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lauralot89 · 24 days ago

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“You don’t know these people, do you?” [Varney] asked Ruthven on the way up.

“Not as far as I’m aware,” said Ruthven. “It’s entirely possible they might have read that godawful Polidori book; in which case this will be extremely embarrassing.”

“Not as embarrassing as Varney the Vampyre, or The Feast of Blood,” said Varney drily. “Practically nothing is as embarrassing as that. Polidori at least wasn’t being paid by the word.”

—Dreadful Company, Vivian Shaw

Who's more out of their mind: James Malcolm Rymer, for writing 667,000 words of Varney the Vampire, or me for reading all of them in ten days?

I have no idea how to feel or to surmise what I've just experienced. On the one hand, Sir Francis Varney may now be my favorite vampire in literature, and whenever this book got me interested, it was sometimes one of the most fascinating vampire stories I've ever read.

I wasn't expecting such an early installment in the vampire fiction genre to be so sympathetic toward the vampire. I definitely was not expecting the vampire to eventually befriend his victims, or to refuse on multiple occasions to kill, or to try and help those he had terrorized as a form of repentance.

Granted, even when I was fully on board with the story, it still had a number of baffling elements. The romantic dialogue of this novel is so atrocious that it makes the Star Wars prequels look like one of Shakespeare's love stories in comparison. The comic relief duo of the admiral and his valet consisted of two jokes only (they speak in sailor slang and fight all the time) which were promptly pounded into the ground. At least six times in this book, possibly more, the narrative stopped so the author could write a chapter just consisting of transcribing what the characters were reading. Because he was getting paid by the word.

Despite all of this, I was fully on board up until Varney's would-be wedding as the Baron failed. After that, we got treated to multiple instances, each spanning several chapters, in which Varney would again pass himself off as some rich guy, try to marry a young woman, and then get exposed and run away. I'm guessing those chapters sold really well and that's why Rymer kept doing those stories? Or else he was just out of ideas. I don't see why those chapters would have sold especially well because they were short on vampire nonsense and chock full of wedding preparations and negotiations. I don't know much about the target audience for penny dreadfuls, but I would imagine they would care more about action than the services hired for a wedding breakfast.

And then once the endless marriages stopped, we got several more chapters of Varney biting a woman, getting caught, and running away. The story only picked back up in the last ten percent of the novel, when Rymer finally did something new by having one of Varney's victims become a vampire herself. Unfortunately, she got finished off pretty quickly and then the novel just ended.

(I am not complaining about the ending. The ending was a hell of a thing and gave me all sorts of emotions. But we could have had Varney's exploits with a newbie vamp instead of Failed Wedding Attempt 875)

Also, I'm assuming that Rymer did not plot this story out before he began? Varney's past changes constantly, sometimes within maybe thirty pages of the last backstory we were given. He's a deceased ancestor of the Bannerworths who took his life a hundred years ago! He's an executed highway robber, resurrected maybe a decade ago at most by a doctor's experiments, Frankenstein-style! He's been a vampire for 180 years and became one by murdering an innocent woman! He lived as mortal during the reign of Henry the Fourth! He lived as a mortal during the reign of Charles the First, and became a vampire after accidentally killing his son by striking him in anger!

If it were just Varney's past that was inconsistent, I'd say he was lying or had lived and died so many times that he genuinely forgot which death was the first one. But there are weird inconsistencies throughout the novel. What was up with the document Varney and Marchdale tried to force Charles to sign? Does Varney have a scar on his forehead or his cheek? Why did one girl who died of Varney become a vampire and the other one didn't? And most importantly to me, the hell was up with the Hungarian nobleman?

Why bother to introduce another vampire if it's going to lead to nothing but a red herring where the reader briefly thinks that the baron isn't Varney, and rather that Varney is the vampire that the baron killed?

Granted, roughly two thousand pages later, when a brood of vampires assemble to resurrect a new vampire, then probably the Hungarian nobleman comes back to speak a whole two sentences to Varney, about how they met at an inn once and also Varney used to hang with people named Bannerworth.

(I need to know more about this vampire group that assembles to resurrect vampire newbs. How does that work? Do they just sense them? Do they get pulled there by vampire power?)

And what was up with that time skip? Did we need to introduce Mr. Bevan as a sympathetic character when the entire Bannerworth family already were sympathetic to Varney?

I just don't know, man.

Also, Rymer hates Quakers. And Jewish people. And Catholics. And evangelicals. And organized religion in general. And Scots. And Americans, I think. Now, this is not at all rare for the time. Stoker and Wilde and many other of their contemporaries would also write their prejudices into their stories decades later. But they didn't write a book longer than War and Peace that had big stretches of nothing except weird diatribes of whatever they disliked.

Anyway.

Can I in good conscience recommend that anyone read this?

Not in its entirety. If someone wants to do an abridged version have at it I guess. Or read it in its entirety over the span of months instead of ten days like I did. My brain is going to explode.

The first half was good. The end stuff was good. I want to wrap Varney up in a number of blankets and feed him some of my blood. And thank God he's in the public domain, because he deserves better than an endless slog of miseries that quickly goes off the rails once he leaves the Bannerworths.

Final mob count: 11

Final failed vampire wedding count: 4

I should have kept track of all the times Varney died and/or got shot, but I forgot

Three stars

#Laura reads Varney the Vampire #Varney the Vampire #review #spoilers

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alpaca-clouds · 4 months ago

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The Horror Of Vampires?!

A friend and I talked about something recently, and frankly it really made me think about this. Officially vampires are creatures associated with horror literature and horror media. However, most people do not really interact with vampires that way? Like, sure Interview with the Vampire and Castlevania for example do get marketed as horror - but... People usually watch horror to get creeped out or spooked. But people usually watch vampire-adjacent media either because "vampires are hot" or because it makes for good action. I mean, I love my vampires - I spoke about it this week. But I (who was afraid of his own shadow as a kid) never once in my life considered vampires as "spooky" or "scary".

And looking back on the history of vampire media... This is not exactly a new development, right?

Lord Ruthven and Varney

We could start whenever with vampire novels, as the vampire genre goes back until the 18th century. However, I am going to start at the beginning of the 19th century wth The Vampyr by Polidori and the Varney Penny Dreadfuls by Rymer. Because these two already quite well show that vampires were not really creatures of horror back then.

Because neither story really was horror even back in the day. The Vampyr was mostly just Polidori poking fun at Byron. While some of the themes we find in Dracula later are present here, ironically it is quite clear that Polidori did not quite think about it the same way that Stoker did. (Or to put it differently: Polidori hung with a very different crowd than Stoker.)

The Varney stories are mostly just... confusing in this regard. The Varney story is most notable for being published as a penny dreadful first - and it seems the writer or rather writers were not quite certain whether Varney was an actual vampire or just a metaphoricial one. One way or another, Varney definitely was portrayed as more and more sympathetical over the run of the novels, and his death in the finale is actually quite tragic.

Dracula and Carmilla

Dracula and Carmilla were probably the one thing that actually was meant to be read as horror. And while we, who definitely would be considered to be "sick bastards" by Victorian standards, would not necessarily consider it this way, it was definitely meant to be read this way back in the day.

Both novels definitely play of the same ideas for horror. A very Victorian kind of horror. Because the horror in both novels is very much based on the idea of "corruption of the innocents" and the "alien who comes to corrupt".

Nobody is gonna argue that both books are extremly queer, which is exactly part of the horror. This was written by Victorians, who were quite appalled by the idea of queerness. Many paragraphs have been written before about Bram Stoker, who very probably was queer himself, writing Dracula with a mixture of xenophobia, antisemitism, and internalized queerphobia. Dracula is all the things that the Victorian society feared. The "stranger from the East" who comes in and corrupts the young people (Johnathan, and Lucy mostly, while Mina is obviously incorruptable).

The same is somewhat true for Carmilla. Carmilla comes in and corrupts a young girl into queerness. The queerness here is the basis of the horror.

Again, we do not quite read it this way these days. But that was what made those novels horror - and maybe it was what kinda made sure that vampires would not stay horror for long?

The Blood of the Vampire

Another book that came out close to the end of the century and already goes very deep into making the vampire sympathetic is The Blood of the Vampire by Marryat. While this story leaves it open (as do many vampire stories of the day) whether it is truly vampires involved here, there is definitely the suggestion... However, we read the entire story from the point of view of the vampire, and the horror is in fact that this young girl does not understand what is happening to her, and that she through her nature accidentally kills people.

