Introduction

"Rubbish, Watson, rubbish! What have we to do with walking corpses who can only be held in their grave by stakes driven through their hearts? It's pure lunacy."

"But surely" said I, "the vampire was not necessarily a dead man? A living person might have the habit. I have read, for example, of the old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth."

"You are right, Watson. It mentions the legend in one of these references. But are we to give serious attention to such things? This agency stands flatfooted upon the ground, and there it must remain. The world is big enough for us. No ghosts need apply." —Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Adventure of the Sussex Vampire

Sherlock Holmes may have no time for vampires, but his friend Dr. Watson quite obviously does. As a matter of fact, Watson's mention of the "old sucking the blood of the young in order to retain their youth" hints that his knowledge may be extensive. For he knows that vampires are not always foamy-mouthed fiends with blood dripping from extended incisors, but rather can be participants in some ghastly process of energy transfer in which one partner gains vitality at the expense of another. Presumably the doctor knows this because he has done his reading, and it is that reading—not in the medical but in the fictional literature of the nineteenth century—that this book will examine.

While critical attention has been paid to other mythic figures in Romanticism such as Prometheus, Don Juan, and the Wandering Jew, the vampire has been overlooked. Partly this is because his current commercial popularity is almost invariably vulgar: vampire dolls, vampire teeth, vampire cartoons, vampire costumes, and "vitamin enriched" vampire cereal (Count Chocula), to say nothing of a spate of vampire television shows, movies, and comic books, have made him more a subject of parody than of serious study. However, the contemporary moon-faced, sunken-eyed, cadaverous vampire licking his chops at the sight of an unprotected virgin is as far removed from his Romantic lineaments as is the Frankenstein monster with bolts through his forehead and huge stitches down his cheeks from the creature Mary Shelley created.

Ironically, the vampire has also been overlooked because most of the early criticism, while often perceptive, was decidedly eccentric. Here is a case of iatrogenic criticism, for the doctor/critic has often done his subject more harm than good, causing more confusion than clarification. The three prominent early critics of the vampire, all writing in the 1920s, were D. H. Lawrence, Montague Summers, and Mario Praz, and each had a profound influence on the shape of criticism to come. Lawrence's comments on Poe in Studies in Classic American Literature were rhapsodic about the vampire myth's ability to explain neurotic love. In The Vampire: His Kith and Kin, Montague Summers, a controversial Jesuit, was critically hampered by his own literal belief in vampires, which caused many problems, not the least of which was his mistaking a popular "penny-dreadful" for a scholarly dissertation on vampires; while Praz, in The Romantic Agony, was overly concerned with making the vampire fit into a DeSadean interpretation of Romanticism. Although these works often sparkle with brilliant insight, they more often illuminate the critic than the vampire. The situation is now changing, as there have been in the last decade a number of book-length studies of the vampire myth, but there is still no extended appraisal of the vampire in literature.

What Summers neglected and what Lawrence and Praz overstated was the psychological use of this mythic figure as an analogy to explain human interactions. For the vampire in Romanticism had a more profound use than making the reader's skin crawl or showing how daring the artist could be. Admittedly, writing schauer-romans exploiting gothic sensibility was fashionable, and, admittedly, the vampire story was an aberration of Romantic eroticism, as Praz implies, but the myth was also often used in serious attempts to express various human relationships, relationships that the artist himself had with family, with friends, with lovers, and even with art itself. In the works of such artists as Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Stoker, Wilde, Poe, and Lawrence the vampire was variously used to personify the forces of maternal attraction/repulsion (Coleridge's Christabel), incest (Bryon's Manfred), oppressive paternalism (Shelley's Cenci), adolescent love (Keats's Porphyro), avaricious love (Poe's Morella and Berenice), the struggle for power (E. Brontë's Heathcliff), sexual suppression (C. Brontë's Bertha Rochester), homosexual attraction (LeFanu's Carmilla), repressed sexuality (Stoker's Dracula), female domination (D. H. Lawrence's Brangwen women), and, most Romantic of all, the artist himself exchanging energy with aspects of his art (Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Poe's artist in The Oval Portrait, Wordsworth's Leech Gatherer, Wilde's Dorian Gray, and the narrator of James's The Sacred Fount).

As befalls any critical work that attempts to discuss English Romanticism, a major problem is organization. Chronological organization will not work, for the vampire is a mythic figure who rather than developing new sophistication and sharpness, becomes instead tedious and dull. Chronological organization thus only reverses critical expectations, for what begins in order ends in diffusion. Comparisons are also difficult because outside of the current cinema, comics, and cheap novels, the vampire myth is rarely used twice for the same pupose. Definitions are also problematic, for the artists freely altered the myth to support artistic ends. So I have organized this work first around male and female vampires in the poetry, then chronologically as the vampire figures in the novel, and finally around the various attempts to use the vampiric analogy to describe the process of artistic creation. I then conclude with a brief summary of twentieth-century adaptations of the myth, detailing its use in D. H. Lawrences middle novels. I regret that this organization often resembles circus elephants on parade, but, alas, there is not much interconnection between the works. This in itself may tell us something important about the Romantic "movement."

I will start with the female vampire, or lamia, not out of any Victorian deference but rather because here are the least sophisticated adaptations: Coleridge's Geraldine, Keats's Lamia, and La Belle Dame sans Merci, Charlotte Brontë's Bertha Rochester, and Poe's Ligeia and Morella have all been recognized and accepted in criticism as actually or potentially destructive females who have vampiric tendencies. The adaptation is not so clear with the male vampire in poetry, however, for here Keats's Porphyro, Byron's Manfred, and Shelley's Cenci are all assertive, facinorous, and in varying degrees demonic, but are they really vampires? Their demonism is more complicated than that of their...