Journal of Dracula Studies 1 (1999)
[Carmen Andras is a member of the Romanian
Academy and the Institute for Social Human Researches in Tirgu-Mures,
Transylvania.]
Labyrinthian Images
Strange
representations of Romania can be the result of either real or imaginary
travels to this country. As an expression of the freedom of movement, thought
and decision, a journey should represent
a concrete way of communication with the Other. Besides the immediate
pragmatic, economic or political purpose, the voyage expresses, in a
psychoanalytical view, the profound desire of personal improvement, the
knowledge and understanding of the Other, the need for new experiences and the
effort of surpassing your own condition, rather than mere spatial movement. But not every traveller
comes back home spiritually enriched. It depends on whether he views the Other
in a contemplative or in a dominating way. The
traveller is inevitably thrown into a foreign cultural labyrinth and faced with
the challenge of building a sense of identity. If his own cultural fibres are
powerful and rigid, the traveller will have difficulty dealing adequately with
the foreign culture. The foreign country will remain an enciphered land, dark and hostile. Nevertheless, there is a
way to achieve a new identity through self-discovery: a combination of
knowledge of both the Other and the self.
If we consider the
English traveller in Romania, we can assert that, generally speaking, he belongs
to the category of detached observer, who uses his lenses “made in England” as a filter for value judgements. As
a result, we enter the territory of prejudices, stereotypes and clichés, with
their decisive effects upon the representations of the Other. They can seldom
be avoided, harming interpersonal and even international relations.
Unfortunately for us, the majority of British stereotypes concerning Romanians,
which constitute the substance of this paper, circulate freely as absolute
truth even today, some of them having acquired a mythical aura, as that of
Count Dracula, the Transylvanian vampire, the monster who reigns over a
labyrinthian realm.
A few qualifications are
necessary. I refer here only to literary
images of Romania, to be distinguished from historical treatises by such
scholars as Professors Keith Hitchins in America and Dennis Deletant, who
followed the efforts of Eric D Tappe and Trevor J Hope in England. Furthermore,
legendary images of Transylvania as the native land of the monstrous Dracula
are balanced by representations of the
real Transylvania in the works of such scholars as Radu Florescu, Raymond
McNally, Grigore Nandris, Denis Buican and
Elizabeth Miller.
Not surprisingly,
literary images of Transylvania as the home of the monster may offend the
sensibility of many Romanian readers for whom Transylvania’s image is an ideal and even sacred one:
it represents the quintessence of the
national history, a land blessed by God with all the possible beauty and
richness, fertilized by the people’s tears and the heroes’ blood, the cradle of
their Latin roots, source of the Romanian Enlightenment embodied in the
Transylvanian School, and a province of a united Romania. Even though the
positive representations surpass in number and quality the negative images, the
latter have had a larger echo in the West, owing to their shocking character,
and have developed into a literary sub-genre. That is why I have chosen them
for this paper.
The impressions that
most British travellers had of Transylvania were filtered through the lens of
the cultures of its Hungarian and Saxon inhabitants, as the native Romanian
population was deprived of political, economic, religious and cultural power. Most
westerners have no concept of the contributions made to Transylvanian culture
by its Romanian population, including such factors as the existence of the
Greek Catholic Church (the Romanian Church United with Rome) with its centre at
Blaj, whose members made their studies at the Western Universities, and the
role of the Orthodox priests and
scholars living in the towns of Transylvania in the nineteenth century. Such
representations were at the level of popular religion and popular culture. The
English image of Transylvania has
depended on the observer's sense of balance and objectivity. An additional factor is that in English literature and even in
historiography, Romania is often pushed towards the “Balkan” area[1] with its inherently negative connotations.
Images of Transylvania
as a realm of horror, haunted by the ghosts of the past, the land beyond the
civilized world where all the superstitions have gathered, are not accidental.
