Vampire Popularity
Vampires are one of the most well known mythologies and can frequently be seen in popular culture and media. Almost everyone has some sort of experience with vampire media and preconceived ideas of what a vampire is. However, this was not always the case. While the vampire lore dates back to the middle ages, and vampires were not nearly as popular in media and pop culture in the pre-Dracula era as it is today. It is hard to imagine what it would be like to live in a culture where we don't have popular vampire media, but we can study how people in the 19th century viewed vampires by studying the content that they had relating to vampires and the things they did relating to vampires.
Vampire Folklore and Superstitions
Before literature popularized vampires, there were still practice and folklore surrounding the creatures. Evidence suggests that the first vampire folklore came from Slavs in the Bulgarian Empire in the 10th century A.D. This folklore spread to surrounding countries starting with Romania, Hungary, Greece, and Albania and slowly worked its way around the globe. We can see that the tales of the living dead directly affected people's actions through a few things. One of the biggest examples of how vampire folklore influenced odd acts is in America in the 18th-19th century. In 1990 in a small town in Connecticut called Griswold, a group of children found graves that contained almost century old bodies. One of these bodies was found in a crypt, body mutilated and torn apart. A man named Nick Bellatoni, the state archaeologist who was a specialist in vampire related research, investigated this body along with the others found. Bellatoni had a pretty good idea of what had happened to the mutilated body. He had recorded cases of people digging up bodies and mutilating them due to the bodies being suspected vampires. Bellatoni "has documented about 80 exhumations, reaching as far back as the 1700s and as far west as Minnesota." (4) Some towns such as Manchester, Vermont in 1790 even went as far as to have a public burning of a heart pulled from a mutilated body with hundreds of people crowded around to watch it like a show. It also wasn't uncommon for people to see vampires where they weren't. Some people saw Tuberculosis as the work of vampires. One family who was struck by the disease was accused by the town of vampirism.Their explanation for the deaths was that one of the dead victims of the disease was actually a vampire. Family members first started dying in 1882 and in 1892 the town asked for the bodies to be exhumed.They exhumed the bodies and found one body still in good shape. The mutilated the body and burned it. They then fed the ashes to the girl's sick brother, who later died. These horrific acts make it clear that, though there wasn't nearly as much representation, people still believed in vampires. This influenced not only the way people read Dracula but the way Bram Stoker wrote it.
More Vampire History
https://www.history.com/topics/folklore/vampire-history
Vampires in Literature
One of the first popular pieces of vampire media is The Vampyre by John William Polidori, which was publishes in 1812. At the time, Lord Byron was a very well known and well loved figure. He was a poet who captured the hearts of many with his poems and good looks. Polidori equated a vampire to the well known and loved figure of Lord Byron in this story. Previous to this, vampires were only really known for the folklore, which wasn't very pleasant/ This new look at vampires may have helped lessen the idea of evil vampires and give some people a new perspective. On the other hand, the next published story with a bit of popularity was called Varney The Vampire by J.M. Rymer.
This story took a more dramatic, horror approach to vampire stories. Varney is shown as a revived corpse who terrorizes the community. Even the cover for the story is chilling and meant to scare its audience.This plays right into the fears of people who bought into vampire folklore. These were the most influential pre-Dracula works of literature and the only real sense of vampires in literature people had before (2)
Works Cited:
1 Coghen, M. "Lord Byron and the Metamorphosis of Polidori's Vampyre." Studia Litteraria Universitatis Iagellonicae, vol. 6, Jan. 2011, p. 29.
2 Hackenberg, Sara. "Vampires and Resurrection Men: The Perils and Pleasures of the Embodied Past in 1840's sensational fiction." Victorian Studies, vol. 52, Autumn 2009, pp. 63-75.
3 Perowski, Jan. "The Romanian Vampire Today." Balkanista, vol. 22, Apr. 2009, pp. 157-166.
4 Tucker, Abigail. "The Great Vampire Panic." Smithsonian, vol. 43, no. 6, October 2012, p. 58.
I really liked your topic and I found it interesting about all the history that deals with vampire folklores. I didn't know there were so many stories about Vampires.
ReplyDeleteI never really thought about Vampires and what they were like before Bram Stoker popularized them with Dracula, so this was especially interesting to read about. I really like how you analyzed your topic under a variety of different lenses like literature, superstition, and popularity, it gives a better overall summary because you dove a bit into each topic and explained more. I appreciate the link too, its a neat informative website.
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