While the picturesque Yorkshire fishing port of Whitby is catnip to day-trippers, literary tourists and (when in season) surprising numbers of Goths, the tourist industry that lines up its attractions for these profitable visitors also tactfully mentions that one anticipated sight is definitely missing. However diligently you search for it, you won’t find Dracula’s grave (though one confectionery shop does a nifty line in super-sweet little “Dracula’s Coffins” – chocolate, filled with fruity red gunk). There’s Dracula rock (black), the Dracula Experience Waxworks, assorted postcards, ornaments and even a celebratory Dracula tea towel, but he simply isn’t buried there. He’s not hidden in the stately ruins of Whitby Abbey, though nothing could be more suitably Gothic, and he doesn’t lurk among the weather-worn gravestones surrounding St Mary’s, where the cliff-top churchyard crumbles slowly into the sea. There are two good reasons for the lamentable absence of his bones. In Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula, the vampire count does indeed begin his brief reign of terror in England by entering Whitby harbour on board the doomed Russian freighter Demeter, going on to flit around St Mary’s churchyard and the up-market terraced streets on the opposite cliff, and despatching at least one local. However, before his nefarious doings have been fully investigated by Abraham Van Helsing and his team of fearless amateur vampire-hunters, he has moved down to London, avid for the richer pickings of a teeming modern metropolis. And even then, he doesn’t meet his comeuppance in England but is tracked eastwards across Europe to his original home in Transylvania. In the chapel belonging to Castle Dracula, Van Helsing finds the Count’s lordly tomb, but Dracula is notably not at home. He is eventually encountered lying corpse-like in one of his travelling coffins, conveniently lined with native grave-earth and transported by loyal gypsies. Just as the setting sun threatens to restore the vampire’s power, Jonathan Harker shears through his throat with a great Kukri knife while the dying Quincey Morris plunges his Bowie knife (Morris is American, you’ll have guessed) into his heart. Pausing only to adopt an expression of deep peace, Dracula’s corpse immediately crumbles to dust. So the only tomb is in Transylvania and anyway is empty, and not even the Yorkshire Tourist Board can claim that Dracula’s bones ever found rest in Whitby.
The other reason why you won’t find his grave there (and I really can’t stress this one sufficiently strongly) is that Count Dracula the vampireis a fictional character. He’s not buried anywhere except in the pages of the book that gave him existence – and given how often the novel is read, studied, adapted and borrowed from, he must be enjoying a much richer afterlife than most literary inventions. And there’s the rub – though Stoker did indeed invent Dracula, he used such potent source materials that his creation looms larger than the novel in which he is embedded. Arguably not the most fully realised character in supernatural fiction, still he has been woven out of such glittering threads that the slightest tug unravels a wealth of references and possibilities. Far from featuring in every page-turning paragraph of the eponymous novel, the vampire actually takes up considerably less wordage than good-guy characters such as Mina Harker or Van Helsing, but he has long since flown the nest in so many dramatisations, sequels and variations on a theme that he has come to stand alone, a flourishing pop cultural trope for audiences who would never dream of picking up a Victorian novel running to 161,774 words. Indeed, his name has almost become synonymous with the concept of the vampire: mention Dracula and you call up a dark-haired, hypnotic-eyed aristocrat who flits into your bedroom, shifting from his bat-shape as flickering wings become black cloak. However many visually unremarkable vampire types may pass for human in True Blood, Being Human or Buffy, anyone choosing to play the vampire come Hallowe’en is going to dress up as Dracula – or at least as the elegant caped bloodsucker who represents our most familiar interpretation of the character. You only have to look at Count von Count from Sesame Street to see how pervasive is the look, the outfit, the accent and the aristocratic status. Dracula is practically a trademark. He also belongs to that select band of created characters who have broken the bounds of fiction: while they may imply different things by it, it’s amazing how many people will calmly insist that “There really was a Count Dracula.”
