Ernestus Berchtold, or, The Modern Oedipus. A Tale was written by John Polidori (1795-1821), a British doctor and author best-known for “The Vampyre.”

Ernestus Berchtold is about Ernestus Berchtold and his friend Olivieri, two young men traveling about Europe. They eventually arrive in Milan where Ernestus meets Olivieri’s father, Count Filiberto Doni. The Donis are Swiss, living in Milan, and are fabulously wealthy. The Count himself is known to have supernatural powers. Every seventh day Doni does not touch “animal food,”¹ and every seventh night he retreats into his room, from which strange sounds emerge and which is always left in the greatest confusion. Ernestus finds this interesting, but he is even more interested in the Count’s daughter Louisa, who falls in love with Ernestus and he with she. She is sickly and ailing, however, and the course of love between Ernestus and Louisa does not run smooth. At one point Ernestus’s heart is broken, or so he thinks, and he loses himself in gambling and debauchery in Milan. Ernestus runs up large debts and is wretched, but the Count simply asks Ernestus how much he needs, and then reappears with that money, saying, “Take it, it is no loss to me, but your wonted happiness I see is fled, that grieves me. Believe one who is older than yourself, Vice is not the path of happiness.”² This does not stop Ernestus from further gambling, and the Count is forced to continue to pay off Ernestus’ mounting debts. Ernestus stops himself and is reconciled to Louisa. They marry, producing one of the great lines of any Gothic: “At that moment happiness seemed to be descending from Heaven to be our handmaid, while in fact despair and horror were preparing their flight from the lowest abyss to wait upon our nuptials.”³

Things go downhill. Olivieri seduces Ernestus’ sister, who dies wretched and dishonored. Olivieri dies, imprisoned and disgraced. And Count Doni dies, but not before revealing the secret of his wealth.

As a young man Count Doni had traveled to the East. He had returned rich but had never spoken about it until his final conversation with Ernestus. In the East Doni had saved the life of an Armenian merchant. The merchant was grateful, and before he died he told Doni the secret of his own wealth, the summoning of a spirit which grants wealth. Doni is appalled by this but gives in to temptation and calls the spirit up. Of the spirit, Doni says, “his hideous form might have appalled a stronger heart than mine.”⁴ The spirit offers Doni a choice: Doni can choose to get a little money (great riches by the world’s standards) once, and then gain a bit more in successive rituals, each one bringing “some human domestic infliction worse than the preceding.”⁵ Or Doni can choose “unlimited power, and constant domestic prosperity, on the condition of giving myself up for ever to the will of a malignant being.”⁶

Doni chooses the former, vowing not to call up the spirit again. Doni returns to society and is well-regarded–he is handsome, successful, a Swiss nobleman, and wealthy–but he marries a beautiful woman who does not love him back. The woman bears Doni two children and then leaves him for another man. Doni has a brief nervous breakdown, and then recovers and devotes himself to caring for and educating his children. He later returns to the whirl of society, but finds that he does not enjoy it as he once did: “grief had weighed down his energies, and sorrow had broken his faculties.”⁷

Doni was successful in not bringing up the spirit until Ernestus entered his life. Doni was initially content to let Ernestus ruin his life with gambling, but Louisa kept pleading for the Count to help Ernestus, and so the Count eventually gave in and conjured up the spirit and got more money to help Ernestus. The “domestic affliction” proviso kicked in, and life for the Count, his family, and Ernestus quickly declined after that, with each summoning of the spirit bringing about further misfortune for everyone.

The final awful revelation is that Ernestus was Count Doni’s son from a previous marriage. Ernestus realizes, after this, that he has married his own half-sister and Olivieri has seduced and dishonored Ernestus’ sister, who is also Count Doni’s daughter and so Olivieri’s half-sister.

Ernestus Berchtold was Polidori’s first novel. It depends heavily on Gothic motifs, down to the incestuous pairings, but it lacks certain basic Gothic elements, including a suitable Hero-Villain, a sinister, haunted landscape or location, and strong negative emotions like terror and guilt. Ernestus is a passive, weak character who never engages the reader’s affections or emotions. The colonialism of the novel goes unexamined—understandable, given the time in which it was written, but distasteful to modern readers. The novel’s incest theme, on the other hand, was immediately noticed:

Ernestus Berchtold¼is explicitly concerned with incest, and the reviews commented on the unspeakability of the theme. In a startling anticipation of the Freudian theory that the desire for incest is both universal and universally repressed, the Edinburgh Monthly Review accused Polidori of “giving free utterance to the sentiments which linger about every imagination, but which it is the prime object of all moral training to subdue”¼the novel presents an unusually complete collection of Romantic incest motifs¼.⁸

Worst of all, Count Doni is Polidori’s “Me” character, and it is all too obvious that Polidori poured his own misery into Doni’s isolation and unhappiness, resulting in an angst-filled character and dull shriek of a novel not worth reading. Ernestus Berchtold was written in the wake of the Diodati ghost-story-telling contest that produced “The Vampyre” and Frankenstein, but it lacks the homoerotic energy of “The Vampyre” and is instead a prolonged wallow in the despair (see: “The Vampyre”) that led Polidori to take his life two years later.

Print: John William Polidori, David Lorne Macdonald, and Kathleen Scherf, The Vampire, a tale; and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The modern Œdipus. Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008.

¹ John Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold; Or, The Modern Œdipus. A Tale (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819), 185.

² Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 120.

³ Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 163.

⁴ Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 259.

⁵ Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 258.

⁶ Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 258.

⁷ Polidori, Ernestus Berchtold, 96.

⁸ D.L. Macdonald and Kathleen Scherf, “Introduction,” in John William Polidori, David Lorne Macdonald, and Kathleen Scherf, The Vampire, a tale; and Ernestus Berchtold; or, The modern Œdipus (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press, 2008), 20.