‘The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters’

: The Work of John William Polidori, its Context and Legacy

Abstract

John William Polidori’s oeuvre is often limited to the 1819 tale The Vampyre, and his creation of a fictional vampire character, a seductive aristocrat, who moves freely about the mortal world. Attitudes and criticism of commentators have, historically, offered little more than begrudging acknowledgement. In recent decades, Polidori has been re-discovered by researchers interested in the creation of fictional vampires, and a surge in undergraduate and post-graduate studies devoted to such writing has ensued.

A translation of Polidori’s Latin medical thesis on somnambulism was published in The European Romantic Review by David E. Petrain in 2010, accompanied by articles entitled ‘A New Look at Polidori’ by Anne Stiles, Stanley Finger, and John Bulevich. Stiles et al. suggested that Polidori’s writing could be revisited in light of his medical thesis and made overtures to this effect with the intention that others could pick up the mantle. This study intends to do just that. Polidori’s major prose writing is examined here through the conclusions Polidori drew about the somnambulists’ imagination and how this could affect perceptions of reality. Included is Polidori’s essay Upon the Source of Positive Pleasure (1818), a wryly satirical development of the concept, as well as Polidori’s two main fictions The Vampyre (1819) and Ernestus Berchtold or the Modern Oedipus (1819). The latter novel has had scant attention from scholarly research, so this study aims to lay the groundwork for further studies. This study offers an original approach in that it interrogates Polidori’s fiction through concepts about the nature and power of the imagination taken from his non-fiction writing.

The late eighteenth-century practice of animal magnetism was connected with somnambulist trance states. Researchers commenting on Polidori’s thesis often make links between his studies and animal magnetism, and the possible connection is investigated here using historical documents such as letters and records. While the evidence is thin as regards Polidori’s study of animal magnetism, there is evidence that he drew upon ideas of the magnetist’s power to create his vampire. This understated power, it is argued here, has become a staple of fictional vampire lore, evident in early-nineteenth-century vampires, and reinforced in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula.

Date of Award	24 Aug 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Winchester
Supervisor	Gary Farnell (Supervisor) & Laura Hubner (Supervisor)