They represent the evolution of constructs based upon stereotypes and clichés
created during the centuries by our British visitors. They wouldn’t have taken the apocalyptical dimensions
in Bram Stoker’s novel had it not been for a certain frame of mind in the West:
the need of projecting one’s own anguish on a neutral, harmless and
conveniently distant territory. Transylvania encodes cultural fears of a
indistinct danger which might menace Western civilization, the worry about
signs announcing the disintegration of the British colonial empire and,
implicitly, an eroding of the myth of English superiority and its right to
subjugate inferior, barbarian peoples. It is in this context that Stoker’s
novel Dracula needs to be considered.
As
a leit-motif in British literature, from the travel journals of earlier
centuries to the modern novel, Romania has been labelled as a centre of
superstition. From a distinctly Anglican perspective, the superstitions are
manifestations of the Orthodox piety intermingled with the primitive
traditions, maintained by political systems that have annihilated individual
will of thought and action in both past and modern times. Steeped in his own religious, moral,
cultural, political and economic values, the English visitor has often
perceived the “Oriental” model encountered in Romania as a threat. Such an
alarm is raised in Stoker’s Dracula. “If we consider the vampire as an
archetype where you can mix up the same will to preserve an evil power and the
threatened life,” notes Denis Buican, “the one who sheds blood and the one who
drinks it, the relation between Vlad the Impaler, the mythical Dracula and some
other modern successors (Hitler, Stalin, Amin Dada, Bokassa, Pol Pot,
Ceaucescu) could find its logic in an a priori of human knowledge” (9).
Transylvania
becomes the very symbol of South-Eastern Europe, that “grey” strip of frontier
land located between European and Oriental civilizations on the symbolic map
invented during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by the Western mind.[2] This
polarisation of Europe is perhaps the effect of the dichotomous tendencies
created by the extraordinary dynamism of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism.
The dark, unseen side seems to have been projected into the shadowed corner of
Europe, torn between the extremes of the dominant Western dilemmas: reason vs
hysteria, optimism vs despair, humanitarianism vs slavery, cosmopolitanism vs
racism, democracy vs imperialism, science vs occultism, nationalism vs
colonialism etc. And the dark side of the Western mind was equally tempted and
afraid of the “dark side” of the world as its double. For example, in
Bram Stoker’s Victorian setting, the British seem equally afraid of their
subconscious “dark side” as of the “savage” and “barbarian” people living
beyond the Western world, the subconscious side of Europe.[3]
Instead of an Enlightenment approach to “Oriental” Europe as a wonderful
epistemological discovery of the Other, we are faced with the crystallization
of a very durable ideology, that is, the ideology of difference and inequality.
The Eastern becomes the mythical, demonical enemy, guilty for all existing wrongs. And Dracula is a classic
example of such a “demonological myth.”
Before
Bram Stoker, a British traveller named Captain Spencer exclaimed during a steam
voyage (the symbol of civilization) down the Danube that he felt the menace of
the revolutionary changes: “You must, therefore, admit that the threats of
having a desolating horde of Huns, Croats, and other half- civilized
nationalities belonging to Austria let loose upon us were sufficient to deter
the most ardent patriotic among us from inflicting such a curse upon his
country.”[4] The fear
of a reverse colonization becomes another threat coming from this side of
Europe, and England would be an essential target (confronted with its own dark
side too, if we take into consideration
Dracula’s double identity: Transylvanian as well as English). By continuing in
this authentic colonial tradition, British literature achieves an imaginary
colonization of these remote European lands with unreal people. Vesna
Goldsworthy call this process “the Imperialism of imagination” meaning the
“Balkanization”, the “Orientalization” and the “Exotization” of South-Eastern
Europe, a concept with negative connotations and suggesting negative
significances.[5]
The mystery surrounding
Transylvania, which comes in part from its very name, has been cultivated by
English writers beginning with the first descriptions in travel journals and
diaries. In the book A
Prospect of Hungary and Transylvania (London, 1664), an anonymous writer gave the
following explanation for the genesis of Transylvania’s name, taken over from
the German geographers: he affirms that it took its name from the great woods
stretching between it and Hungary, the Latin name meaning “the land beyond the
forest,” and the Germans calling it “The Seven Fortresses” from the seven
castles built long ago to defend the boundaries. It is surrounded by high hills
and wall-like woods, the mountain passes being crossed with difficulty and, as
well, because of some rivers -- such as the river Olt -- where a fortress
called the Red Tower protects the mountain pass, and the Mures, with another
fortress (33-4).