I am Legend

Okay, I will admit one thing: Of all the vampire novels released between 1990 and 1970 I have only ever read I am Legend. Now, I am Legend is pretty much somewhere between vampire novel and a zombie apocalypse. Now, if you only know the Will Smith movie, you do not know anything about this story, mind you. Because the twist is completely different.

Now, for the most part the horror of this novel - and this is definitely horror - comes from the decay of society, and how a human being completely isolated will usually use his mind. Sure, part of this are the vampires, but the protagonist's mind is actually a way bigger part of the horror than the vampires.

Especially as the final reveal of the story is: "Vampires are actually quite alright. And they will be the future of humanity."

Salem's Lot

Salem's Lot is another story that definitely features vampires as horror creatures. And to be fair, I am struggling to say much about it because there is just one simple fact: I find King's writing incredibly boring and even kid!me (who, again, was afraid of everything) never found King's stories very spooky or frightening. For the most part I would argue that Salem's Lot has not much horror that is specifically connected to the vampires being vampires. They are just "monsters" that can turn pretty much everyone against you. That is the horror here. The big difference between vampires and zombies would probably be the very specific weaknesses of vampires - and the fact that they are cunning, which zombies usually are not. But generally speaking, the vampires here could be easily replaced with any other kind of monster tht could easily turn other people into "monsters" themselves.

Still, from all vampire media that I have read, Salem's Lot is probably the one example of a story, where the vampires are horror creatures just on the basis of being vampires - and where the book never really bothers even the slightest of humanizing the vampires in any way.

Interview with the Vampire

Just one year after Salem's Lot, though, the novel would release that would very much change vampire literature forever: Interview with the Vampire. Yes, this was officially a horror novel. However, I never read it as horror - and I doubt most folks who read it did. Instead this book and the ones following it, very much is the exploration of the psychology of vampires. Anne Rice's vampires are very sad, very dysfunctional people, who really just want to find some peace and happiness, but are quite unhappy. If anything the thing that is the horror here is not the vampires, but their existence. Because to them existing as vampires becomes a sort of psychological horror to itself. This is obviously especially clear when it comes to Claudia, who is cursed to forever exist as a child in a world that never will respect her and see her as a full person.

As you can see: I am not even arguing that there is no horror in here to be found - but the horror is not "scary vampire", but "being a vampire is fucking scary". Mind you, it is this aspect of the vampire that I found always quite fascinating, and that admittedly got a bit too lost for me on the long run...

So, this was pretty much the point where vampire media changed forever. At this point vampires were hypercharged and suddenly became very omnipresent in media to never go away over the next 50 years. And yes, from the 80s onwards I have read a whole lot more of the vampire media that has been released. However, I will not go much into many details from here on - rather than going into the three distinct types of vampire media that we have now.

Vampire Romance

I am blindly gonna argue that probably the biggest subgenre of vampire literature is vampire romance. Based on the fact that romance is the biggest genre of literature in general, you know? A lot of Urban Fantasy falls into this, too.

Now, generally speaking almost all vampire romances are the same: We have a human main character, most of the times female, who falls in love with a vampire, most of the time male. There are queer variants of this, but very little where a male human falls in love with a female vampire (or the other way around). Sure, I can think of a few novels like that (mostly stuff about non-white vampires, ironically), but generally speaking: Most of this is a tiny female woman or girl, falling in love with daddy dom vampire.

While sometimes the romantic vampires can be dangerous, I can hardly call them horror. Sure, there might be a scene or two - depending on the author - where the vampire goes into a blood frenzy and might be dangerous to their human lover, but in general vampires in this subgenre are depicted as something great, amazing, hot, and desireable. In quite a lot of books the main character ends up becoming a vampire, or at least yearns for it.

So, no. The vampire romance definitely falls out of the horror aspect.

Vampire Hunters

Probably the most varied type of vampire media we have around today is media about vampire hunters. While vampire hunter media was around forever (technically speaking the oldest I have read were from the 1910s and 1920s and published in pulp magazines, featuring usually vampire or general monster hunters - it even seems that this is where the entire "werewolf vs vampire" thing comes from), it really took off in the 90s with Buffy.

Vampire Hunter alligned media usually is more targeted at a male audience, though there are some stories that are more targeted at women. Either way: While the main plot here usually goes about hunting down either one specific vampire or just your average monster/vampire of the week, there is quite a lot of those that have a lot of sideplot focused on romance/sex and a wide cast of side characters. Generally speaking a lot of those stories however will be best described as "action", which is probably why we see this type of vampire story most commonly also in visual media - be it games, shows. comics, or movies.

However, one way or another: Very few of these actually go heavily into horror. While at least some of the games can have some creepy and anxious moments, and a lot of media here goes into splatter and gore... There is rarely a whole lot of actual horror in it. After all, in the end this genre is very much about a power fantasy - which is simply the opposite of horror.

Vampire Horror (?)

Between all the other vampire stories there are some vampire stories, that aim at least to be horror. Del Toro's The Strain definitely falls into this. And in general I have read a total of four books, that actually fall into the genre - while also being completely unable to recall the other three titles, as they do not seem to be in the Wikipedia list.

And this was actually what got me thinking about this the most. Because... out of all those books, only one actually worked for me. And that was a book written from an indigenous perspective doing the same thing that Castlevania Nocturne does: Equating colonialists with vampires.

However, I am not quite sure whether this was because I identified with this perspective, or whether it was because of these books it was the only one not taking place in a semi-modern world.

See, here is the thing: In a modern setting vampire are just not very scary, no matter what you do. And that... Well, it leads me to a theory.

What makes a vampire scary?

So, let me talk for a moment about this. What actually is the horror of the vampire?

From all the novels I have read, I would argue that the general ideas of horror within vampires come from one or more of the following ideas:

Vampires can corrupt anyone into their ways. One horror aspect of this is, that they can turn anyone against you. Even your lover, your family, your friends can fight you on the next day.

Vampires can corrupt you. They can "infect you" and make you live out your darkest desires - be those of sexual or a violent nature.

Vampires can hide in plain sight. They can appear as human for the most part and can hence sneak up on you rather easily.

Vampires usually are incredibly hard to kill (unless you have sunlight).

The last part is the biggest issue.

I will now say it again: Originally vampires could go out into the sunlight. The entire thing with "vampires die in the sunlight" actually goes back to the Nosferatu movie running out of budget for an epic final battle and people ran with it. But it is exactly this that makes vampires so often not work as horror. Because it is a very easy, obvious solution to killing them.

A few days ago I saw a post on my timeline on how monsters that are visible are actually a lot more scary - and I kinda agree. But generally I think that a main issue with vampire horror is, that the "weaknesses" are just too silly and too obvious.

In general I think vampires would work better in a sort of psychological horror, that goes more into the first two aspects of it. Because the vampire as a monster... I am afraid it just does not work anymore these days - if it has ever worked.

And a part of me really would love to write some proper horror with vampires at some point. But I don't know if it can even work. What do you think?

#vampires #vampire literature #vampire #gothic horror #monsters #dracula #dracula daily #carmilla #varney the vampire #the vampyre #bram stoker #salem's lot #interview with the vampire #buffy the vampire slayer #castlevania #vampire hunters

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mayhemchicken-artblog · 8 months ago

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"the vampires convene under the light of the full moon, raising their arms to the sky; they refer to each other as "brothers" and talk very formally; they occasionally all chant "blood! blood!" in unison; and of course they all carry matching shovels which they use to dig up the body."

This is so funny I would think it's a scene from WWDITS.

And the part with one (1) vampire among the evil cult groaning during the entire raising process is potential for comedy gold scene.

