{"id":2419,"date":"2019-06-08T21:05:11","date_gmt":"2019-06-08T21:05:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2419"},"modified":"2019-06-08T21:05:11","modified_gmt":"2019-06-08T21:05:11","slug":"conference-report-vampyre-symposium","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=2419","title":{"rendered":"Conference Report: Vampyre Symposium"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below, Bill Hughes reports on “\u2018Some curious disquiet\u2019: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny”<\/a>, a BARS-supported Open Graves, Open Minds<\/a> symposium celebrating the bicentenary of John Polidori’s <\/em>The Vampire held on the 6th and 7th of April 2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

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This event was not only the bicentenary of the publication of \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 but also 200 years since John Keats lived at the conference venue: the beautiful Keats House, Hampstead. We began the symposium with a fascinating tour round the house by Rob Shakespeare where we saw a first edition of ‘The Vampyre’ (which may possibly have been owned by Keats).<\/p>\n

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Our first paper was by Nick Groom, who began with an outline of the reports on vampires from Eastern Europe that arose in the early eighteenth century and how they were transformed into literary forms. Referring to the momentous occasion in 1816 at the Villa Diodati, Nick elaborated an unexpected and illuminating notion of the vampiric elements in Mary Shelley\u2019s Frankenstein<\/em> (Mary, we learn, had called Percy a vampire), such as blood imagery, blood transfusion, and the story itself as contagious and blood-chilling. This culminates in a reading of Frankenstein<\/em> as recognising the situation of non-human nature.<\/p>\n

Ivan Phillips then explored the centrality of the gaze in vampire fiction. Vision and eyes are dwelt on obsessively in \u2018The Vampyre\u2019. This led him to the development of special effects in vampire narratives. Polidori initiates an obsession with visualising<\/em> the vampire in the transition from oral to print narrative (and subsequently stage and screen).<\/p>\n

Bill Hughes discussed Lady Caroline Lamb\u2019s novel Glenarvon<\/em> (1818) \u2013 a Gothic-tinged narrative of romance and political rebellion in Ireland that refracted Lamb\u2019s own fiery love affair with Byron. The novel\u2019s gloomy tormented hero, Glenarvon (or Lord Ruthven) spreads dissidence in an ambivalent vampirism through his equally contagious glamour. Glenarvon<\/em> provided material for \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 but also bequeathed a parallel legacy of the Byronic demon lover through Gothic romance, reuniting with the vampire in present-day paranormal romance.<\/p>\n

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Sam George talked about the huge impact of \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 in Britain and Europe and how it was expanded in Bodard\u2019s French novel, then staged by Planch\u00e9 and others. The predatory sexuality of the libertine Lord Ruthven took the vampire out of the forests into the drawing rooms. The optical stage illusions of phantasmagoria, more ghostly than the magic lantern, were a powerful device in the theatrical vampire\u2019s success, enabling spectres to hover in the air, whereas the \u2018vampire trap\u2019 enabled actors to appear and vanish as if by supernatural agency. Planch\u00e9\u2019s version invoked Celtic traditions with its Western Isles setting\u2014and vampires in kilts! The staged Draculas later led to slaying kits as stage props, one of which was on display at the symposium.<\/p>\n

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The novelist Marcus Sedgwick described how tuberculosis came to be seen as glamorous in the nineteenth century, drawing on Susan Sontag and illustrated by the death of Chopin. Alongside aestheticisation, the idea of diseases became associated with personality types \u2013 under- or over-stimulation, licentiousness, effeminacy \u2013 but also angelic purity. The pale modern vampire, distinct from the peasant bloated with blood, shares these symptoms, including breathlessness. Thus the pale, alluring vampire first sketched by Polidori is closely related to the Romantic perception of tuberculosis.<\/p>\n

Gina Wisker talked about three vampiric texts linked with the escapist setting of a holiday resort (the genesis of \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 in that vacation at the Villa Diodati being crucial here): Florence Marryat\u2019s \u2018Blood of the Vampire\u2019, Sarah Smith\u2019s \u2018When the red storm comes\u2019, and Neil Jordan\u2019s film Byzantium<\/em>, based on Maria Buffini\u2019s play \u2018A Vampire Story\u2019. With Marryatt\u2019s vampire there are themes of racial purity and the foreign woman as fascinating exotic beauty. In Sarah Smith, the offer of transcendent love from a handsome foreign nobleman is an alternative to the carnage of World War I. Byzantium<\/em> draws on Polidori, with female vampires as companions in a male-dominated world, abused by aristocratic men. They act as angels of mercy in an age of crumbling social services in a run-down resort.<\/p>\n

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Catherine Spooner showed how Gothic themes were intrinsic to the countercultural aesthetic of the 1960s, prefiguring present-day Goth style. The male vampire in Jane Gaskell\u2019s 1964 novel The Shiny Narrow Grin<\/em> shows the fashionable dandyism of working-class communities. The Byronic vampire flourished \u2013 bisexuality was discussed in recent biographies of the poet and his sexual adventuring was in tune with ’60s ideas. The satirical mode of vampirism \u2013 often as a reaction to such liberal ideas \u2013 was pronounced and Hammer Films\u2019 Dracula films often showed this. Dracula represents modernity and his antagonists a repressive Victorianism. And out of this Byronic counterculture emerged the sympathetic vampires of Anne Rice and others.<\/p>\n

