Alright, I successfully defended my diploma
thesis yesterday (so long, university education, I’ll miss you) so I’m gonna
start releasing reviews of the books I used in it. It’s not excerpts from my
thesis because it wasn’t focused on that but hey, those books are still in my
memory since I spent so many hours analyzing them, an therefore I can bring you
my point of view.
Lord Ruthven is the first vampire to enter
Anglo-American prose, and that’s why I’m going to talk rather fondly of it even
though it has a ton of mistakes and unclear motifs in it.
This short story is a great example of
incorporating the father figure theme into vampire fiction (doesn’t that make
Herr Freud happy) and even though the vampire as we know it today is a weak
creature who needs daggers to defend himself in the story, lets just appreciate
the effort Polidori made to rewrite Byron’s story which had led nowhere and
made it into even weirder story which led nowhere but which introduced a very
convenient character to plague the book-reading part of humankind.
There is a beautiful motif of the power of the
moon when it comes to the vampire rejuvenation so I’m going to look away from
the stupid oath the main character must keep and just point in the direction of
the Greek folktales mentioned in the story. Plus the ending, oh, the cunning
demon escaping after achieving everything he wanted to maybe resurface in your
own home! Oh, the chills down our spines! :-)=
And what legacy could possibly this piece
bring? Well, why not use the vampire as a means of dealing with our anxieties
and tabooish subjects we are afraid to address directly. Through the character
of vampire the future writers could deal with such tasks quite elegantly while
spooking the hell out of their readers.
So thank you, Mr Polidori, it was high time the
English suppressed emotions could run free in the evil metaphor called vampire.
GENRE: romantism introduces new element into
the gothic fiction
FANGS OUT: the first vampire to walk the prose
in the English language (heck, it was about time!) FANGS RETRACTING: the oath, oh the weak oath
TOTAL SCORE:
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