Imagine them all in black cloaks going "Thy time has arrived, brother!" and lifting their arms chanting "blood blood". Meanwhile Varney keeps going "Why am I even needed here" "Can't Satan or whoever just raise the dead himself if he needs us so badly" "I mean I myself rose without a vampire chanting so?" "I have better things to do such as languishing" "Is he rising yet?" While one of them whispers to the next, arms still lifted, why do we have him come for evil rituals he always ruins the vibe.

oh that's basically exactly what happens. the following is a direct quote from the text:

"Brothers," he said, "you who prey upon human nature by the law of your being, we have work to do to-night -- that work which we never leave undone, and which we dare not neglect when we know that it is to do. One of our fraternity lies here." "Yes," said the others, with the exception of one, and he spoke passionately. "Why," he said, "when there were enough, and more than enough, to do the work, summon me?"

over the course of the scene, varney proceeds to make the following complaints:

he was busy -- he's hungry, he was out getting food, why'd they have to interrupt him like this

"I was engaged in my vocation. If the moon shine out in all her lustre again, you will see that I am wan and wasted, and have need of--" "Blood," said one. "Blood, blood, blood," repeated the others.

he doesn't have time for this, can we hurry it up please

"Let the work be proceeded with then, at once, I have no time to spare."

who even was this guy we're digging up

"Let it be done with. Where lies the vampyre? Who was he?"

this guy sounds like an asshole. fine, i'll help dig him up, but he can climb out of the grave his own damn self, i'm not helping him

"Shall we aid him." "No," said Varney, "I have heard that of him which shall not induce me to lift hand or voice in his behalf. Let him fly, shrieking like a frightened ghost where he lists."

wow he's taking a while. did we even dig up the right guy?

A quarter of an hour, however, passed away, and nothing happened. "Are you certain he is one of us?" whispered Varney.

are we done yet??

"Is it done?" said Varney. "Not yet," said he who had summoned the[m] to the fearful rite[...]

he goes through the whole scene with the approximate air of someone who's been summoned to a mandatory work meeting on his lunch hour. the other vampires treat the whole scene with grave (haha) importance and mostly ignore his constant complaining. funniest of all, they seem to view him with some reverence, as he's apparently well known and well respected in the vampire community for having lived a really long time (if the line of background he drops in this scene is to be believed, he goes back as far as the 14th century!)

and then as soon as the scene is over, we return to the main plot as though nothing had happened, which at this point in the story consists of three different parties of scooby-doo villains (including varney) all trying to outscheme each other at once, complete with silly disguises and attempts to scare people by dressing up as a monster. the vampire council is never mentioned again and are never relevant to anything else that happens.

book of all time.

#not art #varney the vampire #varney posting #this got long lmao #so much happens in this book

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mayhemchicken-varneyposting · 16 days ago

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About the attempted marriages: Are they far off still? Are they like in The Vampyre as an excuse for him to eat them and go to the next, or have as free rations human instead of having to hunt?

Yes, the marriage episodes start up when the author starts getting bored of the Bannerworths, which is maybe a hundred or so chapters in? We don't really get to see what Varney was planning on doing after getting married, since he never actually succeeds, but at one point it's implied that he believes true love will break his curse, curing him of his vampirism. I'm not sure how he thought that was going to work, like

Step 1: Use money and a fake title to bribe a girl's family into marrying her to me against her will Step 2: Over time she will hopefully fall in love with me Step 3: Oops I still have to drink blood in the meantime Step 4: Let's hope this girl turns out to have a biting kink

The true love thing only comes up once, though, and at other points it does seem like he's in it for an easy meal. The marriages thing is 100% ripping off The Vampyre, but Varney is a very different character from Ruthven; I don't think he would have killed any of his would-be brides. Still, it's almost hard for me to imagine a scenario where he does succeed; he's so characterized by bad luck, and the narrative structure is so stacked against him. My best guess is that he's hoping for an easy long-term food source, and that if he ever succeeded it would immediately backfire and the girl would tell someone she's married to a vampire and whip up a mob to chase him out of town. It wouldn't happen in Rymer's regressive worldview, though, both because the Virtuous Heroine only remains virtuous so long as she is pure (virginal), and because I don't think he believes in divorce.

Which is a shame, because Varney the Vampire Divorce Court Drama sounds entertaining as hell.

#varney the vampire #ask #meta #sir francis varney #this is a rymer hate blog #this is also a polidori hate blog #again margaret meredith would be perfect for this #black comedy where she learns he is a vampire and plots to kill him so she can be free of her marriage to a monster #except he just keeps coming back every time

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cleolinda · 2 years ago

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Varney the Vampire: A Preface

I want you to think back to what it’s like to reread your old work from years ago—your old stories or poetry, your old school papers, or even your old tumblr posts. Sometimes you’re actually kind of pleased, sure, but I want you to really go back and locate yourself in the heady cringe of that feeling.

In related news, I'm going to pick back up with the Varney the Vampire recaps I started in late 2010 CE. I got about nine chapters in, and then something, who knows what, derailed my life, as things tend to. Like, I'm used to this, it happens with the regularity of a lunar cycle. But I like writing about vampires (clearly), and since I feel like Dracula has been tread pretty thoroughly in recent times, I figured I might go back to something different; we had some lively discussions about Varney back then.

But 2010 was a time before A Lot of Things happened. I was in my early 30s at that point, so I won't say, "Oh, I was so young," but I had a very different energy as a blogger 12-13 years ago. So I've decided to rewrite the recaps a little—some more than others, some not much at all. I just feel like I have a really different perspective on the first chapter in particular, in 2023.

As before, I'm using the full, unabridged text. It is hideously long, something like 230+ chapters, but go big or go home, I figure. The thing is, I was using the files hosted at the University of Virginia, and now you can only get those through the Wayback Machine, but they are still usable for now. I have various backups saved, but I do want you to be able to see that I am, as ever, Not Making It Up.

I'm also not going to quibble anymore as to whether James Malcolm Rymer or Thomas Peckett Prest wrote this behemoth. Per Wikipedia sources, scholars seem to agree that it was all or mostly Rymer. When it's mentioned that they figured this out based on his dialogue style, I went... yeah, that checks out. Because it sure is A Style, and I'll be honest, the repetitive filler dialogue in chapter 10 was such a speedbump for me that I just threw up my hands and said, "I don't know how to recap this. Something I can't remember now is going on in my life and I Cannot. I no longer Can."

Well, it's the 2020s and we're gonna. Like I can't tell you how much stress I do not have about this. I've had covid three times and also spinal surgery. Varney the Vampire can no longer hurt me.

To start, this ordeal has a preface—apparently written upon the occasion of collecting the serial into book form—wherein The Author expresses his gratitude for "unprecedented success of the romance of Varney the Vampyre." First off, Rymer uses "vampire" and "vampyre" interchangeably, because fuck me for caring about consistency, I guess. Second, as Wikipedia notes,

It first appeared in 1845–1847 as a series of weekly cheap pamphlets of the kind then known as "penny dreadfuls." The author was paid by the typeset line [YEAH, I NOTICED], so when the story was published in book form in 1847, it was of epic length: the original edition ran to 876 double-columned pages and 232 chapters. Altogether it totals nearly 667,000 words.

For comparison, all of Lord of the Rings plus The Hobbit is 576,459 words. I sure do blanch every time I see those numbers! It's fine. We're gonna be fine. Back to the preface:

The following romance is collected from seemingly the most authentic sources, and the Author must leave the question of credibility entirely to his readers, not even thinking that he is peculiarly called upon to express his own opinion upon the subject.

"Seemingly" is doing a lot of work here.

Nothing has been omitted [for real, nothing down to the tiniest fly-swat has been omitted] in the life of the unhappy Varney, which could tend to throw a light upon his most extraordinary career, and the fact of his death just as it is here related, made a great noise at the time through Europe, and is to be found in the public prints for the year 1713.

I've seen more than one Dracula multimedia art project where people recreated the letters and diaries and recordings in the book (have you heard my whole thing about how Dracula actually was a cutting-edge techno-thriller back in 1897?), but I've never heard of anyone creating ARG-style media for the Totally for Actual-Fact Real tale of Sir Francis Varney the Vampire, and I think it would be hilarious if someone did.

I won't belabor the entire preface, but what I do want to touch on is Rymer's mention of "unprecedented success." Varney is actually standing on the shoulders of a vampire giant, and it's not the one we would think of. Nowadays, our big touchstone—the influence so great that most works either evoke it or take the trouble to say "Our vampires are different"—is Dracula, obviously. Which was published exactly 50 years after Varney, in 1897. But Varney's touchstone is Polidori's short story "The Vampyre" (1819). And for most of the 1800s, this was everyone's touchstone. Per Wikipedia (which I'm going to lean on for how concise it is, but I concur with this from my own research as well):

An adaptation appeared in 1820 with Cyprien Bérard's novel Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires, falsely attributed to Charles Nodier, who himself then wrote his own dramatic version, Le Vampire, a play which had enormous success and sparked a "vampire craze" across Europe. This includes operatic adaptations by Heinrich Marschner (see Der Vampyr) and Peter Josef von Lindpaintner (see Der Vampyr), both published in the same year. Nikolai Gogol, Alexandre Dumas [note: I have the Ruthven play he wrote around here somewhere] and Aleksey Tolstoy all produced vampire tales, and themes in Polidori's tale would continue to influence Bram Stoker's Dracula and eventually the whole vampire genre. Dumas makes explicit reference to Lord Ruthven in The Count of Monte Cristo, going so far as to state that his character "The Comtesse G..." had been personally acquainted with Lord Ruthven. [...]

