Women and gender
In The Vampyre, women have little voice. From the first paragraphs of the letter extract that opens the novella, it is evident that the story depicts a society that looks down on women and judges their actions by a stricter standard. The fictional letter-writer presents men as more intelligent and capable than women, referring to just one or two female authors or scholars who have really proven their "often claimed equality with, the nobler man."
Moreover, in the upper-class British society that Polidori depicts in The Vampyre, women are expected to be pure and innocent. The narrator harshly describes women who do not meet this standard as "female hunters of notoriety." Presumably, this description reflects 19th-century English society's judgment toward women who deviated from the norm by showing any expression of their sexuality.
At the same time, the author portrays the women who are virtuous—like Ianthe and Miss Aubrey—as helpless. Ultimately, they are easy prey for men in general, and for Lord Ruthven in particular.
Sexuality and vampirism
Predating Le Fanu’s Carmilla by half a century and Dracula by nearly eight decades, The Vampyre broke with the folklore tradition of vampire stories and established what would become a convention of the genre by introducing sexuality and sexual seduction as key qualities of the modern vampire.
The author immediately establishes Lord Ruthven as a highly seductive character. He has a sexual magnetism that arouses the attraction and fascination of everyone he meets. Polidori ultimately equates the vampiric act of bloodsucking with sexual seduction and even rape.
Betrayal and revenge
Polidori explores the themes of betrayal, loyalty, and revenge through the changing relationship between Ruthven and Aubrey. Aubrey arguably betrays his travel companion when he tries to stop Ruthven from seducing the young daughter of the Italian countess. Aubrey does so because he himself feels offended and betrayed by Ruthven’s rotten actions and the trail of destruction that the lord leaves behind him.
But ultimately, when Ruthven takes care of the ill Aubrey, Aubrey feels he must be loyal to his friend. This leads him to accept the oath that Ruthven proposes on his death bed. Yet this oath ends up being Ruthven's ultimate revenge against Aubrey for his betrayal: the vampire destroys the young man, along with the people he loves most.
More broadly, if we take Aubrey and Ruthven as stand-ins for the author and Lord Byron, respectively, we can see Polidori’s story as alluding to the author's feelings of betrayal by Byron, who mocked and eventually dismissed him. At the same time, the story is at once an expression of admiration for Byron as well as a form of revenge against him.
Vice and virtue
Polidori characterizes Lord Ruthven, and vampires more broadly, as possessing the ability to turn virtue into vice. The first example of this quality is the way in which Ruthven gives charity. Charity is normally associated with virtue. However, Ruthven only gives charity to those who are wicked or vice-ridden. Meanwhile, he refuses to share his wealth with anyone virtuous. In this way, Ruthven turns charity into a tool for spreading vice.
Moreover, Ruthven seeks out virtuous women and corrupts them. They become so vice-ridden that they "[throw] even the mask aside" and don't care about exposing "the whole deformity of their vices to the public gaze." In this way, Ruthven turns the formerly virtuous women into spreaders of vice themselves.
The modern vampire
Before Polidori's novella, vampires were depicted as wild, lowly creatures in European folk tales. They were supernatural beings who came back from the dead to cause troubles for the people they loved when they were alive.
Polidori’s story, based on the tale that Byron told at the Villa Diodati, created a new genre of modern vampire literature that hinges on the reimagining of the vampire figure. This modern vampire is a seductive, often promiscuous aristocrat who preys on the young, beautiful and innocent members of the upper classes. Polidori's reimagining of the vampire continues to have a lasting influence on vampire literature, movies, and TV series today.
The Byronic hero
Lord Byron’s personal life and his works inspired a type of hero in literature known as the Byronic hero. The British politician and historian Lord Macaulay described the Byronic hero as "a man proud, moody, cynical, with defiance on his brow, and misery in his heart, a scorner of his kind, implacable in revenge, yet capable of deep and strong affection.”
In The Vampyre, Ruthven is certainly not a hero. At the same time, Ruthven—whose character Polidori based on Byron—shares important characteristics with the Byronic hero. He is rebellious, defiant, and seems to have no fear for the judgments of society. He possesses an individualistic, self-assured, and powerful nature. He is self-absorbed and seems unaffected by those around him. Although Ruthven is not traditionally handsome, these qualities prove irresistibly attractive to women and men alike. In this way, Polidori aligns Ruthven with Byron and the Byronic-hero persona that the poet inspired.
The gothic and romanticism
Gothic fiction was popular in England in the 1800s. The genre emphasizes strong emotions, including a form of terror that is pleasurable. In this way, it is an extension of the romantic era of literature, of which Byron was one of the central figures, and which emphasized strong, individual emotions as the source of authentic experience. Polidori’s famous novella includes several key elements of gothic fiction, including the evocation of terror and of the sublime feeling beyond human understanding, as well as the tropes of the virginal young woman and the villainous, predatory male. However, Polidori's novella features the more modern, cosmopolitan setting of the 19th-century English upper classes.
