reputation, much as Polidori was companion to Byron for a year or so. Just as Aubrey's sister and parents asked him to return and to leave the other man before he was corrupted, so might Polidori have been used by his parents to do the same. Aubrey himself describes the man as "one whose character had not shown a single bright point on which to ret the eye." Rather than leaving, though, Aubrey decides to watch all the more closely and to keep track of whatever the other man might do.

Both men give their story a sense of authenticity by the inclusion of the biographer and also by claiming that the story has a basis in fact. Byron actually only says that the story "is founded upon circumstances now less common in the East then formerly," though he does not refer to the details of the story as being factual. Polidori says he took the details from the true story of one Arnold Paul, a Hungarian soldier who died and yet returned to torment his relatives as a vampire for two decades. Polidori includes a history of the vampire and links that history to the rise of Christianity, especially interesting because the idea of vampirism in Byron's poem is not Christian so much as Muslim.

In a way, Polidori uses the pattern from the Giaour in reverse, turning the hero into a villain and making his an object of suspicion rather than admiration throughout. In doing so, Polidori also makes use of certain expectations about character, as when Aubrey notes that Ruthven is charitable but not in the way one would expect:

But Aubrey could not avoid remarking, that it was not upon the virtuous, reduced to indigence by the misfortunes attendant even upon virtue, that he bestowed his alms; -- these were sent from the door with hardly suppressed sneers; but when the profligate came to ask something, not to relieve his wants, but to allow him to wallow in his lust, or to sink him still deeper in his iniquity, he was sent away with rich charity.

This adds to the young man's suspicion of Ruthven.

It would appear that the way Polidori described his main character and the way he shaped the vampire myth as part of his novel derived more from Byron himself and from his own experiences with Byron than from Giaour as such. Ruthven is described as having a pale complexion, aristocratic arrogance, and as being attractive to women, traits thought to be modeled after Byron. Part of the plot for Vampyre came from Byron's fragmentary tale about Augustus Darvell, written that summer as part of the competition among the different guests to come up with a supernatural story. The Giaour was written earlier and has some influence, though not to a great extent. The sense of the foreign and of the Westerner lost in a non-Western society is altered in the novel to having Ruthven be the foreigner in Europe, at least in British society, and to having the society uneasy and the visitor less so.

Much of the novel takes place in Greece, and Greek ruins are also part of the landscape of the Giaour. Both works are inherently about sublimated sexuality and what that brings out in different characters. The Giaour is less sublimated in these terms than Vampyre, and the way the myth is developed by Polidori would for ever after color the way the vampire myth would be treated in print and in the media. This sense of unhealthy sex, including homosexuality and even including hints of incest, is evident in the Giaour and would be more so in Vampyre. The curse in the Giaour includes a hint that incest would be part of the punishment, as is apparent when the curse is given:

There from thy daughter, sister, wife,

At midnight drain the stream of life,

Yet loathe the banquet, which perforce

Must feed thy livid living corpse (759-762).

The inclusion of the sister and the daughter in this list is where the incest emerges, though this could also be read as a curse that destroys the whole family. It is the act of sucking the life from the victim that is inherently sexual in the vampire story and that makes the act of vampirism toward a family member more like incest than simply violence.

The element of suppressed homosexuality in this act is more evident in Vampyre as Aubrey has ambivalence about his feelings toward Ruthven and as Ruthven himself seems often to be more somewhat reluctant lover than companion. Indeed, a triangle is created with Ianthe at the apex between the two men, and such a triangle can often be used to create an image of suppressed homosexuality as the two men pursue the same woman instead of pursuing one another. In this context, the fact that Ruthven spares the young man while he kills so many others suggests a stronger relationship than might be inferred from the short time they have known one another and from the way they often react to one another.

The Giaour, of course, is only a fragment and is not a linear story. There are stylistic and thematic gaps in the poem as well, with sections composed at different times and not smoothly fitted together. Vampyre, on the other hand, is more crafted to be what it is, a well-shaped work with a different type of vampire than had been seen before in fiction. The vampire prior to this time had been primarily a mad person acting out animal instincts, similar in that regard to stories of the werewolf. Ruthven, on the other hand, is sophisticated and aristocratic and always in control even as he acts out his murderous intent and manipulates others to his ends. He also appears highly misogynistic, making him more like what Byron believes the Muslim world of the harem to be. Giaour is cursed to be a vampire as punishment, while Ruthven seems to revel in the power and the role this gives him. He also describes women as adulteresses and worse and treats them as fodder for his needs on every level. Aubrey notes this and does not like it, but he also does not manage to escape from the man or his way of life. In the end, his own sister is destroyed by this man, just as was Ianthe and countless others.