In England, James Planché's play The Vampire, or The Bride of the Isles was first performed in London in 1820 at the Lyceum Theatre based on Charles Nodier's Le Vampire, which in turn was based on Polidori. Such melodramas were satirised in Ruddigore, by Gilbert and Sullivan (1887); a character called Sir Ruthven must abduct a maiden, or he will die.

Back when no one gave a shit about copyright, Polidori's work was spun out into a cottage industry of knock-off stories and plays, an entire horror zeitgeist. Lord Ruthven was, for 78 years, who you copied, who you riffed on, who you parodied, what Count Dracula is to us now: the archetypal vampire. The Big Guy. And Varney is clearly cut from his cloth—the ostensible gentleman who worms his way into the lives of respectable, unwitting people. Unlike Dracula, there's no foreigner Othering, no "historical basis," no undercurrents of contagion and infection, no ambition to make the world his wine-press, none of that; Ruthven is a simpler figure, but the dominant one of this time no less. He is a stranger who shows up in the middle of London high society, icy and distant, his eyes “dead grey”—stern, yet somehow compelling when he cares to be. And when he cares to be, you're in trouble.

And this is the cultural consciousness when Francis Varney shows up.

[Chapter one will go up sometime this week, March 8-10 or so.]

#varney the vampire #vampires #vampire studies #honestly I am nervous about what I want to say about the first chapter #not sure it's gonna go over very well #long post #welcome to hell it's my blog #tv tropes warning. here is your rope to climb back out

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maverick-werewolf · 1 year ago

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Vampire Fact #13 (oh no) - The Importance of Dracula

It's another vampire fact this month! Next month will be a Werewolf Fact again for October, of course, in time for Halloween.

But for now, let's talk about a very important topic when it comes to vampires... the importance of everyone's favorite count: Dracula.

Much like my Werewolf Fact "The Importance of The Wolf Man," this Vampire Fact will discuss the importance of Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, published in 1897, and the almost-impossible-to-overstate importance of how it shaped all popular conceptions of vampires afterward - and even retroactively affected vampire legends through scholarship and study.

I want to open by saying that this post is not setting out to discuss the historical context of Dracula itself as a literary work, neither in terms of when/how Bram Stoker wrote it (and to what degree it was influenced by things like Varney the Vampire and John Polidori's The Vampyre), nor in terms of how much it relates to Vlad the Impaler. I am aware of the conversation around Bram Stoker and his work and the many discussions thereof, but that isn't what I'm here to cover today. Right now, I'm focusing only upon the undeniable, massive influence the novel Dracula in itself has had upon vampires in popular culture essentially from the moment it was published all the way until today - and it will continue, as well.

I may, however, talk about all those kind of things in a separate post, as I have spent a great deal of time studying them and even publishing upon them (including an article diving deep into how Polidori doesn't get enough credit overall in vampire study). But more on that later! For now, let's talk about what Dracula did for vampires.

First off, for those unfamiliar with Dracula, you should be. If you enjoy vampires at all and haven't read this book, that's a big blind spot! First of all, you'd enjoy the heck out of it, and second of all, it's the vampire book. That's possibly even worse than having not seen The Wolf Man if you love werewolves (although it's rather hard to say; they're pretty much on par, even if Dracula is considered more important historically, as it's a work of classic literature and movies don't often get that level of respect, which I disagree with).

Tangent. Anyway.

In Dracula, we see the foundational aristocratic, blood-sucking, pale, red-eyed, fanged, clean, finery-wearing vampire with civilized manners (until he suddenly lacks them because he's turned into a monster) - plus he's a count, of course. He lives secluded in his grand castle high in the mountains of Eastern Europe, and he is seeking to rejoin society. Many vampires are/were also influenced by the romantic - twisted or not - angle in the story and Dracula's obsession with one woman. Not everything of Dracula's was picked up by popular culture, of course - primarily what was reused, appearance-wise, were the elements later found in film adaptations. For instance, his white hair and mustache (the latter no doubt influenced by Vlad the Impaler) from the book are generally turned to black hair and clean-shaven, thanks to films that followed. But still, it all started with this book.

The character of Dracula would impact literally all vampires to follow, in some fashion or another. The influence is all-encompassing and undeniable.

Please note that not all of this influence came from the novel Dracula alone - it also comes from ripoffs and adaptations thereof, especially in film, as mentioned. I'm talking things like Nosferatu and all the many Dracula film adaptations thereafter. Some concepts didn't originate in Dracula itself - but they did come from things created from or otherwise heavily influenced by Dracula, so without Dracula, one can easily argue we wouldn't have any of those things, either. Like werewolves with The Wolf Man (1941), a lot of these influences also come from film. Obviously it all originated with the novel and adaptations thereof, however, so the novel deserves the credit, ultimately.

Your average Halloween vampire has the classic Dracula concept; whether one wants to argue it was popularized directly from the book or from later film adaptations, you can't deny the high-collared, well-dressed, tall dark and handsome pale vampire that became ubiquitous in recent decades. You know them, you love them - you've seen them every Halloween and on every bit of vampire merch afterward (except perhaps a few things after the Twilight renaissance, which I also won't cover in this post).

Other than obvious design influences, Dracula and its film adaptations of course influenced the vampire "lore" afterward. Perhaps the biggest impact on vampires is simple: fangs. Vampires in folklore didn't actually have fangs! Dracula completely popularized that. Many more details in the linked post as to where the fangs came from, etc.

What were some other things? Well, other than what I already mentioned, Dracula popularized the association of vampires with various kinds of animals (based in folklore), and it even popularized many concepts about vampire hunters, thanks to the ever-popular Abraham Van Helsing.

What else did it influence? Everything. Weaknesses, as well as how to become a vampire and vampires being a curse that the creature could spread to others, to humans, instead of a demonic being - and even the term "vampire" itself certainly saw a rise in the public eye from Dracula.

In truth, Dracula didn't just influence vampire concepts - it influenced all vampire stories to follow and the entire worlds built around their concepts, both vampires, vampire hunters, the general feel and setting of the stories, the plots themselves - absolutely everything.

Please note too, of course, that Bram Stoker was not a slouch on research. He was very heavily influenced by folklore and elements of history, even if he put his own spin on it and made many additions. The fangs in particular have become just a part of vampires as a whole, concept, image, everything. Without fangs, is a vampire even a vampire these days? Not really, especially in the modern mindset - and let's face it, vampires are made a million times cooler by the fangs.

If you want to read one of Bram Stoker's biggest folkloric inspirations, check out a little book called Transylvanian Superstitions, Scripta Minora by Emily Gerard and Agnes Murgoci. This is a good publication of it, and the one I have always used.

So what do I mean when I say that Dracula retroactively affected vampire legends, study thereof, and scholarship on such matters? Well, it's similar to what happened to werewolves over time. By creating interest in a particular "brand" of vampire, scholars began to scrape and search for legends that fit that "brand." Did they really exist? How many "legends" were retroactively twisted around to suit a scholar's needs/desires and/or how many were just created on the spot from thin air in order to say that the scholar "discovered" a legend wherein, for instance, a vampire has fangs?

This isn't unheard of in scholarship, by any means - especially when it comes to folklore. It's widely known that scholars will do such things, especially when it comes to academic argument. Am I saying I know of any in particular that were spawned from an interest in Dracula?

Not necessarily, but it's certainly true that a lot of scholars and certainly most people in general assume things about Dracula or its spinoffs and adaptations that followed come from folklore, and some even use that when writing their academic work, when in fact they did not. It still pervades across the internet that vampires that don't die in the sunlight are immensely silly and untrue to the folklore. Gosh, how ridiculous! Well, I hate to tell you, but that didn't even originate with Dracula, either, nor did it come from folklore. For more details on where the "burning/dying instantly or quickly in the sunlight" concept for vampires came from, see my previous Vampire Fact on Sunlight.