The English writer Emily
Gerard Laszowska entitled her book The Land Beyond the Forest (1888); and later on in the 1930s, Patrick Leigh Fermor entitled his
journal Between the Woods and the Water. Such symbolism is accompanied
by the images generally associated with the labyrinth: the passage of the
threshold between worlds, the way into subterraneous darkness, the fright and
menacing dangers, and perplexity in the face of the unknown.
Through the Time Tunnel: from “Western
Light” to “Eastern Darkness”
In a recent book (Canetti’s Fear. Documentations at the Borders of Europe), the modern Austrian traveller, Rüdiger
Wischenbart, cynically alludes to the opacity of the mental frontiers between
Western Europe and the marginalized Eastern Europe, where the “Balkan”
represents “the disorder” with the impenetrability especially denounced as
“mysterious, cunning, filthy under the nails … expression of dire poverty”
(107). His travel to “the tragic space between Europe and Asia,” seems
“beyond time, history and change” to “a place beyond empirical reality,” as if
“out of Africa,” a place “where Europe ends” and “the Oriental tales begin,” a
“precipice between images” etc. With such a horizon of expectation, the
Westerner’s journey to Transylvania is equivalent to crossing the threshold
from Western civilization (“Christian,” democratic, ruled by the light of
reason and order) to the Oriental, (“pagan,” sunk into the darkness of
superstitions and lack of culture, the realm of the unconscious). The American
traveller Robert D. Kaplan tries to find a logical explanation for this image
of Transylvania (or better put, this stereotype): “Because of the country’s
obscure geographical position in Europe’s back-of-beyond, events in Romania, no
matter how terrible, have always assumed a remote, side-show quality to people
in the West” (126).
But such bizarre images
of Transylvania have been employed for quite some time. The image of its
inhabitants coming out of the depths of the earth inspired the poet Robert
Browning in The Pied Piper
of Hamelin. A Child’s Story
(1845):
In Transylvania there’s a tribe of alien
people who ascribe
The outlandish ways and dress
On which their neighbours lay such stress,
To their fathers and mothers having risen
out of some subterranean prison
Into which they had been trepanned
Long time ago, in mighty band,
Out of Hamelin town in Brunswick land,
But how or why they do not understand.
This legend may be based on the
twelfth-century German colonization of Transylvania. The Romanian scholar, Petru
Maior, one of the most important representatives of the Romanian Enlightenment
(“The Transylvanian School”) objected to the “fairy tales” related to the
coming of the Saxons in Transylvania, mainly that of the “children guided by
Satan” or coming from “under the ground.” Using historical documents, Petru
Maior demonstrates that the Saxons arrived in Transylvania in 1143 (218). A very interesting interpretation is given by Professor Radu
Florescu, according to whom the Piper may have been a Teuton recruiter who
enlisted people for the army against the Mongolian hordes at the end of the
thirteenth century. Other authors identify the Piper with a Gypsy singer who
lured the children to his home in Transylvania (based on the rumors that
Gypsies used to steal children and that their music was enchanting). Jacques Le
Goff connected the same legend with the fight against the invasions of rats in
the thirteenth century (319).
