Lucille Turner's Blog - Posts Tagged "dracula"
Nationalist - Monster or Hero?
Given the slightly Gothic flavour of The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer, my account of the inspiration behind the book should really begin in a castle of thick walls, suits of armour and cobwebs on a snowy night in winter. But it doesn’t – quite the opposite in fact, which is only right, since the real story of Vlad Dracula’s life contains a mix of the exotic and the gothic, the Ottoman summer and the Carpathian winter: heat and frozen chill.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
The historical Dracula, Prince of Wallachia (present-day Romania), and also known as Vlad the Impaler because he was said to have impaled his enemies on stakes, spent many years in the palace of the Ottoman Turks. Between 1442 and 1448 he was present at the Ottoman court, where he met the man who would later become his great adversary: Mehmet II, later known as the Conqueror.
Vlad Dracula, who was born sometime between 1428 and 1431 and is believed to have died in 1477 (his body was never found), acquired a reputation as a bit of a 'badass'; he was also closely connected to the most infamous figure of popular legend, the vampire. As far as reputations go, it was one to strike fear into the hearts of his enemies, which considering the quarrelsome state of Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century (not to mention the rest) was perhaps not such a bad thing. The man who would confront such an adversary as Vlad Dracula would have to be made of stern stuff, and he was.
Murad II, the ruling Sultan of the Ottoman Empire between 1421 and 1451, foresaw that his son and heir, Mehmet, would one day conquer Constantinople, the Greek metropolis, but he may not have been quite so delighted if he had glimpsed the rest of Mehmet’s future, which was more the stuff of nightmares than a dream of conquest. Because besides being a born leader, Mehmet was also responsible for the introduction of the law permitting fratricide, the murder of a sibling.
Mehmet called his new law the Law of Governance, and claimed that it would strengthen the empire because it would prevent rivalry for the throne. He introduced it because he had already murdered his own brothers in order to become the heir, and once you do that, the safest thing to do is to make it all legal, which he did, shortly after he became Sultan. The new law meant that a ruling Sultan would no longer have to smother his brother by dead of night with a pillow, or strangle him with a swatch of silk while nobody was watching. He could make it an official event.
Of course, and perhaps most astonishingly, the law meant that Mehmet was effectively giving his own sons permission to kill their brothers one day as a precautionary measure ‘for the common benefit of the people’, as he stated. In a way he was sanctioning the murder of his own children.
However, nobody is all bad. When he proposed the passing of the law, Mehmet had no children of his own. And when he did have them, his own children did not engage in fratricide themselves. They chose instead, in the first instance at least, to come to an agreement. In that sense the law could have been seen as a deterrent. It was a Machiavellian way of seeing things, but it certainly allowed the empire to prosper for a good many years without fear of rebellion.
By the time Mehmet crossed paths with Vlad Dracula at the court of his father, besides being somewhat ruthless, Mehmet was a highly ambitious young man, with the makings of a formidable leader. His father found him hard to contain, and his efforts to bring his son into line practically cost him his life. When Mehmet became Sultan, at the tender age of 19, he was ready to take on most of Eastern Europe. And he would have taken on the rest of it too, were it not for Vlad Dracula.
Dracula has had a bad press. In the Hall of Fame he is The Impaler, and by most accounts a monster. Not because of his association with the vampire myth, so much as his reputation for inflicting cruelty on his victims – the kind of cruelty you don’t want to think about, and particularly during mealtimes. But how bad was he, really?
History is always constructed from the reports of others, and like many leaders before him and after, Dracula had his enemies. Some of them were Saxon merchants from the north, others were Hungarians and still more were Turks. All had in common the desire to get rid of him. And on that basis, you have to ask yourself to what extent these reports about the character of Dracula were true, and to what extent they were exaggerated in order to turn his friends against him.
But why did they want to get rid of him in the first place? In the fifteenth century, Romania was a buffer state between two powerful empires, with Vlad Dracula’s family caught in the middle, a bad place to be. Still, Vlad Dracula, and his father for that matter, was a nationalist who believed in the self-determination of his country, and he was prepared to go to considerable lengths to secure it. Did that make him a hero or a monster – even today such questions can be hard to answer. The subject of nationalism is a tricky one for a globalised world to deal with. Do we seek peace by closing our borders, or do we preserve it by keeping them open? Is it a sin to love our country, or should we rather have no country at all?
At the time of Vlad Dracula, nationalism did not have the ramifications it has today. It was closer in meaning to its original root, natio, which means birth. These days when we think of nationalism we often think of National Socialism, and Hilter. Or perhaps we think of Patriotism, a word that we often associate with Winston Churchill, George Washington, and consequently, with war. In the fifteenth century the idea of nationhood was still young, but that did not mean a man (or woman) could not lose their life for it.
