Bram Stoker's original plan was to set his vampire novel in the Austrian province of Styria, which had been the site of Joseph Le Fanu's female vampire novel, *Carmilla.* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carmilla However, Stoker soon changed the location to Transylvania. (It has been speculated that the Hungarian orientalist Armin Vambery, who knew Stoker, persuaded him to change the location, but there is no proof of this.)
Suppose he had stuck with his orginal location? As Elizabeth Miller noted, the stereotyping of Transylvania
"did not begin with Stoker. The first reference to a Transylvanian in Western literature, in Shakespeare's *Pericles,* is none too flattering: 'The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage' (IV, ii). But it was not until the nineteenth century and the rise of Gothic fiction that the region was selected as a suitable locale for supernatural creatures. A collection of tales by Alexandre Dumas (pere), *Les Mille et un Fantomes* (1849), includes a story about a vampire who haunts the Carpathians; in 'The Mysterious Stranger' (anonymous, 1860), a vampire Count terrorizes a family in this area. Best-known may be Jules Verne's romantic adventure, *The Castle of the Carpathians* (1892), in which the narrator cites the prevalence of beliefs in a host of supernatural creatures, including vampires that quench their thirst on human blood. But it was Stoker's Dracula that firmly established Transylvania as a land of superstition and horror.
"In its representation of Transylvania, Dracula encodes the negative stereotypes that dominated much of nineteenth-century British travel literature, some of which Stoker consulted. Indicative of an increased interest in the more remote parts of Europe, these accounts reveal and perpetuate an attitude that weaves its way insidiously through the pages of Stoker's novel, and from there into twentieth-century popular culture. Victorian travellers habitually presented their readers with invidious comparisons between Western science and Eastern superstition, between Western civilization and Eastern barbarism. Various sources that Stoker (who never visited the region) consulted refer to Transylvania with a variety of derogatory labels: a 'hotch-potch of races,' the 'odd corner of Europe,' 'beyond the pale of Western civilization,' a 'fearful place, grim and phantom-haunted.' Little wonder that the author settled on Transylvania and even less that some of the same attitudes permeate *Dracula*...
"Even though Transylvania had already been associated with the far-away and the mysterious, it was Bram Stoker's fortuitous decision to change the locale of his vampire's abode that assured the name a permanent place in twentieth-century popular culture. So predictable to this very day is the response to the name 'Transylvania' that it is questionable whether the 'real' place can ever be represented.
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/transylvania.html
(Not all pre-Stoker treatments of Transylvania were entirely negative. John Paget wrote in the mid-nineteenth century in *Hungary and Transylvania*: "A strange little country is this Transylvania! Very likely the reader never heard its name before, and yet some hundred years ago it was in close alliance with England; and, long before religious liberty, annual parliaments, payment of members, and the election of magistrates were dreamed of, amongst us, they were granted to Transylvania, by a solemn charter of their Prince, the Emperor of Austria. Here is this country on the very limits of European civilization, yet possessing institutions and rights, for which the most civilized have not been thought sufficiently advanced." http://books.google.com/books?id=TcBDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA181)
Would a Styrian vampire novel by Stoker have the same success as *Dracula* in OTL? (It would presumably not be called Dracula--Stoker did not discover that name until sometime after he had begun work on the novel and had changed the location to Transylvania. [1]) Would Styria become the favorite region of vampire-hunting tourists--or is it just too "western," insufficiently "exotic"? Sure, you can still have Slavic peasants--and you can still have Gypsies--but after all, the place is mostly German-speaking and not very far from Vienna...
[1] BTW, Stoker's never learning about Vlad Tepes--allegedly the "historic" Dracula--would not really change the plot of Stoker's novel much, because it has been persuasively (at least to me) argued by Elizabeth Miller that Stoker's Dracula was *not* based on the historical Vlad Tepes, that probably all Stoker knew about the Voivode was from *An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia *(1820) by William Wilkinson, in which "The name “Dracula” appears just three times, two of which more accurately refer to the father (Vlad Dracul). What attracted Stoker was a footnote attached to the third occurrence: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning” (19). That Stoker considered this important is evident in that he copied into his own notes “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.” [Which it actually doesn't--see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler#Name --DT] "The three references to “Dracula” in Wilkinson’s text, along with the footnote, are the only occurrences of the name in all of the sources that we know that Stoker consulted.
"Stoker’s debt to Wilkinson is generally acknowledged, but a number of points are often overlooked: Wilkinson refers only to “Dracula” and “Voïvode,” never “Vlad,” never “Vlad Tepes” or “the Impaler”; furthermore there are no specific references to his atrocities. It is no mere co-incidence that the same paucity of information applies to the text of Dracula. Yet the popular theory is that Stoker knew much more than what he read in Wilkinson; that his major sources were the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambéry, and readings in the British Museum." She says that while Vambery and Stoker did have a couple of conversations, there is no evidence that Dracula came up in them, and that Stoker probably did not even know that the Voivode Dracula was named Vlad. She adds:
"Another consequence of the insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why, some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a “boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a “Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very simple answer to these questions: Vlad Tepes is Vlad Tepes, while Count Dracula is Count Dracula." http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/divorce.html
Suppose he had stuck with his orginal location? As Elizabeth Miller noted, the stereotyping of Transylvania
"did not begin with Stoker. The first reference to a Transylvanian in Western literature, in Shakespeare's *Pericles,* is none too flattering: 'The poor Transylvanian is dead that lay with the little baggage' (IV, ii). But it was not until the nineteenth century and the rise of Gothic fiction that the region was selected as a suitable locale for supernatural creatures. A collection of tales by Alexandre Dumas (pere), *Les Mille et un Fantomes* (1849), includes a story about a vampire who haunts the Carpathians; in 'The Mysterious Stranger' (anonymous, 1860), a vampire Count terrorizes a family in this area. Best-known may be Jules Verne's romantic adventure, *The Castle of the Carpathians* (1892), in which the narrator cites the prevalence of beliefs in a host of supernatural creatures, including vampires that quench their thirst on human blood. But it was Stoker's Dracula that firmly established Transylvania as a land of superstition and horror.
