Elric in the Dream Realms - Michael Moorcock [158]
Robert Louis Stevenson might have experienced such a process and in his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), which was inspired by fever-dreams and nightmares during a bad illness, produced a new variant on the Faust-character in Jekyll slowly becoming dominated by Hyde. We see also our bestial origins, still within us, in the frightful Mr. Hyde. Dorian Gray (1891) for all its artificiality, is another development of the Faust theme.
The doomed hero, bound to destroy himself and those he loves, is one of the oldest character-types in literature. Byron saw himself in this role, to the discomfort of his friends and family, and by acting it out helped to foster it in Romantic literature. Recent hero-villains of this type have been Peake’s Steerpike in the Titus Groan trilogy, Poul Anderson’s Scafloc in The Broken Sword, T.H. White’s Lancelot in The Once and Future King, Jane Gaskell’s Zerd in The Serpent and my own Elric in The Stealer of Souls.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is another variation. Here, of course, vampirism is the strongest element in the story, but Count Dracula’s lust for blood is almost identical with the lust for virtuous women which marked his predecessors. Faust desired to have and corrupt Margaret, just as dozens of later “demon-lovers” like Schedoni, Ambrosio and, in real life, Byron and de Sade pursued innocence solely to destroy it. Whether witting or unwitting, the hero-villains of fantasy fiction are usually marked by their ability to destroy qualities in others, and this somehow makes them attractive to women readers who are fascinated by them and men readers who identify with them. There is no doubting their appeal, and they are not likely to lose it.
Byron himself wrote an early vampire tale (A Fragment, 1819) and Goethe’s contribution to vampire literature was Braut von Korinth (1797). Mario Praz in his Romantic Agony, the standard work on the Romantic Movement, says:
The hero of Polidori’s Vampire is a young libertine, Lord Ruthven, who is killed in Greece and becomes a vampire, seduces the sister of his friend Aubrey and suffocates her during the night which follows their wedding. A love-crime becomes an integral part of vampirism, though often in forms so far removed as to obscure the inner sense of the gruesome legend—Thus in Melmoth the Wanderer, the hero, who is a kind of Wandering Jew crossed with Byronic vampire, interrupts a wedding and terrifies everybody with the horrible fascination of his preternatural glare: soon after the bride dies and the bridegroom goes mad.
Byron and other Romantics took the crude Middle European legend of the vampire and transformed it. Praz remarks that Byron was largely responsible for the fashion of vampirism in literature. The desire to steal something valuable from his victims, whether it be blood, innocence or souls, is intrinsic to the Faustian/Byronic hero-villain. In later stories the hero-villain was transformed into a heroine-villainess—such as Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1871), the female vampire—who has since found her way into American popular literature to an unhealthy extent—remember her on the covers of Planet Stories or, whip in hand, on the more recent “magazines for men” whose covers are beginning to brighten London bookstalls now?
Since the psychoanalysis of character-types is liable to produce dozens of different theories, I leave the reader to decide what all this means in sexual terms. Many