By Anthony Wroblewski
There is a particular scene in John Polidori’s The Vampyre that I keep returning to: it is just as Aubrey and Ianthe’s love is blooming—when Lord Ruthven is supposedly disappeared from Aubrey’s life—and what occurs but the onset of a gloomy scene, the scream of a woman, Aubrey’s mortal struggle with a vampire, and the discovery of Ianthe’s death. It is quintessentially Gothic in that, halfway through the story when all seems content, the narrative is upended by spectacular violence and horror. It’s a single, drawn-out paragraph that builds a quickly mounting Gothic atmosphere. It is uncanny (if I may use that unsettled word) as it is “concerned with the strange, weird and mysterious, with a flickering sense of something supernatural,” the dark places where violence and ambiguity overtake (Royle 1). The vampire as a literary figure is itself uncanny, in that it is both alive and dead, man and monster, gentleman and transgressor. That Ianthe’s description of vampires conveys a “pretty accurate description of Lord Ruthven” ambiguates the distinction between the man Aubrey knows and the monster he equates him to, “comingling…the familiar and unfamiliar” (Polidori 10; Royle 1). What I want to do in the following essay, then, is to explore this scene through the lens of Royle’s conception of the uncanny. How does language—specifically through imageries and references to darkness, transgression, and violence—produce a sense of uncanniness in the scene? How might abjection key into the story’s construction of the monstrous vampire? How does the vampire reflect notions of patriarchal control over the body as an object?
In the introduction to his second edition of Gothic, Fred Botting suggests that “darkness, obscurity and barely contained malevolent energy reinforce atmospheres of disorientation and fear” (Botting 4, 2nd ed). Darkness literally produces uneasiness; yet it is the absence of light that is key in this production, as “the interplay of light and dark, positive and negative, is evident in the conventions, settings, characters, devices and effects specific to gothic texts” (3, 2nd ed). In more amorphous terms, darkness is the underbelly of a scene, whether it be in setting or character. These dualities are exemplified by Polidori in Ianthe’s death and the assault of Aubrey. Before departing for his research, Ianthe begs Aubrey to return “ere night allowed the power of these beings [vampires] to be put in action” (11). Ianthe’s anxiety is superstitious, yet the story is titled The Vampyre, and so it signifies an impending transformation that necessarily takes place at night, under the cover of darkness. “Despite the encroachment of horror,” Botting writes, “a wish to know presses curious heroines forward…The use of obscurity, the interplay of light and shadow, and the partial visibility of objects, in semi-darkness…has a similar effect on the imagination” (Botting 6, 2nd ed). In racing home, Aubrey observes that “twilight in these southern climates is almost unknown; immediately the sun sets, night begins” (11). Twilight, being the liminal space between day and night, is not present here. This emphasizes the aesthetic transformation of the scene—foreboding in that its abnormality signifies something sinister and uncanny. As darkness falls, nature becomes an “entangled forest,” “echoing thunders…[and] thick heavy rain” assail him (11). According to Botting, “landscapes stress isolation and wilderness, evoking vulnerability, exposure and insecurity…forests [are] shadowy, impenetrable…Nature appears hostile, untamed and threatening” (Botting 4, 2nd ed). This abrupt transformation acts as a portal into the darknessof the scene to come; it signifies the departure from the light of reason and a hastening towards the messiness of ambiguity. It is as if Aubrey is entering a dream, where some thing is awaiting to be discovered, and in fact, “the dreadful shrieks of a woman mingled with the stifled exultant mockery of a laugh” propels both his and our curiosity to resolve the mystery (Polidori 11).
Here I want to emphasize the language Botting uses—the production of darkness induces a state of vulnerability, exposure, insecurity; it creates disorientation and fear; it is hostile and threatening. The reason this language is important to this scene in particular is due to what the scene obscures from view. When Aubrey breaks into the lonely hut, “he [finds] himself in utter darkness,” and within that darkness Polidori employs the vampire against Ianthe (11). Unable to reconcile the transgressive nature of this assault, Polidori commits the vampire’s violence towards Ianthe to shadow, instead displacing it onto Aubrey. He is “grappled,” he “struggle[s]…in vain,” the vampire “kneels upon his breast” and “place[s] his hands upon his throat” (12). Citing Samuel Weber, Royle remarks that the “uncanny is a certain undecidability which affects and infects representations, motifs, themes and situations, which…always mean something other than what they are” (Royle 15). We might infer, then, that because the language Polidori uses in Aubrey’s assault is dominating and sexual, and because he obscures the vampire’s assault of Ianthe, that this juxtaposition produces a scene which is an uncanny displacement of a sexual transgression against Ianthe. The ambiguity of what really happens, coupled with the ambiguity of the identity of the vampire, reduces the crimes against Ianthe to mere spectacle, whereas the attack on Aubrey is that uncanny confusion between reality and the fantasy of this supernatural encounter. The moment of discovery, when “the glare of many torches penetrate[s] through the hole that gave light in the day,” mirrors Aubrey’s interruption of the vampire’s crime, the implication being that the resolution of the mystery marks the sexual release of the predator (Polidori 12). This mirroring further confuses the two encounters—of the vampire and Ianthe, and of the vampire and Aubrey—and the presence of a sudden light and the invocation of day, along with the verb to penetrate, suggests a positive violation. This is because light becomes the physical refuge of Aubrey. I think it is safe to say though that, in the case of this reading, it is no refuge. It is, in fact, a representation of a patriarchal tendency to displace the responsibility of the abuser to a point which is away from the crime. By displacing all visible action away from Ianthe and onto Aubrey (who is ultimately rescued), the scene upholds a common sensibility in which women’s bodies become objects of possession for men’s desires.