And that gives you a nice overview, I think! There's so much more to say, but an internet post isn't really the place. I do plan to write some nonfiction publications on this and other topics, because werewolves won't be my only nonfiction books, lemme tell you. Hope you enjoyed the post!

Until next time! But wait, there's more (yes, I really just said that)...

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#vampire #vampires #vampirism #vampire fact #vampire facts #folklore #folklore fact #dracula #bram stoker #mythology #monsters #monster lore #undead #legends #books #literature #gothic literature #vampire literature

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cadaverousdecay · 2 years ago

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Vampire lore dump gooooo

oh boy!

nearly every culture since the beginning of time had myths of creatures that feed on blood but the modern vampire as we know it has its origins in around the 1600-1700s where revenants were said to come back from the grave and feed off their loved ones these creatures were specifically undead humans that had come back from the grave there were cases of vampire panics where the public believed vampires were everywhere and would dig up graves to discover them, often in times of sickness especially tuberculosis or consumption cuz it seemed like the person's lifeforce itself was being drained away. the vampyre by john polidori is considered the first english vampire short story, although the idea of vampires had been around before then but this story turned them from these bloated ruddy corpses into suave byronic heros (literally, seeing as lord ruthven was based off lord byron). other notable vampire works include varney the vampire, a series of penny dreadfuls and one of the first cases of the sympathetic vampire, carmilla, a lesbian vampire novella, and bram stokers dracula, one of the most influential works of vampire fiction. as the book shows, vampires were often metaphors for fears at the time such as xenophobia and unchecked sexuality. vampires are very versatile in media which is one of the reasons i think vampires have been truly immortal throughout the years, there are vampires in every genre across years of books and movies. vampires keep reinventing themself as monstrous, sexual, attractive, horrifying, pitiful, enviable, and sometimes all at the same time. because they came from folklore and many different sources, there are no set traits for the vampire, other than their need for blood. are they appealing or appalling? can they cast shadows or reflections? do they have fangs? can they control their bloodlust or are they mindless slaves to it? do they care about the victims they kill or do they revel in the violence? it all depends. theres so much you can do with them, so many stories you can tell. they can be the heroes, the villains, the antiheroes. i love vampires so much

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malkaleh · 2 years ago

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I am now thinking about what it would have been like to read Dracula for the very first time - because I know there was at least some (Vampyre, Varney The Vampire, Carmilla) and some folklore but like you still don’t know the story of Dracula as we do.

(Like the experience of reading Jekyll & Hyde without the widespread cultural context)

#book: dracula

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tganalostarosciak · 1 year ago

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Researching about Penny Dreadful

The Accidental Murderess by Missus E. Mooney:

It is a horror short tale by a writer name Missus E. Mooney as the short tale is about a young woman name Miss Hermione Tandy who is a youngest daughter of a fortuitous gentleman known as Mr. Hollingsworth Tandy, who is had endeavored to exert a great deal of paternal authority by removing her acquaintance.

As it is explaining about Hermione Tandy (Mr. Hollingsworth Tandy's the youngest daughter) left her home, seemingly undetected, to meet her lover. This evening she was followed by her father, who concealed himself by the docks and waited. She too waited for some time, but her lover did not show himself.

As if her own lover vanished into a thin air while Hermione Tandy wasn't looking at as this short tale have a plot page and 4 page of story about this short tale 'The Accidental Murderess' by Missus E. Mooney.

Stage Door Secrets by Connie-Spears:

The stage door secret is also a short tale and it made by Connie Spears, but the odd thing is about this short tale, it doesn't have any plot of what is going on, so we have to read and making notes about what is going in this short tale and aswell getting ideas about the plot written when this plot is unwritten.

As we getting the character's name like Aleksey, Director Richard Clarence, Mary Conley and etc. These name are appeared in the first page, so we are getting ideas about the character and aswell the plotting starting in the very first page.

Varney The Vampyre or The Feast of Blood by Thomas Preskett Prest:

This is not ordinary short tale, it is a full story and it is a book as it have a plot, preface as telling what is this book have and published as it is published in 1713 which is roughly over 300 year ago when this book was founded in London, September 1847.

This horror book have lot of pages and lot of chapters as this book have over 900 pages and have 237 chapters in this book. Which is impressive for a human being to make this book by hands about this book called 'Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood' as it is about a vampire which is popular as that it haunts in old London era, that these supernatural beings known as 'Vampires'

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notagarroter · 2 years ago

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Re: Dracula

I keep seeing posts here observing that Bram Stoker's original readers would not have been as versed in vampire lore as we moderns are -- vampires would have been a new concept to them, right?

I just want to say, no, not really.

In addition to Carmilla and Polidori's Vampyre, may I introduce into evidence the hugely popular but now largely forgotten Varney the Vampire?

Varney was serialized between 1845-47 as a "penny dreadful" and was basically the Twilight of its day. Even people who didn't read it would have heard about it.

Point being: when Victorian readers read about two pinprick holes in Lucy's throat, they would have known EXACTLY what that meant.

See also

#dracula #Dracula daily #varney the vampire #original post

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mayhemchicken-artblog · 8 months ago

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The use of "brothers" is telling me that there are no female vamps allowed?

at the very least, there are none at this gathering. rymer's sexism informs his worldview in ways that directly and profoundly affect the world of the story; we only see one example of a female vampire (clara) so there's not really a trend that i can point to, but i think it is telling to look at the differences between her and the male vampires in the story:

male vampires are created as punishment for murder, although the text is maddeningly unclear about what causes a given murderer to rise as a vampire or not. by contrast, clara is innocent of wrongdoing, and is turned by varney as an act of revenge against her brothers.

male vampires remain fully cognizant as they were in life, for the most part. the vampire who is raised during the vampire council starts speaking immediately, as soon as he is raised to life:

"Vampyre arise, arise!" "I come, I come!" shrieked the corpse.

clara, on the other hand, never says a single word once she becomes a vampire. she acts as though in a sort of trance, uncomprehending of her surroundings:

"Speak!" he gasped; "speak! speak!" There was no reply. "I conjure you, I pray you though the sound of your voice should hurl me to perdition -- I implore you, speak." All was silent, and the figure in white moved on slowly but surely towards the door of the church [...]

i've been drawing her with a similar amount of personality to the other vampires in the book, but none of that is present in the original text - in fact, one theory i have is that varney succeeded only in raising her body, not her soul. in the world that rymer envisions, young women are innocent, blameless, and pure, and middle-aged women are either shrews and harpies or background cutouts with no personality to speak of, but the voluptuous female vampires written of by other 19th-century authors do not exist. the vampires who are cursed for their crimes are solely male; the victims which they prey on are solely female. clara remains an innocent victim even in undeath, preying on her sole victim (a random 16-year-old girl) with no awareness of what she is doing; meanwhile, no man is ever bitten, or even implied to have been bitten. as far as rymer is concerned, the idea that any male character is ever in danger of a vampire's bite is never even on the table - which, as you might guess, severely kneecaps the horror.

so yes, as far as the incredibly sexist author of the original text is concerned, vampirism is a No Girls Allowed club, and the reason seems to be because murder is a No Girls Allowed crime. it's fascinating from a critical perspective and incredibly frustrating from a casual reader perspective. this is the man who invented Mrs. Lovett of Sweeney Todd fame; the fact that he can't give us any evil lady vampires is a crime worthy of the vampire's curse.

#not art #varney the vampire #varney posting #this blog is rapidly turning into a varney meta blog lmao #perhaps i ought to make a side blog for this...

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mayhemchicken · 1 year ago

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The writing in Varney the Vampire:

"Oh no!" said Henry. "My sister, who was bitten by the vampyre five minutes ago! I forgot about her when we ran into another room chasing the vampyre and she left my line of sight!"

"And your brother is nowhere to be found!" said Marchdale.

"My what?"

Then, the two of them, having lost track of the vampyre, who, after several minutes of trying and failing to jump over a wall, had given up and decided to use the gate instead, and nobody had stopped him because they were too busy having inane conversations with each other, left the room, the better that they might check up on Hnery's sister, who, in consequence of having been previously attacked by said vampire, had been quite insensible for some minutes. It is evident that Harvey and Mr. Marchdale were quite sensible and well-reasoned men, as I, the author, just told you so.

Suddenly, there came a horrific scream from the adjoining room, a scream so loud and horrific, that it was horrific to all who heard. Dear reader, we would love to tell you all about the scream, but first we're going to pause the narrative for an entire chapter while we tell you a different, entirely unrelated story which has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.

Dracula vs Carmilla

The writing in Dracula:

"Day 1 of the Castle, the Count is a strange but friendly man, I think my employment here shall be fine and nothing will go wrong. Gosh I really love my fiance, Mina."

"Day 4 of the Castle, he's climbing down the fucking wall again. Gosh I really love my fiance, Mina."

"Day 6 of the Castle, he just fed a baby to his sexy roommates and I am thinking of jumping out the window."

The writing in Carmilla: "today Carmilla did something strange and inexplicable and I was suspicious, but then she said she loved me, rubbed herself all over me and sobbed into my hair. I was confused and not at all horny and forgot entirely about the other thing. In other news the General stopped by and told us this long waffly story about a masquerade ball, let me reprint it word for word here..."

#varney posting #sorry for the length but i had to be Authentic

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mayhemchicken-varneyposting · 3 months ago

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Varney the Vampire, Chapter 25: Contraband

[Previous chapter] [Next chapter]

Charles finds his uncle pacing anxiously in the garden. Admiral Bell, having had time to think it over, has reluctantly come to the conclusion that, since Charles issued the initial duel challenge, he ought to be the one to fight Varney. Charles asks him to wait until the next day before arranging anything, and also for him to lend Charles 50 pounds, which he plans to give to Henry to help with the Bannerworth's financial situation. Admiral Bell agrees to both. He then says, by the way this reminds me of a story, and you guessed it - we the readers are about to receive that story in full.

But first, we have to hear a different story about a different weird thing that happened to the admiral at sea. You see, he saw a sea monster one time, which one of his shipmates mistook for a ship.

Now on to the actual story, which takes up the rest of the chapter.

The admiral (presumably not an admiral at the time this story takes place, so I'll just call him Bell) is on a ship bound for Ceylon, when the crew finds a strange man sitting on one of the water casks. Bell asks the man how he got there and he implies he came from the sky, but later when the captain asks he says he is "contraband", and that he stowed away in the hold. The captain asks what he ate and drank while he was down there, and he replies that he didn't, only sucked his thumbs. His thumbs are the size of - well, I shan't say, and he implies that they used to be even bigger.

The man asks the captain for coffee, beef, and biscuits, which the captain brings him. There's something uncanny about the man, which makes everyone on board hesitant to cross him. For weeks he stays on the deck, lying on top of the water cask and whistling - and the more he whistles, the stronger the wind becomes. At first, it is merely a stiff breeze, but soon it becomes a gale, then a hurricane. Through all the rough weather, the strange man lies on the water cask, whistling and drumming on the cask with his heels, apparently impervious to the wind, rain, and waves.

The crew, feeling superstitious, ask the captain for permission to throw the stranger overboard. The captain denies this request, but does tell the crew to talk to the man and get him to stop whistling. One of the crewmen grabs the man's leg to get him to stop drumming on the water cask, and finds him to have inhuman strength, first pinning the man's hand to the cask with his leg, then picking him up one-handed as though he weighed nothing.

They ask the man to stop whistling so that the wind will stop, to which he tells them that bringing the wind is the very reason he's whistling in the first place. They tell him the wind is too strong; in response, he takes off his hat and makes all his hair stand on end, then tells them the wind couldn't possibly be too strong as it's not moving his hair at all. Thwarted, they leave him to his whistling, which he continues for three weeks, at which point he switches to horrible unearthly singing for three days, after which he mysteriously disappears without a trace. The ship reaches its destination a full month ahead of schedule.

Okay, you know what? Rymer can have this one. Out of all the extraneous story chapters in this beast of a novel, this one was actually good.

I don't have too much to say about the first part. Charles does get one baffling line, though.

"I will not thwart you, my boy, although in my opinion you ought not to fight with a vampyre." "Never mind that. We cannot urge that as a valid excuse, so long as he chooses to deny being one."

What the hell kind of logic is this, Charles. I miss when you were the reasonable one.

The admiral's first story is short, and I don't have much to say about it either, except to wonder what sort of whale Ishmael would classify Admiral Bell's sea monster as. He says it was a fish, that its whole head was the size of a ship's hull, and that it had great fins near its head which churned up so much sea spray that the crewman who spotted it mistook them for sails. It sort of sounds to me like they saw a blue whale spouting.

But now, on to the main event. The last chapter-long tangent story I really didn't give a shit about, and I'm pretty sure the next few are similarly forgettable (as evidenced by the fact that I don't remember them that well), but this one is a fascinating little spooky story, with a lot of intriguingly strange details.

It's not written in the voice of Admiral Bell at all, but rather in Rymer's usual narrative style, which I suppose is a blessing as an entire chapter narrated in the admiral's sailor speak would be insufferable to read. He spends a long time on setup; too long, in my opinion, but that's par for the course with Rymer.

The younger Bell, in the story, talks to a crewmate named Jack about the weather they're having. I don't think he's supposed to be Jack Pringle, but it's never specified. Bell is optimistic about the fine winds they're having, but Jack worries that the conditions feel almost too good, a clumsy attempt at foreshadowing what's to come.

"It seems to me as though there was something hanging over us, and I can't tell what." "Yes, there are the colours, Jack, at the masthead; they are flying over us with a hearty breeze."

Three weeks into their journey, the stranger makes his appearance.

The way he's described is a tad uncomfortable; not that there's anything very objectionable in his physical description, but that the author gives him a certain cluster of features, and then goes on to describe how he had a repulsive and sinister air about him, and have the men describe him as "evil-looking".

He was a tall, spare man—what is termed long and lathy—but he was evidently a powerful man. He had a broad chest, and long, sinewy arms, a hooked nose, and a black, eagle eye. His hair was curly, but frosted by age; it seemed as though it had been tinged with white at the extremities, but he was hale and active otherwise, to judge from appearances.

It's not too overt, thankfully, and the stranger's other weird features quickly eclipse this first impression.

"Well," said I, after we had stood some minutes, "where did you come from, shipmate?" He looked at me and then up at the sky, in a knowing manner. "Come, come, that won't do; you have none of Peter Wilkins's wings, and couldn't come on the aerial dodge; it won't do; how did you get here?"

The admiral says a lot of things in this chapter that sound like references I don't get, but I actually did look up Peter Wilkins - he's a character from a story published in 1751, who finds himself in a Robinson Crusoe-esque situation and builds a flying machine to escape. Another date to pin to my "when does Varney the Vampire take place" red string board, and also potentially something to put on my to-read list.

"Well, my man," said the captain, "how did you come here?" "I'm part of the cargo," he said, with an indescribable leer. "Part of the cargo be d——d!" said the captain, in sudden rage, for he thought the stranger was coming his jokes too strong. "I know you are not in the bills of lading." "I'm contraband," replied the stranger; "and my uncle's the great chain of Tartary."

"Tartary" is a term used in Europe through the 19th century to refer to a broad chunk of Central Asia, stretching from Siberia to as far south as Afghanistan and including much of China and Mongolia. It was a region about which the Europeans knew very little, so I suppose if you're Rymer, it seems like a suitably mysterious and exotic place for your supernatural stranger to hail from. I'm not sure why the guy keeps claiming to be "contraband" and "part of the cargo" - as far as I can tell, it's just a weird detail.

Speaking of weird details...

"Why, I sucked my thumbs like a polar bear in its winter quarters." And as he spoke the stranger put his two thumbs into his mouth, and extraordinary thumbs they were, too, for each would have filled an ordinary man's mouth. "These," said the stranger, pulling them out, and gazing at them wistfully, and with a deep sigh he continued,— "These were thumbs at one time; but they are nothing now to what they were."

This bit is utterly baffling to me. Most of the stranger's odd traits are centered around a theme, but I can't work out what's up with the giant life-sustaining lollipop thumbs. I kind of love it, though - it reminds me of the odd details that spring up around folkloric creatures, or storytelling traditions like Jack the Giant Killer. (I'm praying the giant thumbs don't turn out to be some sort of weird 19th century racist trope that's faded into obscurity. Unfortunately, one can never wholly rule that out.)

