The Vampyre

The Vampyre by John Polidori is an inaugural tale in vampire fiction. The story was published in 1819 in the middle of classic gothic fiction’s heyday. The story is preoccupied with classic gothic themes: The battle of Good Versus Evil; the relationship between Power and Corruption; and Women’s Sexuality and Social Roles.

The tale is a chronicle of the dramatic relationship between Ruthven and his young companion, Aubrey. From Aubrey’s naïve viewpoint, that relationship is characterized by slowly mounting horror as hints and portents that punctuate the narrative coalesce to confirm that his newfound friend is, in fact, a supernatural monster. The story relies heavily on foreshadowing to build tension around the revelation of Ruthven’s true nature.

Gothic fiction often plays with appearances in the struggle of Good Versus Evil. The revelers of high society misinterpret Ruthven’s resistance to the attempted seductions of adulteresses as a sign of “his apparent hatred of vice” (29). Ruthven’s preoccupation with “those females who form the boast of their sex from their domestic virtues, as among those who sully it by their vices” (29) hints at his evil aim of transgressing Women’s Sexuality and Social Roles of Polidori’s time. Ruthven’s preoccupation with virtuous and virginal women affirms the connection between virginity and virtue while portraying these features as a woman’s most important assets to be guarded against predators like Ruthven.

Aubrey, the story’s protagonist, is among those who fall under Ruthven’s spell. Orphaned at youth and raised by negligent guardians, Aubrey grew to maturity with an idealized view of the world based on the romance novels and poetry that nurtured his imagination. The allure of Ruthven’s enigmatic personality blurs the lines between reality and fiction for young Aubrey:

[Allowing] his imagination to picture every thing that flattered its propensity to extravagant ideas, [Aubrey] soon formed this object [Ruthven] into the hero of a romance, and determined to observe the offspring of his fancy, rather than the person before him (31-32).

Aubrey’s flight of fancy is meta-commentary on the story’s place within the romantic tradition. Ruthven has the hallmarks of a romantic hero: Solitary, aloof, and concerned with his own inner world. Gothic fiction is an offshoot of the Romantic tradition; Both gothic fiction and Romanticism are concerned with irrationality, characters’ internal psyches, and the supernatural. Where the romantic hero is normally good, Ruthven inverts this trope in the struggle of Good Versus Evil. Traditionally, literature ties appearance to a character’s morality: Good and evil characters are easily spotted by certain tropes and hallmarks. Gothic villains subvert these expectations to reveal a monstrous individual underneath a well-respected social mask.

Aubrey’s Tragic Flaw is his naivety that stems from his love for romantic literature, which inspires his sense of honor. This is demonstrated most clearly when Ruthven is on his deathbed and asks Aubrey to swear the cryptic oath. Although evidence mounts throughout the story that Ruthven is something much more sinister than he appears to be, Aubrey swears to the oath. The scene is particularly romantic and plays on Aubrey’s storybook sensibilities; His friend is dying, and only Aubrey can fulfill his final wish, no matter how cryptic it may be. He continues to abide by it even after he finds evidence that Ruthven is the likely culprit behind Ianthe’s death.

Polidori uses the literary devices of Foreshadowing, Melodrama, Tragic Flaws, and dramatic irony to structure the story’s pace and reader’s reactions. The foreshadowing of Ruthven’s true nature through his proximity to the murders and his odd behavior, coupled with the story’s title, reveal Ruthven’s true identity to the reader relatively early. Aubrey’s tragic flaw and confined perspective stop him from learning this when the reader does, creating suspense through dramatic irony, which occurs when readers know key information that characters do not. Ruthven’s extremely magnetic charm, the gory deaths, and the constant tragedy of the story lend themselves to melodrama, a literary device that relies on high emotional appeal. Melodrama drives the narrative forward, as one tragic event leads to an exceedingly more tragic event. Melodrama allows Polidori to build suspense without resolution until the final line of the story.

The story’s closing moments provide some measure of the ruin that Ruthven has inflicted on others over the course of his long existence. Polidori uses the gothic trope of Madness to symbolize Aubrey’s knowledge of the truth and his brush with a corrupting, supernatural force that does not belong in Aubrey’s society. Even by the standards of gothic fiction the story’s ending is relentlessly bleak and heightens the text’s melodrama. Polidori has accounted for how a vampire can be resurrected from apparent death, but he provides no lore concerning how a vampire might be destroyed. In The Vampyre, there is no redemption for the innocent: Evil triumphs after wooing high society, the virtuous are destroyed, and there is no restoration of the moral balance at the story’s conclusion.