As a young man, Vlad Dracula had not yet gained his status as monster of the Hall of Fame. He was, like his adversary Mehmet the Conqueror, a leader in the making. The two must have been similar in many ways, and their proximity at the court of the Ottoman sultanate must have sown the seeds for the intense and painful conflict that would follow. But who would come out best? Who would be the hero or the monster, or were they both at once? The expression, fighting fire with fire comes to mind when you are dealing with the twin fiends of cruelty and ambition. But one thing is certain, they are both currently perceived as the heroes of their country – Mehmet because he took Constantinople and ushered in a golden age of glory, and Vlad Dracula because he stood up to the Ottoman advance at a time when everyone else was backing down from it.
As nations, we create so many heroes in a spirit of nationalism that it can be hard to separate the fiction from the fact, which is why we need the subtleties of historical fiction to see the stew of the past for what it might have been: a one-sided story. But that does not mean there are no pitfalls for the writer.
As John F. Kennedy once said, “The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic”.
Frankenstein, Dracula and Science
As John Edgar Browning says in his collection of essays, ‘Draculas, Vampires and Other Undead Forms’, “the story of the birthing of Frankenstein’s monster, in many ways, is about our hopes and anxieties about the brave new worlds science can potentially make possible. In contrast, the narrative of Dracula seems its converse: it is about the primordial, dark matter that resists the rationalism of science – the “old magic” that science, as the “new magic”, cannot completely counter…”
When Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818 (anonymously at first) it was a time of major social change. The Industrial Revolution had started; science had begun to show us that more things were possible than we had ever imagined. The steam locomotive had just been invented; the first photograph had just been taken; the first battery had just been made, the first plastic surgery had just been carried out in England, the stethoscope had just been invented. The inner workings of the human body began to lose their mystery. Hardly surprising then that author Mary Shelley should conceive of her monster: a new human being constructed from the body parts of the deceased. It brought old questions to the surface, this creation of Shelley’s, such as what is soul, and, what makes us human? Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, remember, was not the name of the monster, but the name of his creator) harnesses the power of electricity, that mysterious new force, to breathe life into his creation. Science appears as all-powerful, God-like, capable of answering every question, solving every puzzle. But does it?
Shelley’s time saw the rise of a particular kind of literature, which began to gain popularity: Gothic Fiction. The use of the word Gothic came from the architecture these works of literature often used for their settings. Ancient, medieval castles, monasteries and dungeons all feature: places that the light of science had not yet illuminated, but needed to. Frankenstein’s monster was reborn in a gothic setting in the 1994 adaptation, which starred Robert de Niro as the monster. But the ultimate failure of Scientist Victor Frankenstein to answer his monster’s persistent questions is very significant. The monster may live, breathe and walk, but his creator, Victor, offers no reply to his creation’s ultimate question, What am I? It would be another sixty years at least before an answer would finally be found. Meanwhile, enter Count Dracula.
Bram Stoker empowered the Dracula legend with his novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The book was a Gothic triumph, and still is, with its sinister settings and the ominous presence of the Count, a man on whom the words ‘I must be getting home now’ have no real impact. Where Frankenstein had exposed questions unsolvable by rationalism and science, eighty years later Dracula did something entirely different. He answered them.
John Browning, a specialist in the field of vampire studies, refers in his essay to a form of ‘old magic’, which the ‘new magic’ of science cannot counter, and which Dracula apparently personifies. To put this in perspective, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. The ‘new magic’ of science had big hopes. Man no longer needed God; he could become God. Shelley’s Frankenstein thought himself possessed of divine power when he gave life to his creation. But the gift of life came at a price and Frankenstein’s monster in the end destroyed itself. Dracula, by contrast, appears to live forever. Resurrection makes him stronger. He transcends time, ignores it. But let us remember that Stoker did not invent the vampire; it had inhabited popular imagination long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The vampire was as old as death itself; the ‘old magic’ it represented had been part of the fabric of mankind ever since the dawn of time, and it was called instinct.
Scientific rationalism has always had a problem with instinct. Gradually, and in order to deal with the conundrum it presented, which was the conundrum of human nature, scientific thought evolved a new discipline to deal with it: psychology.
Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, a man called Sigmund Freud gave instinct a name. He called it the Id. These instinctive impulses, Freud claimed, competed with rationality: the Ego, for control of our mind. The Id resided in the unconscious mind, while the Ego was present as a part of the conscious mind. The Id was timeless, and had inhabited us since birth; the Ego came later, as we grew. The Id harboured the impulses of sex and aggression, while the Ego struggled to regulate them. These old instinctive urges appear associated with the persona of the vampire. He is seductive; he is cruel. Perhaps more importantly, he is elusive, hard to pin down; he is timeless, eternal. The rational mind would deny him; the unconscious says he exists.