It takes some time for the action in this little story to kick up. Rymer pauses to soliloquize about what it's like to keep night watch on a ship, in a very un-Admiral-Bell-like way. Barring that, and an exchange between the sailors and the captain which goes on for far too long, the rest of the story is actually well-paced for once. Tension builds as the stranger's whistling seems to whip the wind up into a gale, then a hurricane. Not only does he not seem to mind the weather, but he seems physically incapable of being affected by it.

At length there came a storm of rain, lightning, and wind. We were tossed mountains high, and the foam rose over the vessel, and often entirely over our heads, and the men were lashed to their posts to prevent being washed away. But the stranger still lay on the water casks, kicking his heels and whistling his infernal tune, always the same.

The idea that whistling will increase the strength of the wind is an established sailor's superstition, but this strange man seems to have a much stronger connection to the elements, from his claim to have come from the sky, to the fact that his singing is what ends up calming the winds down, to...whatever this is (emphasis mine):

"Pho! pho! you don't know what's good for you—it's a beautiful breeze, and not a bit too stiff." "It's a hurricane." "Nonsense." "But it is." "Now you see how I'll prove you are wrong in a minute. You see my hair, don't you?" he said, after he took off his cap. "Very well, look now." He got up on the water-cask, and stood bolt upright; and running his fingers through his hair, made it all stand straight on end. "Confound the binnacle!" said the captain, "if ever I saw the like." "There," said the stranger, triumphantly, "don't tell me there's any wind to signify; don't you see, it doesn't even move one of my grey hairs; and if it blew as hard as you say, I am certain it would move a hair."

I would like to remind everyone that this story most likely takes place in the late 17th-early 18th century, a time when men's hairstyles were about as long as they've ever been. This man's hair is down around his shoulders at a minimum, and curly to boot.

The sailors leave him be after this, because how the fuck are you supposed to respond to something like that? He spends three weeks doing his thing and eating enough for three people, until finally he seems to have had enough of sailing:

Well, about that time, one night the whistling ceased and he began to sing—oh! it was singing—such a voice! Gog and Magog in Guildhall, London, when they spoke were nothing to him—it was awful; but the wind calmed down to a fresh and stiff breeze. He continued at this game for three whole days and nights, and on the fourth it ceased, and when we went to take his coffee royal to him he was gone.

They're still another three weeks from land at this point, so presumably the stranger fucked back off into the sky. His meddling has shaved an entire month off their travel time, but the admiral notes that the ship would have been in terrible shape had it not been brand-new.

I...look, as far as I'm concerned, everything in this story happened exactly as narrated. It's canon now. Somewhere out there in the universe of Varney the Vampire is a weather elemental with giant thumbs who likes to fuck with sailors.

Next: Charles leaves, taking the cast's collective braincell with him

#varney the vampire #varney summary #charles holland #admiral bell #time knots and other fuckery

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cleolinda · 2 years ago

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Varney the Vampire: Chapter 1

[I originally posted a shorter recap of this chapter on Livejournal, on December 7, 2010. If you'd like to just read the original, less serious version of the recap, that's here.]

[Content note: I'll talk about this a bit later, but, heads up: this opening chapter describes an assault that’s more vivid than I remembered. That's the second half of the recap.]

I'm not actually going to rewrite all my Varney posts like this, but I'd like to talk not just about the way James Malcolm Rymer wrote the chapter, but also the way I recapped it 12+ years ago.

First off, I don't think I gave Rymer enough credit for the atmosphere of the opening; maybe I just appreciate it more after struggling through some of the filler chapters. I did give him some credit, noting that there are 900 words of gothic effectiveness before anything actually happens—I'll quote the very beginning at some length so you can get a feel for what the next 230+ chapters are like:

The solemn tones of an old cathedral clock have announced midnight -- the air is thick and heavy -- a strange, death-like stillness pervades all nature. Like the ominous calm which precedes some more than usually terrific outbreak of the elements, they seem to have paused even in their ordinary fluctuations, to gather a terrific strength for the great effort. A faint peal of thunder now comes from far off. Like a signal gun for the battle of the winds to begin, it appeared to awaken them from their lethargy, and one awful, warring hurricane swept over a whole city, producing more devastation in the four or five minutes it lasted, than would a half century of ordinary phenomena.

It was as if some giant had blown upon some toy town, and scattered many of the buildings before the hot blast of his terrific breath; for as suddenly as that blast of wind had come did it cease, and all was as still and calm as before.

Sleepers awakened, and thought that what they had heard must be the confused chimera of a dream. They trembled and turned to sleep again.

I summarized this as:

The lightning! The thunder! Ominous calm! The buildings scatter like toy houses! O THE STORMY STORMINESS OF THE STORM. And then the hail starts up, at which point I started laughing, because… hail. Sexy, sexy, stormy hail. Oh the hailiness of the hail, the stormy sexy chunks of ice hailing on your head, yea, unto a mild concussion. In conclusion: hail.

I had some interesting expectations here about gothic atmosphere, or perhaps just the vampire genre itself, necessarily being "sexy." You do see some eroticism in a vampire story like "La Morte amoreuse" (1836), but—remember how I mentioned the cottage industry built on Polidori's "The Vampyre," which ultimately results in Varney the Vampire as a sort of parody? There's no Erotic Biting in any of that. Biting of any nature happens off-page in "The Vampyre," and to my knowledge, Ruthven doesn't manage to bite anyone in spinoffs like The Bride of the Isles. At the time Varney was first published (1845-1847), I don't know if people were expecting scenes like—well, what's about to happen next.

Enter Flora:

And now we meet Our Heroine, Flora Bannerworth, an aptly-named maiden who is "young and beautiful as a spring morning," bare shoulder, sculpted ivory bosom, teeth of pearl, moaning in her sleep, a flood of loosed tresses, so on and so forth. Wind, rain, sexy hail, 600 words, FLASH OF LIGHTNING! SHRIEK!

Okay, I clearly expected the heroine to be eroticized, and I was at least right about that:

The bed in that old chamber is occupied. A creature formed in all fashions of loveliness lies in a half sleep upon that ancient couch -- a girl young and beautiful as a spring morning. Her long hair has escaped from its confinement and streams over the blackened coverings of the bedstead; she has been restless in her sleep, for the clothing of the bed is in much confusion. One arm is over her head, the other hangs nearly off the side of the bed near to which she lies. A neck and bosom that would have formed a study for the rarest sculptor that ever Providence gave genius to, were half disclosed. [...]

Oh, what a world of witchery was in that mouth, slightly parted, and exhibiting within the pearly teeth that glistened even in the faint light that came from that bay window. How sweetly the long silken eyelashes lay upon the cheek. Now she moves, and one shoulder is entirely visible -- whiter, fairer than the spotless clothing of the bed on which she lies, is the smooth skin of that fair creature, just budding into womanhood, and in that transition state which presents to us all the charms of the girl -- almost of the child, with the more matured beauty and gentleness of advancing years.

Y'all.

I had read a lot of Victorian literature by 2010—took graduate classes, even—and was too jaded to be as fazed by this quasi-Lolita mess as I maybe should have been. I remember reading this and thinking, "Yeah, that's standard. Goes on a bit, though."

Having established Flora Bannerworth, Victorian Lolita (she's the only person with any sense for several chapters, don't hold it against her), the story starts to ramp up. Flora sees "a figure tall and gaunt, endeavouring from the outside to unclasp the window" in the next flash of lightning. She's not sure what she really saw; it turns out that the literary point of the hail is that she can't tell if the sound she's hearing is ice raining down on her gothic mansion or vampire fingernails trying to claw the window open. And like, who thinks "Obviously, a vampire is trying to get in"? She saw it so clearly, and yet, storm, darkness, hail, she could just as easily explain it away—how did Ann Radcliffe differentiate terror from horror? Basically, terror is the dreadful lead-up and horror is the shocking revelation? So we switch here from the horror of OH SHIT VAMPIRE AT THE WINDOW back to the dread of waiting to find out what it really was.

