Psychological use of this mythic figure as an analogy to explain human interactions. For the vampire in Romanticism had a more profound use than making the reader's skin crawl or showing how daring the artist could be. Admittedly, writing chauerromans exploiting gothic sensibility was fashinable, and, admittedly, the vampire story was an aberration of Romantic eroticism, but the myth was also often used in serious attempts to express various human relationships, that the artist himself had with family, friends, lovers or even art itself. Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Brontes, Stokers, Wilde, Poe- vampire was variously used to personify the forces of maternal attraction/repulsion (Coleridge's Christabel), incest (Byrons Manfred), oppresive paternalism (Shelley's Cenci), adolescent love (Keat's Porphyro), avaricious love (Poe's Morella and Berenice), struggle for power (E.Bronte- Heathcliff), sexual supresion (Bronte - Bertha Rochester), homosexual attraction (Le Fanu's Carmilla), repressed sexuality (Stoker's Dracula), female domination (D.H. Lawrence - Brangwen women) and most romantic of all - artist himself, exchanging energy with aspects of his art (Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Poe "Oval Portrait', Wordsworth "Leech Gatherer" Wilde's Dorian Gray and the narrator of James Sacred Fount)

Outside current cinema, comics and cheap novels, vampire myth is rarely used twice for the same purpose. Definitions are problematic, for the artist freely altered the myth to support asrtistic ends.


James B Twitchell "The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic literature"