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Sir Christopher Frayling, who inaugurated academic vampire studies, ended the first day with a fascinating plenary which surveyed the development of the field, interspersed with personal reminiscences. He showed how disparate elements became consolidated into a genre with Polidori. Then he led us through his own journey from the Enlightenment and Rousseau and eighteenth-century vampire reports to his pioneering book and his friendship with Angela Carter and her love of all things Gothic. He showed that there are still new ways of looking at the vampire and he offered support and hope for young researchers in the field. He also drew our attention to a big exhibition in Paris next year on the history of vampires!<\/p>\n

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We began Sunday with a tour of Highgate Cemetery, accompanied by the erudite and entertaining guides Peter Mills and Stephen Sowerby. A Gothic site in its own right, it features in Dracula<\/em> and has the graves of the Rossettis and of the groundbreaking lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall among many others (Karl Marx lies in the East Cemetery which we didn\u2019t have time to see). It was also the scene of a notorious vampire hoax in the 1970s.<\/p>\n

Back at Keats House, Stacey Abbott returned to Neil Jordan\u2019s film Byzantium<\/em>. Jordan consciously evokes Polidori and is also in dialogue with Buffini\u2019s play and Jordan\u2019s earlier vampire film, Interview With the Vampire<\/em> (1994). The vampire women interrogate the idea of the Byronic vampire; the film rewrites nineteenth-century vampires from a female perspective. Both films feature vampires who show a propensity for compassion and both explore the nature of storytelling. Rather than exploiting the weak, these female vampires serve justice and mercy and curb the power of men and the patriarchal male vampires.<\/p>\n

Sorcha N\u00ed Fhlainn supplemented Stacey Abbot\u2019s reading of Jordan\u2019s Byzantium<\/em>. Polidori and subsequent vampire stories explore the nature of guilt and Jordan\u2019s films are no exception. The Irish background is significant; for example, the stone and blood imagery from Irish myth. Jordan\u2019s rewriting of Rice, of Polidori and Buffini is important. He also extends the queer dynamics of Polidori. Forms of narrative in Polidori \u2013 whispered secrets and oral tradition \u2013 are both exploited by Jordan.<\/p>\n

Daisy Butcher talked about the long history of female vampires in folklore and literature, with Geraldine from Coleridge\u2019s Christabel<\/em> as a prototype. Female vampires often have empathic characteristics and are often psychic vampires. Christabel<\/em> introduced a range of tropes \u2013 snake imagery; vampires dressed in white, signifying modesty and purity; an ethereal, languid body that conceals monstrosity. Sheridan Le Fanu\u2019s Carmilla feeds off Laura\u2019s emotions as well as her blood. Luella Miller is parasitic, infantile, and narcissistic, but seems to have no control over her draining of people. These three texts show an increasing sympathy for the female vampire.<\/p>\n

Kaja Franck began with Joss Whedon\u2019s Angel as a modern incarnation of the pale, brooding Byronic vampire. Anne Rice\u2019s Lestat and Edward Cullen of Twilight<\/em> are also fashionably pale. Their appearance is central \u2013 vampires are made to be looked at: \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 has many moments of staring at, being looked at (as Ivan Phillips also noted). Twilight<\/em> and \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 share certain features such as the pale outsiders, their capacity to stimulate adaptations, their status as popular culture, and the presence of a love triangle. But their difference is in having a female and male author respectively. Thus Polidori ushers in the vampiric way of looking but Twilight<\/em> inverts that.<\/p>\n

Jillian Wingfield presented on Octavia Butler\u2019s Fledgling<\/em>. From Dracula<\/em> to Richard Matheson\u2019s I Am Legend<\/em>, vampire fiction has been connected to contemporary views of science. In Fledgling<\/em>, vampirism is rationalised through scientific discourse. Butler transforms themes from Polidori to challenge Western male cultural biases. Butler\u2019s use of science absorbs traces from both \u2018The Vampyre\u2019 and Frankenstein<\/em>. There is a symbiosis of genres too.<\/p>\n

Xavier Aldana Reyes showed us the presence of Gothic in Spanish literature as a key indicator of national culture and a non-realist tradition, traceable back to the late nineteenth century. There are blood-sucking witches in Spanish folklore but vampires only appear after external models made them available. The first literary vampire in Spain \u2013 Emilia Pardo Berz\u00e1n\u2019s Vampiro<\/em> (1901) \u2013 was influenced by Polidori and French and German Romantic texts. Spanish vampire narratives would address the coldness of aristocrats and the position of women. With the advent of cinema, vampires became more prominent. Parodies of Dracula featured heavily here and a psychosexual treatment of Carmilla<\/em> stands out for its almost surrealist quality.<\/p>\n

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It was a fabulous conference and OGOM<\/a> would like to thank the speakers and guests who made it possible, Keats House staff (particularly Anna Mercer and Rob Shakespeare), and the caterers with their vampyre cupcakes. We are also enormously grateful for generous funding from the British Association for Romantic Studies, the International Gothic Association, and the University of Hertfordshire.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below, Bill Hughes reports on “\u2018Some curious disquiet\u2019: Polidori, the Byronic vampire, and its progeny”, a BARS-supported Open Graves, Open Minds symposium celebrating the bicentenary of John Polidori’s The Vampire… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2419"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2427,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2419\/revisions\/2427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bars.ac.uk\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}