The Industrial Revolution, in full swing at the time Dracula the novel was published, had already begun to yield to the forces of evil. The brave new world that science had built was crumbling round the edges. Crime grew apace with the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The persona of the vampire lurked in dark corners on the streets of London.
Perhaps Bram Stoker was unaware that he had plumbed the darkest corners of the human psyche with his resurrection of the vampire myth, but he was certainly conscious of having based his vampire character on a real person: Vlad Dracula, a man who lived some three hundred years earlier in Romania. Psychology may not yet have made its appearance on the world stage, but the human psyche did not need to; it was as old as humankind — as old as the vampire.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
When Mary Shelley published her novel, Frankenstein, in 1818 (anonymously at first) it was a time of major social change. The Industrial Revolution had started; science had begun to show us that more things were possible than we had ever imagined. The steam locomotive had just been invented; the first photograph had just been taken; the first battery had just been made, the first plastic surgery had just been carried out in England, the stethoscope had just been invented. The inner workings of the human body began to lose their mystery. Hardly surprising then that author Mary Shelley should conceive of her monster: a new human being constructed from the body parts of the deceased. It brought old questions to the surface, this creation of Shelley’s, such as what is soul, and, what makes us human? Scientist Victor Frankenstein (Frankenstein, remember, was not the name of the monster, but the name of his creator) harnesses the power of electricity, that mysterious new force, to breathe life into his creation. Science appears as all-powerful, God-like, capable of answering every question, solving every puzzle. But does it?
Shelley’s time saw the rise of a particular kind of literature, which began to gain popularity: Gothic Fiction. The use of the word Gothic came from the architecture these works of literature often used for their settings. Ancient, medieval castles, monasteries and dungeons all feature: places that the light of science had not yet illuminated, but needed to. Frankenstein’s monster was reborn in a gothic setting in the 1994 adaptation, which starred Robert de Niro as the monster. But the ultimate failure of Scientist Victor Frankenstein to answer his monster’s persistent questions is very significant. The monster may live, breathe and walk, but his creator, Victor, offers no reply to his creation’s ultimate question, What am I? It would be another sixty years at least before an answer would finally be found. Meanwhile, enter Count Dracula.
Bram Stoker empowered the Dracula legend with his novel, Dracula, published in 1897. The book was a Gothic triumph, and still is, with its sinister settings and the ominous presence of the Count, a man on whom the words ‘I must be getting home now’ have no real impact. Where Frankenstein had exposed questions unsolvable by rationalism and science, eighty years later Dracula did something entirely different. He answered them.
John Browning, a specialist in the field of vampire studies, refers in his essay to a form of ‘old magic’, which the ‘new magic’ of science cannot counter, and which Dracula apparently personifies. To put this in perspective, we need to go back to the Industrial Revolution. The ‘new magic’ of science had big hopes. Man no longer needed God; he could become God. Shelley’s Frankenstein thought himself possessed of divine power when he gave life to his creation. But the gift of life came at a price and Frankenstein’s monster in the end destroyed itself. Dracula, by contrast, appears to live forever. Resurrection makes him stronger. He transcends time, ignores it. But let us remember that Stoker did not invent the vampire; it had inhabited popular imagination long before the start of the Industrial Revolution. The vampire was as old as death itself; the ‘old magic’ it represented had been part of the fabric of mankind ever since the dawn of time, and it was called instinct.
Scientific rationalism has always had a problem with instinct. Gradually, and in order to deal with the conundrum it presented, which was the conundrum of human nature, scientific thought evolved a new discipline to deal with it: psychology.
Around twenty years after Bram Stoker wrote ‘Dracula’, a man called Sigmund Freud gave instinct a name. He called it the Id. These instinctive impulses, Freud claimed, competed with rationality: the Ego, for control of our mind. The Id resided in the unconscious mind, while the Ego was present as a part of the conscious mind. The Id was timeless, and had inhabited us since birth; the Ego came later, as we grew. The Id harboured the impulses of sex and aggression, while the Ego struggled to regulate them. These old instinctive urges appear associated with the persona of the vampire. He is seductive; he is cruel. Perhaps more importantly, he is elusive, hard to pin down; he is timeless, eternal. The rational mind would deny him; the unconscious says he exists.
The Industrial Revolution, in full swing at the time Dracula the novel was published, had already begun to yield to the forces of evil. The brave new world that science had built was crumbling round the edges. Crime grew apace with the cities of the Industrial Revolution. The persona of the vampire lurked in dark corners on the streets of London.
Perhaps Bram Stoker was unaware that he had plumbed the darkest corners of the human psyche with his resurrection of the vampire myth, but he was certainly conscious of having based his vampire character on a real person: Vlad Dracula, a man who lived some three hundred years earlier in Romania. Psychology may not yet have made its appearance on the world stage, but the human psyche did not need to; it was as old as humankind — as old as the vampire.
The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer
