#deborah lutz

In medieval Eastern Europe alcoholics, thieves, excommunicated people, non-Christians (specifically Jews), those who died under a curse, and suicides were some of the excluded who might not stay dead. Dangerous lovers come down through myth with a similar constellation of vampiric symptoms; they are often alcoholics (Carton, Rhett Butler, and numerous erotic historical romance heroes), thieves (Conrad, the Corsair, and many other pirates); they are seen as unholy or cursed (Manfred, the Gaiour, Cain-like figures, Rochester, Heathcliff, and contemporary heroes linked with demonism, especially in gothic romances); they are effeminate or gay-coded (Rhett Butler, the dandy); and they desire death above all else (Manfred, Carton, Heathcliff, etc.). 

Vampires after Byron, Tom Holland argues, descend from the Byronic hero, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), surely the most influential version of the vampire story, was largely based on Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), a story Holland notes was originally told by Byron, which his sometime doctor heard, recorded, and embellished. Contemporary film versions of vampirism, as well as such popular narratives as those of Anne Rice, represent an even more eroticized, sophisticated, celebrity vampire haunting the fashionable world with dandified grace, full of Byronic decadence, satiated ennui, melancholy, and pallid beauty. 

An interesting and tenuous link can be traced between the vampire and the dandy, with Byronism as a background influence for both. Curiously, Lord Ruthven of The Vampyre appears to be something of a Regency dandy, and he has many of the characteristics that the Silver-Fork will later incorporate for its hero. The story opens in a familiar way: It happened that in the midst of the dissipations attendant upon a London winter, there appeared at the various parties of the leaders of the ton a nobleman, more remarkable for his singularities, than his rank. . . . His peculiarities caused him to be invited to every house; all wished to see him, and those who had been accustomed to violent excitement, and now felt the weight of ennui, were pleased at having something in their presence capable of engaging their attention. (265) 

Lord Ruthven has “the reputation of a winning tongue,” and he loves to gamble, especially when it means he can ruin promising young men, Dorian Gray-like. He moves through the drawing rooms of London with a magnetic aloofness, “a man entirely absorbed in himself, who gave few other signs of his observation of external objects, than the tacit assent to their existence, implied by the avoidance of their contact” (267). He has, like so many dangerous lovers, “the possession of irresistible powers of seduction” (269). Lord Ruthven, like all vampires, is a dangerous lover of the melodramatic villainous type, and he eroticizes a sexual cannibalism, an act that involves violent, sadistic seduction. 

Because the vampire must always be invited in, he represents the paradoxical fascination and repulsion of sex that is desirable because it is dangerous, because it might lead to pain, expulsion, and/or death. This desire to be ravished, to be “taken,” to be greedily consumed, has a role in so many of the demon lover narratives discussed here. When Jonathan Harker first meets the vampire of Stoker’s Dracula, his charm and personable qualities relax Harker after his frightful journey.

 Although when Dracula is later encountered in England he is repeatedly described as a kind of crazed animal with a “hellish” look and flaming red eyes, here in the beginning his gently seductive and thoughtful manners draw Harker to him. Like the many melancholy heroes we have encountered he remarks, “I love the shade and the shadow, and would be alone with my thoughts when I may” (26). Dracula is another night brooder like Manfred or Eugene Aram who must do his work under cover of the darkness, when others are safe within their beds. 

Cast out of the everyday activities of the living and the permanent stasis of the dead, Dracula haunts the night caught in a liminal state between death and life. Like a melancholy insomniac—Romeo, for instance—he is unable to live in the light of day. Dracula mourns the many who have died during his very long lifetime, both by his hand and by other means. Rickels explains that Dracula represents, like Heathcliff after Catherine’s death or Manfred, unmitigated mourning. Dracula apologizes for his melancholia in one of his few speeches: “[M]y heart, through the weary years of mourning over the dead, is not attuned to mirth” (26). 

Dracula must die in order to open the possibility for a future that comes from Mina’s repurification after being “sullied” by Dracula and her engendering of a new narrative through her baby by Harker. That Mina can become a part of the heterosexual couple again and can escape the “outside” as represented by vampirism points to the future of many dangerous lover narratives. Thus we are brought full circle to the collection of dark, mysterious strangers in the twentieth century whose crimes do not need to be expiated by death, or by the punishments and inquietude that might happen after death, but instead their immanence comes on earth and in life, and their terrible self-exiled bitterness is absolved by love in the contemporary romance.”