Chapter Two: Orientalism in Lord Byron's Turkish Tale
The Giaour
47
The paradoxical fact in the events is that the loss of love resulted in a
mutual hatred between the Giaour and Hassan which was later an impulse
for murder. Both men with all the cultural and religious differences are not
so much of different themselves. They both have a dignified personality
unable to accept unfaithfulness; the Giaour confesses: "Yet did he but what
I had done / Had she been false to more than one" (1062-1063) they are of
equal vices and weaknesses that led to similar tragic fates.
The Giaour is considered as the prototype of the Gothic Vampire;
whilst, it was a later work of Lord Byron that stimulated the birth of the
modern vampire. In April 1816, five friends escaped their troubled lives to
the rural serenity at villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva.
Gathered
at the villa were: Lord Byron, Percy Blythe Shelly, John William Polidori –
personal physician to Byron –, Mary Godwin and her step-sister Claire
Clairmont. To break the tedium of the hot, stormy weather, Byron
suggested a ghost story contest. The result was the most famous work of
vampirism
Frankenstein
and a lesser known work of Polidori
The
Vampyre.
Byron wrote a fragmentary narrative of 2000
words entitled
Fragment of a Novel
(1819) and had quickly abandoned it. Polidori
reworked Byron's fragment and published his own under the name of Lord
Byron which, as it was anticipated, achieved an immediate attention than it
would be under Polidori's name. The work was "less of plagiarism than of
slander" (Chih Yeh 20). Polidori named his vampire Lord Ruthven after
Clarence de Ruthven, the name attributed to Byron in his former mistress
Lady Caroline Lamb's first novella
Glenarvon
(1816). Probably because
Byron became a lord at the age of ten and Polidori envied his prestige that
accompanied the title. Byron in turn wrote a
letter to
Gallignani's
Magazine
in which he denied all authorship to the work but it was too late to undo the
Chapter Two: Orientalism in Lord Byron's Turkish Tale
The Giaour
48
connection. Though this work presented a modern type of a vampire,
Byron's
The Giaour
was the first literary encounter with a vampire far
before this latter.
The Giaour was cursed to be an undying creature that feasts on the
blood of his relatives: "But first, on earth as vampire sent, / Thy corse shall
from its tomb be rent, / Then ghastly haunt thy native place, / And suck the
blood of all thy race" (755-758). The characteristics of the Giaour in the
tale are parallel to those of a typical vampire,
a legend in the vampiric
folklore known as Vrykolokas.
It is a creature whose soul has come under
the thrall of infernal forces which makes it compulsory to reanimate its
former body by victimizing its own kin. John Cuthbert Lawson provided a
list of ways in which a corpse can become Vrykolokas. Those of a close
relation to the Giaour's character are: men of evil and immoral life in
general, those who die under a curse and those who meet with any sudden
or violent death. Accordingly, The Giaour is a truly vampire. Peter
Thorslev on the other hand considers:
The Giaour is primarily a sensitive Gothic Villain - in
his appearance,
in his air of the fallen angel, in his
"remorse," and in his defiance. He has first of all the
looks of a Gothic Villain, especially in those three tell-
tale features, the brow, the eye, and the smile (150).
The “Shrouded eye”, the “unchangeable brow” and the “bitter smile”
mixed with evil traits are the characteristics of the Gothic villain and the
feeling of remorse has never been associated with the vampire. Though his
“evil eye”, “sallow” and “pale” complexion are ones of a vampire, the
passage in which it is proclaimed that the Giaour will from “daughter,
sister, wife, / At midnight drain the stream of life" (759-760) makes it
difficult to adjudicate when it is remembered that the poem concludes with
Chapter Two: Orientalism in Lord Byron's Turkish Tale
The Giaour
49
his death apparently
alone with no family; a fact not compatible with the
vampire's stereotype as physically immortal.
Byron claimed to John Murray in June 17
th
, 1816: “I have…a personal
dislike to „vampires,‟ and the little acquaintance I have with them would by
no means induce me to divulge their secrets” (Byron 135). The vampire
conundrum in
The Giaour
is neither easy to solve nor leads to a satisfying
answer; what is pleasing though, is Byron's morality behind using the
vampire. Byron tends to convey that the Giaour's folly was not of causing
others to die, but of forsaking his reason to live, the fact that he was made
immortal and rather preferred "To die and know no second love" (1164).
Love was his elixir of life, his sense of longevity and when it was finally
lost, he succumbed to death and broke the metaphor of eternity.
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