Around this point in the original post, I pointed out that there are four elements you might see in a vampire story: the Appearance of the Vampire; the Attack of the Vampire; the Victim's Consumptive Suffering; and the eventual Destruction of the Vampire. You see these pretty reliably in Dracula, for example; you see them subverted in Interview with the Vampire, where the vampire is eventually destroyed by fellow vampires, but then it turns out he wasn't, and he goes on to be vampire king and see Jesus and mess around with the Devil and Atlantis is involved, idk I didn't keep up with those books after the one with the body-thieving. In this particular chapter of Varney, we get the first two elements, and they are honestly very effective: "Frozen with horror!" I said. "Heart beating wildly! The strange reddish light from a burning mill in the distance! The vampyre's nails clattering against the glass as it seeks to open the latch! She tries to scream but cannot to move, but cannot! Her cries for help are but hoarse whispers that no one can hear!" And then:

(I want you to remember Lord Ruthven's "dead grey eyes" here:)

The figure turns half round, and the light falls upon its face. It is perfectly white perfectly bloodless. The eyes look like polished tin; the lips are drawn back, and the principal feature next to those dreadful eyes is the teeth the fearful looking teeth projecting like those of some wild animal, hideously, glaringly white, and fang-like.

(Sidebar: This is apparently the first appearance of the word "fang" in vampire literature.)

It approaches the bed with a strange, gliding movement. It clashes together the long nails that literally appear to hang from the finger ends. No sound comes from its lips. [...] The glance of a serpent could not have produced a greater effect upon her than did the fixed gaze of those awful, metallic-looking eyes that were bent down on her face. Crouching down so that the gigantic height was lost, and the horrible, protruding white face was the most prominent object, came on the figure. What was it? what did it want there? what made it look so hideous so unlike an inhabitant of the earth, and yet be on it?

Here I am, making a very good point while being gleefully insensitive:

Panting, repulsion, heaving bosoms, etc. And then begins the slow agony of Flora oozing across the bed in her attempt to escape. Hair streaming (slowly) across the pillows, covers dragging (slowly) behind her, until she gets one foot (slowly) onto the floor. This is one of the few times the paid-per-word aspect works in Varney's favor—it has the endless creep of a nightmare, so let's take a moment to bask in a brief ray of quality. Undaunted by effective writing, the vampyre reaches her and drags her by the hair back onto the bed; "Heaven granted her then power" to scream her head off. And thus follows the most awesome sentence I have yet seen in gothic literature:

With a plunge he seizes her neck in his fang-like teeth a gush of blood, and a hideous sucking noise follows. The girl has swooned, and the vampyre is at his hideous repast!

My Hideous Repast is totally the name of my new goth band.

And that was the end of my commentary on the chapter.

I'm torn here because I do think the writing in general is entertainingly overblown, and I do think "my hideous repast" is funny in the abstract. But what I don't understand—not to bring the room down, but I feel like it should be pointed out: when I started recapping Varney the Vampire back in 2010, I completely missed the fact that this opening scene is describing a sexual(ized) assault. Some readers might be really, really uncomfortable with this scene. Why did I not see this?

I came here to have fun and that would not have been fun?

I was approaching the serial from the assumption that it's silly and melodramatic, so anything that happened also would be?

This cover illustration did not exactly set me up to take it seriously?

I was so used to the ravishment fantasies of gothic/vampire media that it didn't strike me as something unpleasant or unusual to read?

It was 2010 and we didn't necessarily question problematic angles as thoroughly as we do now, even though I was already critiquing Twilight in 2008 so that's kind of a bullshit excuse?

I still think the melodramatic writing is pretty funny in places and I'm not sure how I feel about myself for that?

I think at least some of my reaction actually does come from writing about Twilight from 2008 onwards. It was a vampire story that had a marked lack of Erotic Biting scenes, to the point where director Catherine Hardwicke had to add one to the movie: Bella's fainting-couch fantasy of Edward as a classically gothic vampire, which apparently involves shoe-polish hair.

The mood 15 years ago (!) was, some people loved a twinkling repressed sparklepire insisting he mustn't touch his high-school ladylove, he mustn't! but he must!!, and other people were big mad about it. Reading Varney, it felt refreshing to go back to a "traditional" story and say, see, there is bloodshed and it's not sparklewashed and tame, that is what real vampiring looks like. And somewhere along the way, I think I lost sight of the fact that Twilight, for all its many faults, at least involves someone who enthusiastically consents to being bitten. Like, Bella as would-be victim consents when Edward doesn't; the big tension of the series is that Bella is always throwing herself at a hungry vampire who keeps running away from her.

Hey, you might say, in the midst of a cultural moment when everyone’s going wild over the bizarrely chaste story of a teenage girl and her guilt-ridden goody-two-shoes vampire boyfriend,

remember when vampires were actually scary and forced themselves on their victims?

wait what do you mean that's not great

By “not great,” I don’t mean that vampire villains are Problematic™ and should be banned from fiction. I'm saying, that's the point, that it's villainous to force a vampire bite on someone; that's what the horror of the situation is about. That said, one of the unique holds that vampires have on audiences is the moment when “force” becomes ambiguous—ambiguous for the characters, but when we consent, as readers and viewers, to seek out that ambiguity. Like, I’m here for vampires because of that, the psychodrama is the whole point for me; it’s not because I like watching people get chewed on. That ambiguity holds an audience-proxy tension between “I don’t want this” and “but I do want this.”

Case in point, Dracula attacking Mina in the original text: Mina is horrified to find that she’s compelled to submit despite herself (“strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him”), although that scene is heavily weighted towards “I don’t want this”—towards horror. A story like “Carmilla” has Laura feeling confused, conflicted, unsure of what’s even been happening behind the veil of her dreams: Do I want this? What am I even wanting? “Whatever it might be, my soul acquiesced in it”: more of a balance between want and not-want. Whereas Bella immediately wants to be bitten, end of, and spends three books chasing a vampire who is agog at how little she cares for her own life. It's... some kind of tension, for sure.

Thousands of words have been written about how this tension is tied to societal sexual repression, of course. And as the decades went on, as sexual mores loosened throughout the twentieth century and beyond, writers and filmmakers started saying, “Oh, the vampire’s bite is enjoyable and it doesn’t turn you immediately into a vampire, have fun.” (The U.S. seems to be moving politically back towards repression, which makes me wonder how vampire media might change soon.) And this is why Twilight feels like a metaphor for literal chastity: there are immediate consequences for being so much as nicked by a fang, and so all the eroticism is dialed down to teenage makeouts.

And so, in 2010, I was so busy enjoying the literary contrast between Twilight and a book where vampires actually bite people that I lost sight of the fact that what happens to Flora is a particularly cruel and vivid assault. I mean, getting dragged by her hair, Jesus Christ, why was I not more disturbed by that?

What this then makes me ask, though, is how did readers in 1847 take this?

Who was this written for?

Readers who would identify most with Varney—attacking Flora, which is awful, but the action as written is extremely callous?

Readers who would identify most with Flora—being attacked, which suggests a "horror is a safe roller coaster" framing?

Readers who wouldn't really identify with either of them, but instead might picture it as a stage play?

Given that Polidori's Lord Ruthven set off a "vampire craze" onstage, I lean towards the third option. It takes a certain bystander detachment to read this scene and not think of its reality—to empathize—at all. And my "lmao this is so silly" is, in fact, a form of detachment. But all three of those options are possible, all at once.

So: is this opening chapter intended to be funny? (Subsequent chapters are far more intentionally humorous, and I had doubled back to recap this after reading ahead.) Are we meant to laugh, or is the outdated style only unintentionally funny now?

Is it satirizing earlier vampire literature/theater on purpose?

Is humor a way of making it easier to read a scene like this?

Is it not a good thing, really to make a scene of assault "easier to read"?

Did I, a reader who would identify with Flora, need it to be easier to read?

Is it okay to have multiple, conflicting reactions to something?

The only answer I have is "Yes," to that last question. And the only thing I know to do with conflicting feelings about media is to accept them and say, as a data point: here they are. There’s a level to this first chapter that I completely did not grasp 12-13 years ago, when I was 30+ entire years old, and I'm still not sure why that is.

I do think Varney the Vampire is frequently pretty funny; weirdly, the subsequent chapters read like a parody of Dracula if everyone in Dracula except one (1) heroine was completely useless, 50 years before that book was even written. Flora might be the victim in this chapter, but she is not the butt of the jokes. But I guess what we need to think about is—if this book is meant to be parody, why is it funny, who is it making fun of at any given point, and what purpose does that serve?

At this point, the antiquated style is what’s funny to me, and I’m making fun of Rymer. Did Rymer intend his readers to find the opening chapter funny? Maybe not: I think he intended it, certainly, to be titillating, even exploitative—and I was aware of that, but maybe not enough.

We'll resume with Varney trying to get over a garden wall. It will be a shorter, lighter post.

#varney the vampire #vampires #vampire studies #welcome to hell it's my blog #long post

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