"In its representation of Transylvania, Dracula encodes the negative stereotypes that dominated much of nineteenth-century British travel literature, some of which Stoker consulted. Indicative of an increased interest in the more remote parts of Europe, these accounts reveal and perpetuate an attitude that weaves its way insidiously through the pages of Stoker's novel, and from there into twentieth-century popular culture. Victorian travellers habitually presented their readers with invidious comparisons between Western science and Eastern superstition, between Western civilization and Eastern barbarism. Various sources that Stoker (who never visited the region) consulted refer to Transylvania with a variety of derogatory labels: a 'hotch-potch of races,' the 'odd corner of Europe,' 'beyond the pale of Western civilization,' a 'fearful place, grim and phantom-haunted.' Little wonder that the author settled on Transylvania and even less that some of the same attitudes permeate *Dracula*...
"Even though Transylvania had already been associated with the far-away and the mysterious, it was Bram Stoker's fortuitous decision to change the locale of his vampire's abode that assured the name a permanent place in twentieth-century popular culture. So predictable to this very day is the response to the name 'Transylvania' that it is questionable whether the 'real' place can ever be represented.
http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/transylvania.html
(Not all pre-Stoker treatments of Transylvania were entirely negative. John Paget wrote in the mid-nineteenth century in *Hungary and Transylvania*: "A strange little country is this Transylvania! Very likely the reader never heard its name before, and yet some hundred years ago it was in close alliance with England; and, long before religious liberty, annual parliaments, payment of members, and the election of magistrates were dreamed of, amongst us, they were granted to Transylvania, by a solemn charter of their Prince, the Emperor of Austria. Here is this country on the very limits of European civilization, yet possessing institutions and rights, for which the most civilized have not been thought sufficiently advanced." http://books.google.com/books?id=TcBDAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA181)
Would a Styrian vampire novel by Stoker have the same success as *Dracula* in OTL? (It would presumably not be called Dracula--Stoker did not discover that name until sometime after he had begun work on the novel and had changed the location to Transylvania. [1]) Would Styria become the favorite region of vampire-hunting tourists--or is it just too "western," insufficiently "exotic"? Sure, you can still have Slavic peasants--and you can still have Gypsies--but after all, the place is mostly German-speaking and not very far from Vienna...
[1] BTW, Stoker's never learning about Vlad Tepes--allegedly the "historic" Dracula--would not really change the plot of Stoker's novel much, because it has been persuasively (at least to me) argued by Elizabeth Miller that Stoker's Dracula was *not* based on the historical Vlad Tepes, that probably all Stoker knew about the Voivode was from *An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia *(1820) by William Wilkinson, in which "The name “Dracula” appears just three times, two of which more accurately refer to the father (Vlad Dracul). What attracted Stoker was a footnote attached to the third occurrence: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. The Wallachians were, at that time, as they are at present, used to give this as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous either by courage, cruel actions, or cunning” (19). That Stoker considered this important is evident in that he copied into his own notes “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.” [Which it actually doesn't--see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlad_the_Impaler#Name --DT] "The three references to “Dracula” in Wilkinson’s text, along with the footnote, are the only occurrences of the name in all of the sources that we know that Stoker consulted.
"Stoker’s debt to Wilkinson is generally acknowledged, but a number of points are often overlooked: Wilkinson refers only to “Dracula” and “Voïvode,” never “Vlad,” never “Vlad Tepes” or “the Impaler”; furthermore there are no specific references to his atrocities. It is no mere co-incidence that the same paucity of information applies to the text of Dracula. Yet the popular theory is that Stoker knew much more than what he read in Wilkinson; that his major sources were the Hungarian professor Arminius Vambéry, and readings in the British Museum." She says that while Vambery and Stoker did have a couple of conversations, there is no evidence that Dracula came up in them, and that Stoker probably did not even know that the Voivode Dracula was named Vlad. She adds:
"Another consequence of the insistence on connecting the two Draculas is the temptation to criticize Stoker for inaccurate “history.” Why, some ask, did he make Dracula a Transylvanian Count rather than a Wallachian Voivode? Why was his castle situated in the Borgo Pass instead of at Poenari? Why is Count Dracula a “boyar,” a member of the nobility which Vlad continuously struggled with? Why does Stoker make Dracula a “Szekely,” descended from Attila the Hun, when the real Dracula was a Wallachian of the Basarab family? There is a very simple answer to these questions: Vlad Tepes is Vlad Tepes, while Count Dracula is Count Dracula." http://www.ucs.mun.ca/~emiller/divorce.html
Last edited: