WHO IS
DRACULA’S
FATHER?
And Other Puzzles in Bram Stoker’s
Gothic Masterpiece
JOHN SUTHERLAND
For Paul Barber
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Preface
Who is Dracula’s father?
Is Count Dracula the great Impaler incarnate?
How dead is Dracula?
Bram Stoker (1847–1912), a short biography
What colour is Dracula’s moustache?
Quincey P. Morris: vampire?
Where did Dracula’s (English-speaking?) harem come from?
Who washes Dracula’s pinafore?
Why does Van Helsing swear in German?
J.S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872)
Why does the bloofer lady target children?
Why did Henry Irving not bite?
Nosferatu? What does that mean?
Why does Dracula take risks? (Dr Freud explains)
What do Stoker’s notes tell us?
How much German does Jonathan speak?
Why Whitby?
What is the point of R.M. Renfield?
Why are the Gypsies so loyal to Dracula?
What else was happening in 1893?
Dracula: a chronological plot summary
What happened in Munich?
Why is Stoker’s vampire aristocratic?
Who invented the Dracula tux?
How rich is Dracula?
Why won’t Dracula let Jonathan go home?
Whose face does Jonathan remember?
Is Dracula’s blood warm?
Why are Dracula’s palms hirsute?
Is Dracula gay?
What is ‘Carfax’?
Where would you find a ‘gesunder’ in Dracula?
Why is Dracula so interested in blue flames?
How does Vampire Lucy escape from a lead-lined coffin?
Where have all the vampires gone?
Coincidence, or something else?
How ordinary a vampire is Count Dracula?
Is Van Helsing’s giant spider real?
Appendix: Dracula Digested, by John Crace
Copyright
Preface
I believe the reward from reading fiction arises less from what you know than what you don’t know – what, perhaps, you’ll never know. Puzzles.
In what follows I have, as it were, picked up Bram Stoker’s Dracula and shaken it, to see what puzzles fall out. Interspersed with those puzzles are a few separate features, including a brief biography of Stoker on page 14 and a short summary of Dracula’s narrative on page 99. Don’t rely on the movie versions. They take liberties. (But enjoy the best of them. Even the worst sometimes afford a perverse pleasure. Who would not be charmed by Dracula’s Dog?)
I was very lucky to be a friend of Dr Paul Barber in the 1980s, when I was working in America. Barber is the most admired of scholars who have looked, anthropologically, folklorically, and every which way at the vampire phenomenon. His conclusions are stated in his now classic work, Vampires, Burial and Death (1990, reprinted 2010). It’s a masterly summation of fact, fiction and fantasy. And in the lighter-hearted cogitation, I have borne in mind Paul Barber’s instruction that we should keep separate in our minds the ‘folkloric vampire’ and the ‘fictional vampire’.
Lovers of Dracula, and those coming to it for the first time, are lucky to have the fullest critical biography yet produced: David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula (2017). Insight into the novel has recently been further enriched by the facsimile reproduction and transcription of the author’s preliminary memoranda in Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, edited by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (2008).
There is a wealth of discussion about Dracula on the web, upon which I have drawn. If I have missed any acknowledgement of what is borrowed, I apologise, and will make amends in future editions.
Judge of a man by his questions
rather than by his answers
VOLTAIRE
Who is Dracula’s father?
Who spawned Dracula? There are two contenders worthy of discussion here. Elsewhere (see page 6) we will examine the popular notion that Dracula is none other than Vlad the Impaler, the infamous 15th-century prince of Wallachia – in which case his father would be Vlad II Dracul, a nobleman of similar rank. But there is another possibility.
Before he goes to Transylvania, Jonathan Harker bones up in the reading room of the British Museum. One can indulge a fanciful vision of him under Panizzi’s great dome, alongside George Bernard Shaw.
We may note, in passing, that Bram Stoker actually started his five years of casual research for Dracula in the public library of Whitby, over a relaxing summer holiday in the town, in 1890. One book in particular caught his fancy, William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. From that volume (there cannot have been an overwhelming demand for it in the library) Stoker took the following, transcribed, supposedly by Harker, verbatim into the narrative:
In the population of Transylvania there are four distinct nationalities: Saxons in the South, and mixed with them the Wallachs, who are the descendants of the Dacians; Magyars in the West, and Szekelys in the East and North. I am going among the latter, who claim to be descended from Attila and the Huns.
Later, in an outburst of genealogical bombast, Dracula, a distinguished member of Szekely nobility (who did not, incidentally, use the title ‘count’, but ‘boyar’), makes the point that he did not originate among the lowly Hunnish rapers and pillagers, but from the loins of the great Hun himself:
‘We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent on the seaboards of Europe, ay, and of Asia and Africa too, till the peoples thought that the werewolves themselves had come. Here, too, when they came, they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches, who, expelled from Scythia had mated with the devils in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?’ He held up his arms.
