Jun
15
Life without Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”
June 15, 2010 | 4 Comments
A little while back I received a series of questions through my contact link that I felt was well worth sharing from a fan, “Barb.” Some of her questions were very intriguing and a few of them I have never been asked before, which is a shocker for me, as I have been asked a lot of questions over the years. So, with her kind permission, I am sharing my answers to her questions here as opposed to a private reply, which is my norm. I hope you enjoy!
Without Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” do you think the vampire would be as popular today?
Bram Stoker’s Gothic Victorian novel, “Dracula” has been in print ever since it was first published back in 1897. It may well be the most popular vampire story of all time, but it is defiantly not the oldest or the first of its kind. To answer this question I am only going to focus on European vampires and not bring up the ancient Hebrew tales of Lilith, the Pisachas of India or the Gandharvas of Vedic myth, all of which are hundreds, if not a thousand years older. Bram Stoker had lightening in a bottle with “Dracula,” don’t kid yourself into thinking he was the Steven King or Ann Rice of his day. I bet anyone could name at least three of any of their book, but I dare you to name one other of Stoker’s.
In the hundred years leading up to “Dracula” being published there was a rash of vampiric activity being reported all across Europe; pamphlets and treatises were being published on the subject, and not just by “crazies” or the Church, but also by serious minded and respected members of the scientific community. Starting back in 1679 Philippe Roht wrote a dissertation on the dead and how they feed from their graves. Lieutenant Colonel Buttener published his report of his personal run in with vampires in a Serbian town called Medvegia. Also in that year the Prussian Royal Society of the Sciences also published papers on vampiric activities. Johann Christopher Harenberg declared in his 1733 work that only the bodies of the excommunicated did not decompose. In 1734 Michael Ranft wrote a paper that clearly distinguished the differences between actual vampires and the nightmare illusions that some people suffered from. The Marquis Boyer d’Argens wrote a thesis in 1738 that analyzed the various examples of vampires that were known to him. Gottlob Heinrich Vogt and Christopher Pohl joined in the debate, as did an anonymous author who signed his works with the nom de plum of “the Weimar Doctor.” A Benedictine monk named Dom Augustin Clament fused all of this accumulated knowledge and wrote his much famed “Dissertation on the Apparitions of Spirits and of Vampires or Revenants of Moravian Hungary (“Dissertation sur les apparitions de esprits et sur les vampires ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie”). It became so popular that it was translated into German in 1751 and reprinted again and again over the years. Voltaire included an article on vampires in his work “Philosophical Dictionary” in 1770.
Now, with that solid foundation of scientific and scholarly works out there supporting the belief in the vampire, it was no wonder that authors would pick it up as a subject matter and write on it. Stoker was only one of many authors who were writing and publishing stories of the vampire in that time.
–1764 Horace Walpole “The Castle of Otranto”
–1797 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “The Bride of Cornith”
–1800 Johann Ludwig Tiek “Wake Not the Dead” (the first English language written Vampire story)
–1819 John Wiliam Polidori “The Vampyre, a Tale”
–1820 The Theather de la Porte Saint-Martin presented “La Vampire”
–1821 Charles Nodier “Smarra, or the Demons of the Night”
–1825 Charles Nodier English translation of “The Vampyre, a Tale”
–1836 Theophile Gautier “La Morte amoureuse” (“The Dead Lover”)
–1861 Leon Gozlan, serial writer, “The Vampire of Val-de-Grace”
–1839 Alexei Tolstoy “The Family of the Vourdalak”
–1845 “Feast of Blood, Varney the Vampyre”
–1872 John Sheridan Le Fanu “Carmilla”
–1875 Paul Feval, “The Vampire City” (“La Ville vampire”)
–1887 Guy de Maupassant, “The Horla” (short story)
And this is really just a sampling, it does not include all of the books, newspaper articles, novellas, operas, poems, short stories, songs, variety shows, and vaudeville acts and that were about vampires. There are hundreds of them. Vampires were already pop-culture when Stoker wrote his novel and added to the numbers. And, to be perfectly honest, it did not keep to the ideal of what was considered to be Gothic Romantic literature at the time. Perhaps that is why we all know Dracula today and not so much Carmilla or Clairmond. It was also written differently than the others, in a series of diary entries and letters between the characters, this style is known as an epistolary novel. When it was decided to turn the novel into a play, Stoker himself wrote it, and who was better for that task than himself? At that time the author of a book would not have written a play, as these are clearly two separate talents, but Stoker was a playwright and heavily involved in the theater, he understood what could and could not be accomplished on stage, he knew how to get reactions from theatergoers. Another factor that I think was in the books favor was that after Bram Stoker had passed away F. W. Murnau, a German Expressionist film director essentially stole the story, changed the names and locations and released the silent film “Nosferatu.” The film was popular enough but it received undue amounts of attention when Stoker widow sued for lost royalties. Ultimately the courts ruled in her favor, but then like now, the controversy stirred up interest in her husband’s book again, both in Europe and in America. It was very difficult back then to enforce copyright laws and because of the success of “Dracula” unauthorized copies of it were being produced with reckless abandon. Widow Stoker did not have the money to pursue so many lawsuits, and even if she did, there was no such thing as an international copyright at that time.
So, “Barb” to finally answer your question, sort of, I think that “Dracula” is popular today because of a series of events that propelled it to the front of vampire fiction. Had any one of the above mentioned events not occurred, I wonder myself if “Dracula” would be what it is today. On the other hand, even if “Dracula” was never published, I am certain that vampires would be every bit as popular as they are right now.
Vampires are creatures of man’s creation, invented from our fears and imaginations. We fear them because they are most like us in appearance. Historically the vampire stalked us, and used it wits and guile to lure us into its clutches. There have always been stories of vampires who used sex to entice its prey into a secluded location promising one thing and delivering another. These tales go back further than ancient Greece and Rome, back to the dawn of civilized man. The only difference I can really see between our ancient stories and our modern ones is in how we tell them, and the marketing that is behind them.
Comments
4 Comments so far
Hiya Theresa,
Just a quick correction to this: “–1800 Johann Ludwig Tiek “Wake Not the Dead” (the first English language written Vampire story)”.
A few problems here, namely, 1) Tieck didn’t write the story, 2) it wasn’t published in 1800, 3) it wasn’t the first English language vampire story. Off the top of my head, that’s still reserved for Polidori’s “The Vampyre”.
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Doctor John Polidori’s short story entitled “The Vampyre” was first published in 1819 by a British periodical called “New Monthly Magazine.” It was conceived in the summer of 1816 when Polidori and Lord Byron were on holiday at Lake Geneva.
That makes it older than “Wake not the Dead.”
If Johann Ludwig Tiek did not write “Wake Not the Dead,” then who did? I can find no source in print that claims otherwise. If indeed I am wrong, I would like to know the truth.
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