Patrick Leigh Fermor, an
early twentieth-century visitor to Transylvania, gives the impression of a
strange people, as if coming from another world and another time. He recalls
his childhood readings, when
his imagination was stimulated by Robert Browning’s poem. The archetypal
character of the cave is due to the fact that it is a symbol not only of
the maternal womb, but of the earth as the source of life. The cave is at the
same time the place of closing, of claustrophobia, or death, and of
resurrection, too. Readers of Robert Browning undertook a subterranean journey
to Transylvania, the land “beyond,” a labyrinth where monsters are watching the
intruders and not letting them to find the light: a tomb, an abyss. In Western
representations, the underground world of Transylvania is opposed to the light
of reason, and represents darkness, chaos or the passage to Hell guided by
Satan himself.
The perplexity at the
passage between worlds is reflected in the same way in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as Jonathan Harker, the
authentic Englishman, faces his Transylvanian adventure with calmness and
lucidity. However, at his arrival in Budapest, he feels the panic of being at
the gates of the “Orient”: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the
West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the
Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of
Turkish rule” (9). The stereotypes extracted by Bram Stoker from his readings
about Transylvania show their
effects:
Having some time at my disposal when in
London, I had visited the British Museum, and made search among the books and
maps in the library regarding Transylvania; it had struck me that some
foreknowledge of the country could hardly fail to have some importance in
dealing with a noble of that country. I find that the district he named is in
the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states,
Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst if of the Carpathian
mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe. I was not
able to light on any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle
Dracula, as there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our own
Ordnance Survey maps; but I found that Bistritz, the post town named by Count
Dracula, is a fairly well-known place (9-10).
The image of the strange
barbarian Transylvanian races is not new. It can often be found in many
descriptions by English travellers who frequently connect the local residents
with fear of the unknown. For
example, W Lithgow noticed in 1616 that the country is surrounded by high
insurmountable mountains and that it is covered by forests which are full of
murderers. It is true that he also pointed out the beauty of the landscapes and
the cordiality and hospitality of the inhabitants. These positive features are
common to the majority of the English representations about Romania and are to
be found in Bram Stoker’s book, too. But their impact is not as powerful as
that of the negative ones. Similarly, in 1652, Robert Bargrave was obsessed by
the banditti and by the funeral stones built on the graves of those who were
killed there. Later on, in 1807, Thomas Thorton would shiver seeing some
goitrous people in the mountains and shows no sign of compassion. Generally
speaking about the Romanians, Thorton considered that their national costume
was wild but that men seemed helpless. Robert Stockdale, one of the three
English students that travelled in the Romanian Countries between 1793-1794,
did not feel at ease among the Transylvanians: “The men in Transylvania and the
Banat are a large and robust race and amongst them we saw some of the most
tremendous hussar figures we had seen.”
The fear invoked by
Transylvanians is accompanied in the travellers’ imagination
by the horror of the wolves’ presence at night. “In the West,” writes Kaplan,
“the very word Transylvania conjures up images of howling wolves, midnight
thunderstorms, evil-looking peasants, and the thick, courtly accent of Count
Dracula, as portrayed by Bela Lugosi” (149). Bram Stoker also writes of a
strange race of people. Even though they are ludicrous, his descriptions deserve our attention because they represent
the quintessence of all the confusions about Transylvania that exist in foreign
travellers’ minds.
Let us follow the landscapes running before
Jonathan Harker’s eyes as he is comfortably seated in the “Orient-Express,” the
very sign of civilization. The images are very confused: Slovaks and Szeklers
appear side by side, in their cowboy-like dress, but still looking as English,
French or German peasants:
All day long we seemed to dawdle through a
country which was full of beauty of every kind. Sometimes we saw little towns
or castles on the top of steep hills such as we see in old missals; sometimes
we ran by rivers and streams which seemed from the wide stony margin on each
side of them to be subject to great floods. It takes a lot of water, and
running strong, to sweep the outside edge of a river clear. At every station
there were groups of people, sometimes crowds, and in all sorts of attire. Some
of them were just like the peasants at home or those I saw coming through
France and Germany, with short jackets and round hats and home-made trousers;
but others were very picturesque. The women looked pretty, except when you got
near them, but they were very clumsy about the waist. They had all full white
sleeves of some kind or other, and most of them had big belts with a lot of
strips of something fluttering from them like the dresses in a ballet, but of
course petticoats under them. The strangest figures we saw were the Slovaks,
who are more barbarian than the rest, with their big cowboy hats, great baggy
dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts,
nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots,
with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black
moustaches. They were very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the
stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands.
They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self
assertion (11).
Nobody could imagine a
stranger race of people, looking so odd even if harmless and shy, and acting
like shadows on a Transylvanian stage. English travellers had experienced a
general, obsessive fear of thieves in these parts of the world. But here we
have a touching picturesque image of some beasts with
kind souls who would harm nobody.
Visitors could calmly follow their way
until they ran into a vampire!
Caught in the Web of Superstitions and
Despotism
Another feature of the Transylvanian labyrinthian journey is that
it takes one into the darkness of superstition. For the English, with their
inflexible religious and moral Anglicanism, the practices and forms of Orthodox
piety are considered superstitious,
and they always point out their primitive roots. That is why the resulting
image is that of a gloomy Transylvania, lost in an insurmountable Middle Age,
land of superstition and witchcraft, the land beyond the civilized world, the origin of the
ill-fated Dracula.
Visitors notice with
admiration the tolerance manifested towards the different existing religions
accepted by the state, expressing, nevertheless, their regret that
the Orthodox Church is not recognized as such. Kaplan meditates on this:
While the plain of Athens below the Parthenon
-- not to mention Moldavia and Wallachia -- dozed under an Oriental, Ottoman
sleep, Transylvania was proclaiming the Enlightenment, with freedom and
equality for both Catholics and Protestants. William Penn was so impressed that
he considered naming his American Quaker colony Transylvania ...
The religious freedom was only relative,
however. The mass of native peasants -- the Orthodox Romanians, that is -- did
not enjoy the benefits of this Enlightenment. They laboured at the bottom of a
medieval apartheid system, in which the Hungarians and the Saxon Germans,
whether Protestant or Catholic, enjoyed all the rights (150).
Two English travellers who recorded their
impressions of Transylvania are worthy of note; in both cases, the Orthodox
Church is judged as the centre of superstitions.
The first is Rev Edmund Chishull (1702), Lord Paget’s companion, who acquainted
himself with the Protestant environment of Transylvania. Compared to the
attention paid to all the legal religions from that province (Calvinistic,
Lutheran, Unitarian) excepting Catholicism, Chishull dedicates only one
confused phrase to the Orthodox religion, recognizing only that the Romanians,
the Russians and the Armenians have the same religion (214). He declared that the population was
convinced that they were haunted by witches, that women of all ages were
executed every year for this crime, based on some testimonies that they might
have harmed their neighbours, children, goods or cattle. In the Saxons’ lands,
they were subdued to the “water proof“ (practised even in England where the so
called “ducking stool” was built for it). When the poor tormented creature
admitted her guilt, she was convicted to be burnt on the pyre. Chishull had to
admit, however, that there were also other places less enlightened where
witchcraft flourished. Elsewhere he reflects the maintenance of some medieval
practices in Transylvania, acknowledging for the first time that superstitions
should not be attributed only to Orthodox believers.
Although
some English travellers tried to keep a temperate (though critical) tone, the
same cannot be said of John Paget, whose language became malicious, with satire
directed at the Orthodox Church and its forms of devotion. The “Wallachian
Crosses” which he saw along the road bore “the bastard Greek letters,” and “the
top [was] covered in by a neat shingle-roof, something like Robinson Crusoe’s umbrella”
(102). His indictment of the cult of icons resounds with undisguised
sarcasm:
The semi-circular recess forms the altar,
which is adorned by the most wretched prints of Greek virgins, St. Georges, and
other grim saints … they are very practical illustrations of the evils of
immortality, and if the husband, and wives of Demsus do not obey a certain
commandment, it is not for want of knowing how the devil will catch them at
their peccadilloes, for it is here painted to the most, minute details (124).