Stoker made a note to himself that Dracula’s first language is not Romanian. It is certified in the printed text, rather pedantically, when he informs the newly arrived lawyer: ‘my friend Harker Jonathan – nay, pardon me. I fall into my country’s habit of putting your patronymic first’. He means Hungarian. Hunnish.
Attila (406–453) qualifies as one of the cruellest world conquerors in history. The name remains well known and much referenced – as in Mrs Thatcher’s nickname, ‘Attila the Hen’. Once heard, never forgotten.
Attila preyed on the rubble of the Roman Empire earning himself the title ‘The Scourge of God’. He approved the title, suggesting as it did that: (1) he was God’s punitive instrument; (2) he could himself punish God, if the whim took him. He centred his evil empire in the land of the Hun, now called, in his memory, Hungary.
Dracula’s claim, of course, may suggest only that he is Attila’s distant descendant, but given that he has lived for many centuries, could he in fact be the direct offspring of the great Hun? Interesting in this respect is the unusually detailed (for the 5th century) account of the tyrant’s death and funeral, as recorded at the time by the Roman historian Priscus of Panium. Attila died mysteriously, on his wedding night, still in his forties. God, doubt
less, prepared a warm welcome for him. Jordanes (another Roman historian) summarises Priscus’s account thus:
Shortly before he died … [Attila] took in marriage a very beautiful girl named Ildico, after countless other wives, as was the custom of his race. He had given himself up to excessive joy at his wedding, and as he lay on his back, heavy with wine and sleep, a rush of superfluous blood, which would ordinarily have flowed from his nose, streamed in deadly course down his throat and killed him, since it was hindered in the usual passages … On the following day, when a great part of the morning was spent, the royal attendants suspected some ill and, after a great uproar, broke in the doors. There they found the death of Attila accomplished by an effusion of blood, without any wound, and the girl with downcast face weeping beneath her veil. Then, as is the custom of that race, they plucked out the hair of their heads and made their faces hideous with deep wounds, that the renowned warrior might be mourned, not by effeminate wailings and tears, but by the blood of men.
His body lay in state for a statutory number of days. His army, frantic with grief, mourned by smearing their faces with blood, circling the silken burial tent on their horses. He was buried with huge pomp – but no one knows where. Legend has it a river was diverted to flow over his resting place, lest anyone find and despoil it. Millions of people had a bone to pick with Attila the Hun.
But was he really dead? Is Dracula Attila reincarnate – or even the still-alive Attila? Attila died by drinking his own blood. Is that what Dracula hints by holding up his arm in Jonathan’s face? Or, more likely, was Ildico, on that gory wedding night, impregnated? There is a Dan Brown novel lurking in that idea.
Attila, if we pursue this line of speculation, has waited all these centuries for what? To conquer not just a slice of eastern Europe, but the whole planet, man, woman and child. Now, in 1893, God’s Scourge, in the (un)person of Count Dracula, is ready to strike. Beware humanity. Call on a talkative old Dutch professor: he may save us.
Is Count Dracula the great Impaler incarnate?
That Dracula is, more or less, the offspring of Attila is persuasive. There is, however, an alternative genealogy which has found greater favour with Dracula devotees. Namely, that Dracula is Vlad Tepes, later called the ‘Impaler’, (re)incarnate. If so, he has come down in the world over the centuries. Vlad Tepes was much more than a mere ‘count’, or ‘boyar’. Vlad III (c. 1431–c. 1477) was, as Van Helsing labels him, a ‘voivode’ – a warrior prince of Wallachia.
Vlad Tepes has, in historical record, a double character. He was, and still is, memorialised as a hero who held back the Turks’ Ottoman imperial tide. He was also, legend has it, a sadist of hideous ingenuity. It was something temperamental and, at the same time, astutely political. Only by a regime of terror could order be kept in his part of the world. It is a belief which eastern European rulers, from Turkey to Mongolia, have followed to Stalin and beyond.*
Vlad Tepes’s cruelty was as theatrical as it was brutal. He is reported as coolly impaling 25,000 Turks while calmly eating his lunch on a table in front of the massacre with the screams of his victims as condiment to his meat. Lucky victims were merely spitted through the belly. Others met with more ingenious cruelties best not thought about. There is a painting recording the great Impaler nailing the turbans of a party of Turk envoys to their heads with nails – since they declined to remove their headgear in his august presence. He was, one concludes, a very witty sadist.
That the Count is the great Impaler reincarnate is the core of one of the most flamboyant (and hugely enjoyable) film treatments of the novel, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992). The director, Francis Ford Coppola, bought the Impaler thesis wholesale, 25,000 and all.
The identification of Count Dracula, directly or indirectly, with Vlad the Impaler, is provably false. It arises from a cat’s cradle of misapprehension originating in Van Helsing’s passing comment: ‘He [Dracula] must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land’ (an unhappy phrase; but the doctor is, himself, an incorrigible gobbler of the English language).
William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820), which Stoker pored over in his 1890 summer holiday in Whitby (of which more later) was his trove for such details. Wilkinson notes that ‘Dracula’ in the Wallachian language means devil or dragon. But Wilkinson goes on to add that ‘The Wallachians … used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning’. (Vlad, as a name and title, originates with vladeti, meaning ‘rule’. It is used widely. There are at least half a dozen Romanian footballers named ‘Vlad’, none reported to feed on blood.)
Many commentators have blithely assumed that Dracula and the great Impaler are one and the same or closely related. It is an irresistible temptation. But there is no warrant for it in the text of the novel. Had Stoker intended the connection it would surely have been signalled more obviously. It would have been too rich a detail not to dangle in front of the reader. The word ‘impale’ occurs nowhere in the text. Dracula does not impale. He osculates – the toothy ‘kiss’, not the sharp stick, is his weapon of choice.
Coppola’s research team must have come up with the facts contradicting the Impaler thesis. But the fiction that Dracula was the great Impaler was too good not to be true. And, what the hell, it was only a movie.
* See M.J. Trow, Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Impaler (2003) and Radu Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula, Prince of Many Faces (1989).
How dead is Dracula?
Two of the titles Stoker played with before hitting, late in the day, on Dracula were. ‘The Un-Dead’ and ‘The Dead Un-Dead’.
Neither is as good as the single word which stands on the published page, oozing enigma for first readers (Place? Person? Thing?). But those dropped titles point to an interesting puzzle. It can be easily enough stated; it is less easily resolved:
1. Is Dracula dead – ‘as a doornail’, as the proverb puts it?
2. Is he dead but ‘resurrected’? (There is plentiful anti-Christ symbolism in his depiction – did Stoker read Nietzsche?)
3. Is he immortal, or merely long-living, like Methuselah?
4. Was he, himself, vampirised?
5. Was he made, by recruitment and instruction, into what he now is by some Satanic super-vampire?
6. Does he represent an evolutionary leap by the human species?
7. Is he alien, extraterrestrial, not of this earth? In H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, published in the same summer 1897 month as Dracula, the Martians, we recall, are interplanetary blood-suckers.
I lean towards 5. The reason is a note scrawled in Stoker’s early jottings for the novel. The Dracul/Dracula (father/son) family, he writes, ‘had dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.’
Stoker derived this from one of his half-dozen principal sources, Emily Gerard’s writings about ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’:
As I am on the subject of thunderstorms, I may as well here mention the Scholomance, or school supposed to exist somewhere in the heart of the mountains, and where all the secrets of nature, the language of animals, and all imaginable magic spells and charms are taught by the devil in person. Only ten scholars are admitted at a time, and when the course of learning has expired and nine of them are released to return to their homes, the tenth scholar is detained by the devil as payment, and mounted upon an Ismeju (dragon) he becomes henceforward the devil’s aide-de-camp, and assists him in ‘making the weather’, that is to say, preparing the thunderbolts.*
Jason Colavito, to whom I’m indebted here, notes that ‘Gerard’s version of the story is not a professional one’. Colavito goes on to say that ‘By luck, a folklorist, R.C. Maclagan, produced a report for the journal Folklore in 1897 that included a more accurate
version of the story then-current in Transylvania’. Maclagan’s report reads:
Here we find that the drac is the devil in person, who instructs certain persons to be magicians and medicine men in a college under the earth. Of these, one in eight receives instruction during fourteen years, and on his return to earth he has the following power. By means of certain magical formulae he compels a dragon to ascend from the depths of a loch. He then throws a golden bridle with which he has been provided over his head, and rides aloft among the clouds, which he causes to freeze and thereby produces hail.†
The relevant element here is that Dracula half a millennium ago – the dark ages – was one of Satan’s privileged adoptees. He signed a Faustian pact: his soul in exchange for superhuman knowledge and power (Dracula, one recalls, can create a microclimate wherever he goes).
This discussion can help us to make sense of a further puzzle in the last pages of the novel. Why does Dracula have a ‘look of peace’ on his face as he is killed? This is how his demise is described by Mina (the blood of Dracula is still in her veins, remember):
I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
One would think having one’s jugular ripped apart, and one’s heart impaled on a bowie knife and one’s castle reduced to rubble might be a trifle unpeaceful.
Along with Gerard – ‘Madame Dracula’, as she has been nicknamed – one of the acknowledged sources of Dracula was Henry Irving’s starring performance as Mephisto in his 1885 hit version of Faust (a loose amalgam of Goethe and Marlowe). A much-quoted exchange from Marlowe finds the title character quizzing Mephisto about what damnation is:
Who Is Dracula's Father? Page 1