One of the assertions which Botting makes regarding Gothic transgressions is that “the terrors and horrors of transgression…become a powerful means to reassert the values of society,” and that “transgression, by crossing the social and aesthetic limits, serves to reinforce or underline their value and necessity” (7, 1st ed). He suggests that “after escaping the monsters and penetrating the forest…heroines and readers manage to return with an elevated sense of identity to the solid realties of justice, morality and social order” (7, 1st ed). But where is Ianthe’s justice? Aubrey perceives “the lifeless corse” of his lover, with “no color upon her cheek…[and] upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein” (Polidori 12). We are not drawn toward sympathies for Ianthe, but rather towards that object of love which Aubrey has lost through this encounter. Throughout the story she is rendered as “his object [to] attain,” and upon recognizing her death he is “laid by the side of her who had lately been to him the object of so many bright and fairy visions” (10, 12). Her body becomes the object for the transgressions of the vampire’s violence and for Aubrey’s treatment of her as a romantic possession, not an actant pursuing her own designs. Taking a step back to consider the broader themes of The Vampyre, it is apparent that certain social values are being reinforced through the uncanny elements of the narrative. Aubrey characterizes Ruthven as a gentleman; he observes Lord Ruthven and gives his first impression of him as “the hero of a romance,” one who is not only worthy of social observation and study, but who embodies “profuse…liberality” (5). Ruthven’s charities are, on the surface, something to be admired: “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” (6). Yet these boons have “a curse upon [them], for they (recipients) all were either led to the scaffold, or sunk to the lowest and the most abject misery” (6). His sexual escapades with women are painted as transgressive; however, it is those “female hunters after notoriety attempt[ing] to win his affections” who are blamable (3). Women in general are relegated to the space of objects, and the subject Ruthven becomes those “fears of social disintegration…enable[ing] the reconstitution of limits and boundaries. Good [is] affirmed in the contrast with evil; light and reason [win] out over darkness and superstition” (Botting 8, 1st ed). Ruthven is not a good person, but neither are the women whom he encounters as represented by Aubrey. This is because the social order of the day is specifically prohibitive of liberality, and violent death is the uncanny consequence of transgressing these boundaries. But Ianthe is notlike these other women—in fact she is described as being an “unconscious girl,” embodying “innocence, youth, and beauty” while being “fairy” and “infantile” (Polidori 9-10). She is the good feminine—that which adheres to the social structures around her—and as a result, the depravity of the vampire must destroy her.
Ruthven as the vampire transgresses multiple social boundaries leading up to Ianthe’s murder, and the transgressive nature of the vampire as an instrument of sexual violence serves to reproduce patriarchal social norms which objectify women’s bodies as possessable. Aubrey is complicit in this construct, as his reinforcement of the angel/whore dichotomy, as well as his objectification of Ianthe, support these social norms. Those women who exercise sexual freedom are shunned, while those gentlemen who exercise it are lauded as romantic heroes. The lonely hut as a domestic space is infiltrated by the vampire, who represents both stranger and familiar. Passionate violence towards Aubrey displaces sexual violence against Ianthe. While the uncanny disintegration of social boundaries within The Vampyre produce horrifying monsters out of liberality, they simultaneously reinforce the rigidity of patriarchal structures of social, sexual, &c conservatism. And the stage for which anxieties regarding the fluidity of social boundaries is set within the obscuring darkness, so that that which is transgressive takes on the monstrous, the uncanny.
Works Cited
Botting, Fred. “Introduction: Gothic Excess and Transgressions.” Gothic. Routledge, 1996, pp. 1-20.
—. “Introduction: Negative Aesthetics.” Gothic. Routledge, 2014, pp. 1-19.
Polidori, John. “The Vampyre.” The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre. Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 1-24.
Royle, Nicholas. “The Uncanny: An Introduction.” The Uncanny. Routledge, 2003, pp. 1-38.
The Gothic Novel 