Bram Stoker's Dracula: the vampire between folklore and Victorian occultism
Count Dracula, the Scholomance, Van Helsing and Transylvanian superstitions: the historical and folk sources of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel.
In May 1897 the London publisher Archibald Constable issued Dracula, a novel by the Irishman Bram Stoker, then business manager of the Lyceum Theatre and a close associate of the actor Henry Irving. The book is built as a collection of diaries, letters, telegrams and newspaper cuttings, and tells of a Transylvanian nobleman's attempt to move to England in order to spread his curse.
A name taken from history
Stoker's working notes, now kept in Philadelphia, show that the character was originally called Count Wampyr. The name Dracula came from his reading of a book by William Wilkinson on the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, published in 1820, which explained that in the Wallachian language the word meant devil. It was the nickname of Vlad III, prince of Wallachia in the fifteenth century, notorious for his cruelty towards his enemies.
How much Stoker really knew about Vlad, later called the Impaler, is debated. In the novel the count proudly recalls his ancestors' battles against the Turks, but there are no explicit references to impalement. The close link between the vampire and the historical prince was developed above all by twentieth-century criticism and tourism.
Transylvanian superstitions
For his setting Stoker used travel guides and ethnographic studies, in particular the writings of Emily Gerard, who had lived in Transylvania and in 1885 published an essay on local superstitions. From her comes the idea of the Scholomance, a secret school in the mountains where, according to legend, the devil himself taught pupils the art of magic. Van Helsing states that the Draculas had studied there.
The means of defence described in the book also come from European folklore: garlic, the crucifix, the consecrated host, the stake. The novel also fixed other traits destined to become canonical, such as the lack of a reflection in mirrors and the inability to enter a house without an invitation. On arriving at the castle, Jonathan Harker is greeted with a famous line: «Enter freely and of your own will».
Stoker and the Golden Dawn
It is often said that Stoker was a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. There are, however, no documents to prove it, and his name does not appear in the known lists of initiates. It is true that people linked to occultism moved in his London circles, and that the Victorian interest in spiritualism, hypnosis and diseases of the mind leaves clear traces in the novel.
Dr Seward runs an asylum and observes the patient Renfield, who eats insects to absorb their life; Van Helsing speaks of hypnotism and cites the research of Jean-Martin Charcot. Mina Harker, bound to the count by a telepathic link, is hypnotised to discover where he is. Modern science and ancient beliefs work together against the vampire.
Dracula was not an extraordinary success at first, but cinema made it a worldwide myth, beginning with Murnau's Nosferatu of 1922 and the 1931 film with Bela Lugosi. The novel remains a fascinating document of the Victorian age, in which the oldest fears were told with the tools of modernity: the train, the phonograph, the typewriter.