These images seem to him grotesque:
I have often been much amused with these
pictures in the Wallack churches; for, though too gross for description, they
contain so much of that racy, often sarcastic wit proper to Rabelais or
Chaucer, throughout with a minuteness of diabolical detail and fertility of
imagination worthy a Brughel (124).
The same Protestant contempt for what they
perceive as superstition (the Sign of the Cross, the fear of the dark spirits,
etc) become outrageously pronounced in Bram Stoker’s imagination. For Paget,
the source of all superstition is the “Wallack” priests and how they keep their
believers in the “darkness of ignorance” in order to manipulate them more
easily. The image presented of the Romanian village priest is unfavourable,
from his ordinary rustic clothes to his lack of education and culture:
Except from a somewhat greater neatness of
person, and the long black beard which hung down to his breast, the Wallack
priest was in no way distinguished from the humblest of his flock. With just
enough education to read the service of the church, just enough wealth to make
them sympathize with the poor, and just enough religion to enable them to
console them in their afflictions, these men exercise a greater power over the
simple peasant than the most cunning Jesuit, the most wealthy Episcopalian, or
the most rigid Calvinist. This is a strong point in favour of the Wallack
priest (125).
Such judgements were influenced not only by
Paget’s own cultural values but from the opinions of the Transylvanian
aristocracy: “If we may believe the Hungarian nobles, the Wallack priest is
characterized by cunning malice, which he employs to maintain his power over
the peasants, to enrich himself, and to foment discord between landlord and
tenant” (126). Later, Emily Gerard Laszowska provided extensive descriptions of
Transylvanian superstitions, which in turn were an important source of
inspiration for Bram Stoker.
Stoker knew where to
find such clichés regarding
Transylvania, which he summarized in the well-known sentence: “I read that
every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the
Carpathians, as if it were the centre of some sort of imaginative whirlpool”
(10). Harker’s Anglican background makes him doubt the
utility of superstitions against the vampires. Later on, he will understand
that popular wisdom was deeply rooted into the history of mankind and that he
had to rely on it. Stoker’s readers also notice that, in fact, even if oddly
exotic and primitive as described by the novelist, the inhabitants of the
Transylvanian lands were all Christians (Orthodox, Catholics or Protestants).
As he tried to get to
Dracula’s Castle on the eve St George’s Day, a woman begged Harker to
give up because “tonight, when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things
in the world will have full sway.” He continues in a mixture of
patronizing bemusement and uneasiness:
Finally she went down on her knees and
implored me not to go; at least to wait a day or two before starting. It was
all very ridiculous but I did not feel comfortable ... She then rose and dried
her eyes, and taking a crucifix from her neck offered it to me. I did not know
what to do, for, as an English Churchman, I have been taught to regard such
things as in some measure idolatrous, and yet it seemed so ungracious to refuse
an old lady meaning so well and in such a state of mind. She saw, I suppose,
the doubt in my face, for she put the rosary round my neck, and said, “For your
mother’s sake”, and went out of the room. I am writing up this part of the
diary whilst I am waiting for the coach, which is, of course, late, and the
crucifix is still round my neck. Whether it is the old lady’s fear, I do not
know, but I am not feeling nearly as easy in my mind as usual (13-14).
Nor does he feel better in the coach
because he can hear “a lot of words often repeated, queer words, for there were
many nationalities in the crowd; so I quietly got my polyglot dictionary from
my bag and looked them out. I must say they were not cheering to me, for
amongst them were ‘Ordog’ - Satan, ‘pokol’ - hell, ‘stregoaica’ - witch,
‘vrolok’ and ‘vlkoslak’ - both of which mean the same thing, one being Slovak
and the other Serbian for something that is either were-wolf or vampire”
(14-15). Luckily for him he had that
polyglot dictionary that could explain even the words of such a bizarre
Hungarian-Romanian-Slovakian- Serbian dialect! It is important to notice that
vampirism was a common subject in these
parts during the nineteenth century. And everywhere one finds the same idyllic
Transylvanian images, with benevolent people, shy and kind, kneeling in prayers
under the burden of superstitions and fears, too gentle and naive to fight the
evil that oppresses them: “By the roadside were many crosses, and as we swept
by, my companions all crossed themselves. Here and there was a peasant man or
woman kneeling before a shrine, who did not even turn round as we approached,
but seemed in the self-surrender of devotion to have neither eyes nor ears for
the outer world” (Stoker 17).
