Vlad the Impaler and the Legend of Dracula. Talk by Patrricia Erskine=Hill, 24 September 2021

 

The LitSoc’s Covid Campaign continued with the Third Coming (courtesy of Zoom) of an  established favourite, Patricia Erskine-Hill.  Having previously entertained and educated us with analyses of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the publishing trade in the Venice of the Rinascimento, she moved to the violently contested reaches of late medieval Europe’s eastern frontier and the performatively sanguinary saga of Vlad the Impaler and the role this cultural milieu played in the genesis of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Romance, Dracula.  Accounts of Vlad’s homicidal brutality rode the wave of the early 16^th century print revolution and were Europe’s first horror-schlock best sellers. 

As the political tectonic plates of the Ottoman Empire and the Central European powers shifted uneasily in the mid-15^th century, Vlad emerged as a voivode in Wallachia (now part of Romania), an aristocratic vassal of the Ottoman Sultan.  These feudal lords considered their allegiances as fluid arrangements and were ever ready to sell their loyalty to the highest bidder.  Although remote, this corner shared with the rest of Europe a taste for grisly public executions, especially for crimes against the state.  One regional specialty had women guilty of infanticide or witchcraft placed in an open grave and then buried alive, possibly planting the seeds for later legends about the undead sallying forth from their tombs and coffins.  Vlad’s contribution to the Grand Guignol cocktail of brutality and deterrence was impalement, where a sharpened stake was driven through the victim’s trunk and then implanted in the ground thus giving them a painful three day death.  Creative variations on the theme allowed the stake to be passed from front to back of the thorax or from back to front or advanced upwards from the fundament along the vertebral column with the objective being a long, lingering death.  Stoker seized on Vlad’s patronymic Dracul (of the Dragon) as the title of his book – Dracula. Vlad was a member of the Order of the Dragon, Christian knights pledged to resist Ottoman encroachment and his battles with the Turks have made him a Romanian national hero whose violent ways are considered a necessary evil.  

Patricia claimed Clontarf-born   Stoker as a fellow alumnus of Trinity College, Dublin where he graduated with a first in   Maths and was an outstanding athlete.  Moving to London, he had a 20 year career managing both the leading actor, Henry Irving and the Lyceum Theatre.  In researching his first novel, he would have learnt that the vampire thread could be followed over a century of European literature and the legends waxed strongest in Transylvania, then in Northeast Hungary on the periphery of the Hapsburg lands.  He therefore moved Dracula’s castle from Wallachia to there, positioning it at the remote Borgo Pass, connecting Transylvania and Moldavia.  

The novel takes the Exeter-based solicitor, Jonathan Harker, to Castle Dracula to complete the Count’s purchase of some property in London.  Although he never visited the area, Stoker drew heavily on Baedeker guides to give detailed, realistic descriptions of the topography.  As he moves east Harker leaves modernity in his wake; after Budapest train travel gives way to coaches and harbingers of Gothic horror appear – as the coach is passed by Count Dracula on horseback a fellow traveller observes that the dead ride fast. 

Concluding his legal business at the castle, Harker then finds himself under house arrest.  Searching the castle, he finds Dracula sleeps all day in a coffin and leaves the place at night and he watches the 3 brides of Dracula devour a baby.  He effects his escape but arrives in Budapest a raving lunatic and is nursed back to health by nuns.  Bent on revenge, Dracula focuses on Lucy Westenra, a friend of Harker’s fiancée Mina, whose likeness he found among Harker’s belongings.  Having previously declared an aspiration to pass for normal and not seem a stranger in a strange land, he naturally heads for Yorkshire where the spectrum of normality is considerably wider than in the rest of England.   At Whitby, he preys on Lucy, who becomes progressively paler and weaker and bears two distinctive gashes on her throat. Following her death from serial exsanguination, Lucy joins the ranks of the vampires and Dracula begins his assault on Mina. 

In what some critics interpret as a reckoning in which Western science and organisation triumph over those ….doomed to death, though fated not to die,  an intrepid trinity of Harker, Lucy’s American fiancé Quincey Morris and the Dutch vampirologist Abraham Van Helsing range widely to hunt down and kill the vampire Lucy, the 3 brides and finally skewer Dracula himself with a cosmopolitan collection of bladed weapons  whereupon his cadaver turns to dust and his reign as the scourge of reluctant blood donors comes to an end. 

Stoker’s saga has tapped into some global subconscious nerve pathway and has inspired more than 200 films with the likes of Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman playing Dracula.  In the course of this, Stoker’s hairy werewolf Dracula has morphed into what one critic has described as an archetypal fin-de-siecle European decadent, a delicate slimmed down Oscar Wilde.  Patricia declined to engage with the myriad psychological interpretations of this Gothic tale leaving Winchelsea’s necessarily silent republican minority to ponder on her revelation that Prince Charles is a significant Transylvanian landowner.

William Doherty