Bram Stoker, Elizabeth Bathory and Dracula
by
Elizabeth Miller
In my recently published book Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (Westcliff-on-Sea, UK: Desert Island Books, 2000), I challenge the widely held contention that the novel Dracula was influenced in part by Bram Stoker's research on Elizabeth Bathory. This theory (a very weak one indeed) found its strongest expression in Dracula was a Woman (1983) by Raymond McNally, co-author of the popular and influential In Search of Dracula (1972). McNally's statement that "Bathory's legend certainly played a major role in the creation of the character of Count Dracula" (99) cannot be substantiated.
The hypothetical link between Count Dracula and Countess Elizabeth Bathory (1560-1614) can be traced back to the early 1970s. At that time, there was an upsurge of interest in the Blood Countess, notorious for murdering young women and bathing in their blood in order to retain her youthful appearance. Inevitably, her lust for blood would precipitate an association with vampires. In 1970, prior to any investigation into possible influences on Stoker's novel, the title of the Hammer movie Countess Dracula created an artificial link. Gabriel Ronay included a section on Bathory in The Dracula Myth (1972), as did Donald Glut in True Vampires of History (1971), though neither claimed that Stoker knew of her. In 1972, McNally and Florescu noted that "in some circles it is believed that the story of the Blood Countess was known to Stoker" (In Search of Dracula 159). But they did not pursue any links at that time. In 1977, in The Vampire Cinema, David Pirie argued that "With Bathory ... the Dracula resonance is irresistible" (17). Unfortunately, its irresistibility proves nothing.
In 1983, McNally tried to demonstrate that Stoker had a second historical person in mind (the first was supposedly Vlad the Impaler) as his novel took shape. While Dracula was a Woman is valuable as a biography of Bathory, its arguments for the Bathory-Dracula link are weak. McNally bases his thesis on the assumption that Stoker read about the Countess in Sabine-Gould's The Book of Were-Wolves (1865). Without this, there is no case. To begin with, we know that Stoker was familiar with this book. It is included in his own list of source-texts, and his Notes contain several jottings from it. There is also no doubt that the book contains a section on Bathory. (Actually, Baring-Gould refers to her as "Elizabeth -----" never using the name "Bathory.") What is not certain is whether Stoker read the section on Bathory; or, if he did, whether it played any part in the development of his novel.
What does Baring-Gould's book say about Elizabeth Bathory? The few short paragraphs deal primarily with her belief that bathing her body in human blood would enhance her beauty, and how this led to the deaths of 650 young maidens. That Stoker read this passage is for many critics taken for granted. McNally goes so far as to claim that Stoker took notes from it. I have studied Stoker's notes, and I can assure you that he did not take a single note from those pages dealing with Bathory. These notes, scribbled on two scraps of paper, refer without exception to the characteristics of werewolves and their association with vampires.
McNally contends that there are parallels between the Count and Bathory, sufficiently forceful to be evidence of direct knowledge. For example, he argues that one of the motifs in Dracula -- that after drinking blood, the Count begins to look younger -- came from the legendary blood-bathing of Countess Bathory to keep her skin looking young and healthy (99). This "fact" is pure speculation. The source may just as well have been Arthur Machen's "The Inmost Light" or Stenbock's "A True Story of a Vampire," both published in 1894. Or maybe Stoker just made it up. He was, after all, a writer of fiction. McNally finds further ties between Count Dracula and Bathory, with all of which I take issue.
The view that Bathory was an influence on Dracula keeps proliferating, and the claims get more and more ridiculous. For example, Matthew Bunson in The Vampire Encyclopedia adds that Bathory had links to Romania, and thus to Vlad the Impaler: "Romania has also had some local rulers who are ranked among the bloodiest in history, most notably Vlad Tepes ... and Elizabeth Bathory" (225). Before you know it, Bathory and Vlad have become twin prototypes for all vampires, as in this doubly nonsensical statement: "The first reported vampires were real historical figures in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Eastern Europe: Elizabeth of Bathory and Vlad the Impaler" (Brownworth and Redding ix). One person even goes so far as to claim that Bathory's castle (Csejthe) was Stoker's model for Castle Dracula. The mind boggles!
Elizabeth Miller is Professor of English at Memorial University of Newfoundland. For her full analysis of this topic, see the "Elizabeth Bathory" entry in Dracula: Sense & Nonsense (Desert Island Books, 2000). For more details on this book, visit Dracula's Homepage at http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller.
