Deleted member 90563
Has anyone seen the Mary Beard doc on Caligula? That was quite good, and shone a different light on the man.
Caligula, Bram Stoker's bestselling novel of 1887.
- Thread starter Paul Robison
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Mars was generally viewed in a positive light by the Romans, IIRC.
This ignores a basic thematic point of Dracula the novel. As per traditional English Gothic, it's a conflict between modernity and rationalism, and dark grotesque (and aristocratic) medievalism. The latter tries to infect modern England, and loses. As such, Dracula requires the vampire to be from an inherently "backward" and isolated location... and once one factors in Eastern European folk traditions things fit together nicely. Caligula was seen as a madman temporarily in charge of the most Enlightened civilisation on earth - decadent, but not dark, and at the heart of things, not infecting from the periphery. Besides, where would he be hiding for the past 1800 years, seeing as we know how Caligula died? Or is your idea to set the entire thing within the Ancient World, which destroys the conflict between old and modern?
How about Julian the Apostate? Gives his opposition to Christianity another twist. Have him disappear on campaign, rather than killed.
He would be even more of a tragic hero antagonist than Vlad. The last true Roman upholding traditional Roman / Greek values before the empire was cast into the darkness of medieval popery, making a deal with Hades to be allowed to return from the netherworld to save the Roman Empire, but, failing to do so, he lives on through the ages in the hopes of one day being able to aid in restoring it, but repulsed by his need to regularly having to imbibe human blood to survive, yet like an opium addict unable to let go of it. When he arrives in modern (late 19th century) London he realises that the Roman Empire has found a worthy successor in the British Empire to take up the torch of enlightenment to elucidate the world, and, as a true stoic, he decides that he can finally die in peace, voluntarily walking into the bright sunlight.
Yes. As viewed by moderns and post-moderns, there's nothing really dark about the Roman Empire. Even at its most brutal and debauched, it's usually treated with a certain joviality(eg. "Too many Christians, not enough lions", the myth of the vomiting parties etc). Even visually, when people imagine everyday life in Roman times, the scenes are usually taking place in bright daylight.
Hmmm ... on the one hand I have to serve as Sir Henry Irving's very own Renfield; on the other hand I am now married to Mrs Florence Stoker (having pipped Oscar Wilde to the peach), a woman so formidable she very nearly sent NOSFERATU into the grave for good & all!
Well it's not a bad back-story, per se, but I still think it a pity that no Dracula adaptation (none of which I am aware) has kept the bit from the novel about The Count having acquired his sorcerous abilities through education at the Scholomance, an Academy of the Black Arts run by The Devil Himself (Where every graduating class is obliged to run for their lives to boot, with The Devil taking the hindmost as fair payment for his instruction).
Honestly, people are so busy adding their own little somethings to DRACULA that they keep missing all the cool bits left in the actual book!
Presumably, you're talking about the theory presented by dr. Rainer M. Köppl of the University of Vienna back in 2007/08, brought to English by the English-translation of his historical docudrama Die Vampir Prinzessin, The Vampire Princess. Doing some digging, there is a lot of skepticism raised by this theory, with a noteworthy article coming out last year by Jenni Wiltz, the Girl in the Tiara, which challenges the theory and points out that, with what Köppl himself had presented, Dracula in its original form, as The Un-Dead starring Count Wampyr, was originally going to be set in Styria, Austria, inspired by Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla. The fact that they originally shared the same setting was likely was encouraged Bram Stoker to change the location, though the aspect of Transylvania being less frequently traveled to by English people likely helped to maintain some mystique.
Additionally, through Stoker's working notes, we know that Dracula wasn't inspired by Vlad Drăculești, but rather just discovered the name without any awareness of its full context, in a copy of William Wilkinson's book An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. The book contains references to multiple voivodes named Dracula, with one having crossed the Danube to attack Turkish troops and had some success, ultimately copying the footnote "DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning." As such, when he shifted the story to Transylvania, he just adopted the name to give it a bit more authenticity, as otherwise he's just an adapted amalgam of concepts and ideas from the vampire genre (started by John William Polidori's character Lord Ruthven) Stoker found interesting, as noted by Niels K. Petersen. Similarly, no evidence has been found to confirm that Van Helsing had been based on Van Swieten.
Ultimately, to turn this back to the thread question, presumably the reason why Dracula was even set in the Habsburg lands is because of the 18th century vampire panic that started there first before spreading to the rest of Europe, which only occurred due to the spread of vampire stories from Serbian territories. There would have been no reason for Stoker to have made his leading count an Italian, let alone a Roman, unless he thought setting the story in Venice would've benefited for his original direction of a vampire detective story, and not a vampire epistolary novel.
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