From Moralist to Seducer: How Fiction Inverted The Meaning of The Real Dracula's Bloodlust
Dracula lives — forever undead — in the common imagination. As Clare Haworth-Maden notes in her book, Dracula, his name instantly brings to mind a vampire in tux and cape, fangs bared, leaning over a prone woman. His intended or actual victim is usually a woman.
Although possessed of supernatural powers and strength, Dracula has significant points of vulnerability. His powers do not survive daylight. Garlic keeps him away. He can be repelled by the sign of the cross. Perhaps most tellingly, as Haworth-Maden also writes, “he may not enter a dwelling unless invited.”
Most people know that there was a real Dracula. He was a 15-Century Prince named Vlad Tepes III. He was nicknamed Vlad the Impaler or — the name he often used for himself — Dracula. He ruled Wallachia, a country that is part of what is now Romania. He possessed no supernatural powers but, as an absolute monarch, he exercised his earthly powers in extraordinarily cruel ways. He may have been responsible for the deaths of as many as 100, 000 people and his favorite means of execution was impalement by which means a person was shoved atop a sharpened pole. The pole slowly tore through flesh until it penetrated a vital organ.
It is also common knowledge today that Transylvania is a real place, a region within Romania.
However, little known or at least remarked upon is the way in which the motivation and meaning of the violence perpetrated by the real Dracula have been curiously inverted in his fictional incarnations. Vlad the Impaler was a stern moralist who terrorized vice out of his country. According to Dracula, Prince of Many Faces by Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, during Vlad the Impaler’s reign, a cup made of gold was “purposely left by Dracula near a certain fountain located near the source of a river. Travelers from many lands came to drink at this fountain, because the water was cool and sweet. Dracula had intentionally put this fountain in a deserted place to test dishonest wayfarers. So great was the fear of impalement, however, that so long as he lived no one dared to steal the cup, and it was left at its place.”
Vlad the Impaler’s fiercest wrath fell on “immoral” women. Florescu and McNally wrte that adulteresses, unmarried females who had lost their virginity, and “unchaste” widows were all punished in the following grisly manner: “Dracula would order her sexual organs cut. She was then skinned alive and exposed in her skinless flesh in a public square, her skin hanging separately from a pole or placed on a table in the middle of the marketplace.”
Yet Bram Stoker’s Dracula represents sexual temptation. When he greets Jonathan Harker, he tells him “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” Stoker’s Dracula speaks as the voice of sin, which each person must freely allow into his — or her — heart. By contrast, Dracula’s subjects, and victims, were born into his realm and automatically under his thumb.
The Count of Stoker’s classic novel lives with a harem of three young, pretty women. When they approach Jonathan Harker, he is overcome with fear and sexual longing: “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips.” The Count discovers the women hovering over Harker and responds with words of transparent homosexual jealously and possessiveness, shouting, “How dare you touch him, any of you? . . . This man belongs to me!”
The Count in Stoker’s novel is quite ugly as he is in the classic Nosferatu, one of the first Dracula films (although one in which the name “Dracula” is not used). He is described as an old, cadaverous man with pointed ears, hairy palms, thick eyebrows that meet over his nose, and having bad breath. Maden Haworth has observed that Stoker’s villain has “a physiogomy . . . consistent with the Victorian age’s concept of the ‘criminal type.’â€
Dracula has, with occasional exceptions, gotten even sexier since Stoker’s time. While the repulsive Nosferatu might have to force his lust on his victims, film Draculas like Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, and Frank Langella, are suave, handsome sorts who can easily seduce.
Equally inverted in the fictional Dracula is the real Dracula’s relationship to religion. The fictional vampire is instantly stricken into helplessness when confronted by the side of the cross. Roman Polanski did a witty comic send-up of this in The Fearless Vampire Killers when a Jewish vampire laughs at an outstretched crucifix.
Vlad the Impaler was ostensibly a Christian. According to Dracula Prince of Many Faces, Wallachia’s brutal “was often seen in the company of Romanian Orthodox monks” and “when he imposed the death sentence, he insisted upon proper ceremony for his victims and a Christian burial.” He founded many monasteries and churches.
When Dracula showed two monks the usual scene of impaled cadavers in his courtyard, one said, “You are appointed by God to punish the evildoers.” The other monk remonstrated and was immediately impaled. Vlad reigned before the enunciation of the Divine Right of Kings but the concept of submission to earthly authority, often advocated by religious authorities, was quite congenial to the tyrant.
Moreover, Dracula believed himself to be — and was seen by others as — a Christian patriot, protecting his country and religion from Muslim invaders. The evolution of the name “Dracula” is instructive on this point.
Along with several other distinguished European royal figures, Dracula’s father, Vlad II, had been inducted into an organization entitled the Order of the Dragon. Florescu and McNally write that among its stated purposes were “the defense and propagation of Catholicism against . . . heretics, and . . . crusading against the infidel Turks.”
As member of the Order, Florescu and McNally continue, Vlad II took on the constant wearing of a medallion inscribed with mottoes that “symbolized the victory of Christ over the forces of darkness” and a black cape which would later be the trademark of the fictional, cross-fearing Dracula. Florescue and McNally write that Vlad II, and others of the Order of the Dragon, wore it “only on Fridays or during the Commemoration of Christ’s Passion.”
Vlad II was called “Dracul” because he was a member of the Order of the Dragon; his son, Vlad III became “Dracula” meaning “son of the dragon.” Far from being an epithet, the title was a term of pride, bestowed on courageous men who had fought valiantly against the Turks and for the Christian faith. In short, the real Dracula got along with the cross quite nicely; it was his symbol.
Why was the meaning of Dracula’s violent life been so utterly inverted in fiction? The answer to that lies, at least partially, with the Victorian society in which Bram Stoker. In many ways, the Victorians were a progressive people who believed, as Florescu and McNally wrote, that they could restrain “an untamed nature through the application of science.” Although they were guilty of fostering horrors like clitoridectomy as well as the imprisonment of men like Oscar Wilde for consensual homosexual acts, their primary method for ensuring chastity was social opprobrium. As much as they shared the real Dracula’s disdain for “immoral” women, the Victorians would have been genuinely appalled by his bloodthirsty methods.
Victorianism was not distinctive for the restrictions it put on sexual activity (many of which are fairly cross-cultural) but, as David J. Skal writes in Hollywood Gothic, the separation between “the public face and the private behavior.”
Bram Stoker, unlike his contemporary Wilde, was a good Victorian. As such, he wished to warn against the consequences of sexual immorality — and to sexually titillate without ever being explicit. Finally, it suited his purposes to link savage cruelty with the sexual indulgence both he and his society scorned rather than the sexual restraint they championed.
Hollywood has no moral agenda and is free to titillate unabashedly — thus, the alluring, handsome seducer is generally preferred to Stoker’s ugly rapist.
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