Thursday, March 6, 2014
To examine the rise and rise of Dracula, we need to examine just how unusual were his roots. The novel, published in 1897, had been in gestation since at least 1890, but some critics look for its origins far earlier in the life of its author. Bram Stoker came from Clontaf near Dublin, a well-educated member of the professional classes; like his father, he worked initially as a civil servant. His childhood background immediately sets up a rich field of connections, with Mrs Stoker amusing her sickly son with Irish legends that might have included the Dearg-due, the Banshee and the revenant Abhartach. Such traditions may well have set Stoker’s imagination en route to a world where the supernatural impinges dangerously on the everyday, but there is no direct equivalent of the eastern European vampire figure in Irish legend, and there were other Irish connections much closer in time. Stoker knew Sheridan Le Fanu, whose haunting novella of the seductive (and Sapphic) vampire Carmilla (1872) provides the prototype for some of Dracula’s themes, as well as its original setting of Styria, rather than Transylvania. He would certainly have known Oscar Wilde’sThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) – in Dublin they moved in the same circles and Wilde had wooed Florence Balcombe, the beautiful Irish girl who chose instead to marry Stoker himself in 1878. Dorian Gray isn’t a vampire tale, but its evocation of a modern London below whose surface uncanny corruption seethes unrecognised, plus the notion of an eternally youthful protagonist apparently exempt from mortal morality, do find echoes in Dracula, while its popularity would have suggested that writing a supernatural thriller was a sound idea.
The iconic power of the Count himself, though, may have a less literary source. Stoker worked as a civil servant (his second book, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), indicates just how uninspiring this was) but nurtured a passion for the theatre, writing reviews for the Dublin Evening Mail. In particular, he was mesmerised by the larger-than-life performances of visiting actor Henry Irving. Under Irving’s calculating encouragement, Stoker changed his career and his life, moving to London to become business manager of the Lyceum Theatre and effectively personal manager to the actor. Alongside domestic life with Florence, Stoker’s existence centred around Irving, a demanding, hypnotic personality used to striking poses and holding the stage. His gaunt aquiline features were especially suited to such sinister roles as Richard III or Mephistopheles, and Stoker’s Dracula reads like a part made for Irving to play.
Even while working and on occasion touring with the Lyceum Company, Stoker found time to write. Dracula was his fifth novel and by so far the best that it has been suggested he had a helping editorial hand from the (then) immensely popular Manx novelist Hall Caine, to whom it is dedicated. A less speculative reason for its quality is that Stoker’s notebooks show him maturing his complex plot from 1890, recording his changing ideas along with a list of the sources he consulted. These help explain the unique hold the book exercises over its readers – it is a construct that deliberately touches on verifiable realities, a novel of many voices, a strict timetable of journeys and dates and layer upon layer of researched references.
From the notes, we know that Stoker read up on Romanian folklore in Emily Gerard’s 1885 article Transylvanian Superstitions (he never visited the country). Belief in vampirism was never an official doctrine subject to written dogma, so Stoker was effectively reading about oral traditions written down in the name of folklore but quite probably, in their native environment, subject to local variations and changes over time. Ironically, by putting so much of this material into the mouth of his “vampire expert” Van Helsing, Stoker himself helps create the immutable “rules” of vampirism endlessly cited thereafter.
At its most basic, the belief discussed the buried dead who wouldn’t stay down. Usually familiar, local individuals who had recently expired (as opposed to age-old warlords attempting to take over the world), vampires were not glamorous, didn’t have fangs or evening cloaks and were not always associated with blood-drinking. They were just wrong, aberrations from the natural order, and in their wake death followed, usually of their family and neighbours. The idea seems concerned with contagion (linked perhaps to anxieties about the protocol of death), and the vampire of folklore may be an anonymous unfortunate – ‘a man in our village…’. Stoker takes the convincing background details of the belief but translates the grave-soiled revenant of a mundane villager into a superstar, flashing (not too often) onto the stage of his novel as a fiendish mastermind whose turbulent history has matured during centuries of undead brooding until he is ready to erupt onto the modern stage. Instead of a contagious corpse, he delivers a mediæval warlord striding like a colossus across a 19th-century world of petty clerks, a great black dog that certainly doesn’t need the help of the Whitby RSPCA. Ruthless and horrible, Dracula is attractive because he calls on the forces of nature while defying its laws, and harks back to cliff-edge castles and mighty forests while casually using the modern urban environment as his blood-bank. Beside him, Stoker’s band of heroes are small, neat people defined by professional and social roles.
