'The deadly hue of his face': The genesis of the vampiric gentleman and his deadly beauty; or, how Lord Ruthven became Edward Cullen

Unlike his progeny, Count Dracula, Ruthven is able to pass in polite society, making his seductive nature more insidious and damaging. Thus he anticipates the arrival of late-twentieth-century vampires such as Anne Rice’s much-lauded sympathetic vampires. Kaja Franck, in her chapter, concentrates on Ruthven’s twenty-first-century children, the sparkling vampires of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight novels, through the intersections of gender, the Gothic, and consumerism. Where Polidori’s narrative is focalised through Aubrey’s increasingly disturbed viewpoint, Meyer’s novels usurp the masculine voice, replacing it with the object of the vampire’s desire, Bella Swan. Ruthven’s ‘deadly hue’ is replaced by sparkling attraction. Polidori’s narrative, and its critique of social mores, is reimagined for a twenty-first-century audience who are attracted to rather than repulsed by the Other. Like Ruthven, the Cullens are at once embedded within and yet permanently removed from their society. However, rather than being symbols of social degradation, they are held up as an aspirational, wholesome family. Franck shows how Meyer’s vampires act as reflections of consumerist desire in a society shaped by social media and celebrity culture.