The aristocratic, larger than un-life vampire figure isn’t, however, entirely original to Stoker. Once again, he made a perceptive choice from within an existing literary range. The first major depiction of the vampire in English fiction is the pale, seductively attractive Lord Ruthven in John Polidori’s 1819 novella The Vampyre. In what looks like an unscrupulously brilliant piece of promotion, authorship was attributed to the notorious Lord Byron – in fact Polidori had (briefly) travelled with the poet as personal physician and Ruthven is an unflattering portrait of his former employer, whose travels to Greece had been instrumental in introducing the idea of the vampire into English-speaking literary culture. Mid-century penny-dreadful Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood (whose authorship is variously attributed to Prest and Rymer) also has an energetic, titled vampire with historic connections. Varney, in the illustrations a theatrically dashing if hideous creature, has fangs, leaves puncture wounds on the necks of his victims (young ladies preferred) and can move about during the day, all features that Dracula will inherit. Stoker didn’t haveto create his undead hero in this mould – by the 1890s, the vampire was a familiar type in supernatural fiction, and variations on the theme had included Le Fanu’s sentimental chestnut-haired seductress Carmilla and a beautiful revenant from Ancient Rome in Anne Crawford’s A Mystery of the Campagna. Dracula, however, is as much about a compelling, ruthless, exotic masculine presence as it is about vampirism, and the choice to expand on the Ruthven/Varney prototype chimed well with what has become the most controversial element in the book’s construction – the role of the real-life Dracula.
Stoker’s vampire was originally Count Wamyr (which inflicts his leading character with a rather obvious label) but he changed this to Dracula after reading about the 15th-century Wallachian warlord Vlad III Dracula, a voivode (Prince rather than Count) of the house of Basarab. Stoker found the reference in William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, a book he borrowed from Whitby public library while on holiday there. Using this name was a stroke of genius. Now so familiar as to be virtually generic, in 1897 its deceptively mellifluous syllables must have sounded alluringly foreign and fraught with unimaginable meaning. In fact it’s a diminutive, almost a nickname. Vlad II, caught up in the struggle to repel Turkish invasions whose threat was religious as well as territorial, joined the Order of the Dragon, a religio-military alliance dedicated to preserving Christendom in the face of such a danger. Dragon is “Dracul”, so he became known as Vlad Dracul and his son as Vlad III Dracula, son of the Dragon. But the latter had another, decidedly unofficial nickname – Vlad Tepes or “the Impaler”, derived from his unpleasant habit of condemning enemies (could be Turks, but could be anyone who annoyed him) to a slow, agonising death impaled on wooden stakes. He exhibited a taste for torture and mutilation that, if contemporary sources are to be believed, went far beyond the legitimate display of power and right into the area of psychopathic gratification on a grand scale (sometimes thousands of victims at a time). Reasons can be suggested – living under circumstances where political ambition practically guaranteed a short life and a nasty end, he spent his boyhood as hostage to the Turkish Sultan, far from home and subject to ill treatment at the hands of this father’s enemies. Tales of the atrocities he would subsequently inflict, however, look like exaggerations, part of a German propaganda campaign to show him as irrational, violent and treacherous. Wilkinson’s book doesn’t mention them, or use the term “Impaler”. Stoker could have researched further and found (possibly in the British Museum) the German pamphlets that tell the whole shocking story, or he might have heard about it from Arminius Vambery, a Hungarian historian he is known to have met. However, there’s no evidence in the notes or the novel that he knew of Vlad’s darker side. What he takes from history are the name and a very brief account of Dracula’s pre-death military career. He’s not telling the story of Vlad Tepes, but to the determined literary detective, the connection must go deeper. Since the history of Vlad III was popularised for a Western audience in the 1973 book In Search Of Dracula by Radu Florescu and Raymond T McNally, the portrait of the Wallachian (not Transylvanian) prince, with his Hapsburg jaw, long dark hair and moustache and distinctive red hat has joined the reference points for the vampire of Stoker’s novel, giving him another dimension of apparent reality.
He already has a choice of faces, though, and I don’t just mean the powerful old white-moustached, hairy-handed gentleman of Stoker’s description (appearing later in the novel altogether younger and sporting a natty little beard – London suits him). One reason the Dracula legend keeps growing is because it gets endlessly revisualised, with images that feed back into the way we read the book. As early as 1922, FW Murnau filmed the story, pared down, relocated to Bremen and boasting a cadaverous, rat-toothed vampire who embodied the most extreme aspects of Stoker’s description, an emaciated goblin rather than an urbane nobleman. He couldn’t be called Dracula, however, for reasons of copyright, so the film is Nosferatu and the vampire Graf Orlock. And here the odd capacity of the novel to branch out into legend becomes apparent. Orlock is played by Max Shreck, whose surname means fright, which is surely too apt to be believed… (Actually, Shreck was a perfectly legitimate actor with the famous Max Reinhardt Company, but this hasn’t stopped speculation, plus a further complication of reality/fiction in the 2000 movie Shadow of the Vampire, in which the making of Nosferatu is assisted by the fact that Shreck/Orlock, played by Willem Dafoe, really is a vampire.)
By 1925, Dracula was also appearing live on stage in an adaptation by Hamilton Deane. (Henry Irving, alas, never did play the part. Although in 1897 Stoker arranged a professional read-through of a dramatisation he had hastily put together to preserve copyright, the great man showed no interest.) The Deane play reduced the action to something like a drawing-room drama, with a Count who now could turn off his sinister side and play up his role as a charming, exotic newcomer in polite social circles. The 1931 Universal film directed by Tod Browning was essentially this modern-dress version brought to the screen, complete with successful stage Dracula, the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi. Dracula had been reconceived for the cinema audience of the 1930s as an urbane stranger, rather too sleek of hair and intense of expression to be quite decent. There was a hint of Valentino about him, a slight Old World decadence that made him dangerously attractive. At the same time, he now had an accent that everyone could mimic and evening clothes of exaggerated elegance that became a virtual uniform for his appearance in a string of sequels. Universal studios added to the legend by deciding that Dracula would be constantly reborn (who cares how?) and always recognisable whoever played the role. This is still the Hallowe’en costume version of Dracula, or Grandpa in The Munsters, the vampire defined as much by his cape as by his bloodlust.
From their own Dracula in 1958, British company Hammer Films, with Kodak’s Eastmancolor at their disposal and post-war audiences looking for stronger meat, beefed up the blood and cast Christopher Lee as a more silent, physically overwhelming Count. As X-rated films could deliver sex as well as violence, this comparatively youthful (36 when he first played the role) vampire was faced with heaving bosoms and translucent negligees, turning staid Victorian damsels into ravening vamps with his bite and revealing a sub-text that had always been there, hardly hidden even in Stoker’s novel. Vampirism was transgressive not just because it blurred life and death but because it released its victims from the restrictions of conventional morality. Dracula was now the demon lover who liberated our desires and just as the Hammer series faded away in the 1970s, the critical industry of commentaries on novel and character got into gear. Dracula was de- and re-constructed to personify anything from Stoker’s homosexual desire to the late Victorian fear of reverse colonisation and the tainting of the Empire by alien blood. At the same time, air-travel was becoming cheaper and the Romanian connection became something that could be explored at first-hand. (The Dracula Society was founded in 1973 largely with this in mind.)
The Count, though, still had new aspects to uncover, and the 1977 film version directed by John Badham cast Frank Langella as the most romantic Dracula to date, a vampire directly motivated by love for the heroine Mina. He was now becoming a darkly handsome outsider led by his emotions as much as by his appetite, a perfect role model for a generation of New Romantics and budding Goths. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula made a brave attempt to reincorporate all the threads in a film that wasn’t so much true to the book as true to what the book might have been if only Stoker had read all the commentaries on his novel. A prelude to the literary plot not only assumed that vampire Dracula and Vlad Tepes were one and the same, but drew on a Romanian legend that Vlad’s first wife, hearing a false account of his defeat, jumped from Poenari fortress to her death. Dracula now has what Stoker never makes clear, a reason for becoming a vampire, an excuse for all that unpleasantness and a quest: in Victorian London, he finds his lost love reborn in Mina Harker. It’s as though Stoker somehow forgot to incorporate the mystical possibilities of reincarnation into his vampire lore (he does weave it into the plot of his Egyptian novel The Jewel of Seven Stars), so Coppola puts the record straight.
And that is a major part of Count Dracula’s remarkable status – he’s instantly recognisable yet constantly re-invented. In a novel which is written in the first-person voices of several main characters, Dracula doesn’t get a voice. He’s the mirror in which we see only our own reflections, an electrifying character who still manages to provide a blank slate on which the preoccupations of each reader, director or critic can be written. An immediately recognisable icon, he’s still constantly re-invented. He has become an alternative for the Devil in a secular age, a role model for angst-ridden teens, a window into Victorian repression, a metaphor for disease, a political cartoon, a plush toy.
He long since overwhelmed his creator: it seems absurd to realise that when Stoker died in 1912, none of his obituaries mentioned Dracula; now, Stoker’s entire life tends to be viewed in relation to his most lasting creation. And Dracula really does survive with remarkable vigour; the other reason you won’t find him buried in Whitby is because he’s not really dead. When the movies endlessly revived him they were surely taking a hint from Stoker, who abandoned a proposed ending that had Castle Dracula destroyed forever in favour of that rather messy slash-and-stab death. Come on – we all know it takes more than a Bowie knife to kill a vampire. No stake, no beheading – Dracula is always waiting for the next comeback.