To the Englishman,
such manifestations of piety and faith in superstitions are the fruits of
ignorance in Transylvania where a despotic system turned the peasants into
shadows. It could not, however, destroy their kindness and goodwill: “One by one several of the passengers
offered me gifts, which they pressed upon me with an earnestness which would
take no denial; these were certainly of an odd and varied kind, but each was
given in simple good faith, with a kindly word, and a blessing, and the strange
mixture of fear-meaning movements which I had seen outside the hotel at
Bistritz -- the sign of the cross and the guard against the evil eye” (Stoker
18). And the very symbol of this unspiritualized
world is Dracula himself, as a warning for mankind: “reason’s slumber gives birth to monsters.”
Such refrains echo
throughout the novel, though in different tonalities. Tuned up by Mina Harker,
the notes sound warmer and more human, but essentially subject to the same
rules:
The country is lovely, and most
interesting; if only we were under different conditions, how delightful it
would be to see it all! If Jonathan and I were driving through it alone what a
pleasure it would be! To stop and see people, and learn something of their
life, and to fill our minds and memories with all the colour and
picturesqueness of the whole wild, beautiful country and the quaint people … It
is a lovely country; full of beauties of all imaginable kinds, and the people
are brave, and strong, and simple, and seem full of nice qualities. They are very,
very superstitious. In the first house where we stopped, when the woman who
served us saw the scar on my forehead, she crossed herself and put out two
fingers towards me, to keep off the evil eye. I believe they went to the
trouble of putting an extra amount of garlic into our food; and I can’t abide
garlic. Ever since then I have taken care not to take off my hat or veil, and
so have escaped their suspicions (427-9).
Such
illusions are still prevalent. “Romania is a country of crazy superstitions and
fantastic legends,” exclaimed the British traveller Nicola Williams in her 1991
journal about a Romania suspended between “Tarzan’s birthplace” and “Ovid’s
grave”: “with its dramatic castles and medieval towns where mass tourism means
you, a horse and a cart, and a handful of farmers, Romania is the wild West of
Eastern Europe. Dracula fiends flock to this land of alpine peaks, Black Sea
beaches, and fantastic castles in the Carpathian mountains” (11).
Eastern
Europe has become the labyrinthian subconscious of the Continent. The image of
Transylvania as the land of vampiric monsters does not spring from the Romanian
collective mind, but is a Western construct. It represents rather the symptom
of the Western thought. Rüdiger Wischenbart
comments that “In the West, people believe that one can
live in isolation from these zones. The Europeans from the West believe in the
illusion that the modern world offers, finally, happiness with no suffering,
reason and consciousness with no subconscious, and no fear” (35). I should
rather say that the distressing labyrinthian
images of Transylvania are the projections of Western fears onto an
oppressed and helpless East. By
transplanting their own anguish beyond the Carpathians, Westerners
preserve their self-image of perfection.
Dracula and his Role in the Maintenance of the Iron Curtain
The mythical Dracula has contributed
considerably to the manipulation of Western public opinion about Eastern Europe. In some authors' opinion,
Dracula is the symbol of a world antithetical to that of Victorian England.
From this perspective, Dracula, the cursed prince from a feudal Transylvania,
represented a danger to Great Britain and implicitly, to the entire world.
Indeed, when Bram Stoker's book appeared in 1897, England was considered the
most important world power. The one who conquered London had the whole world at
his feet. That was in fact what Dracula intended. We have to add that
Transylvania was not only the far off land “beyond the woods,” but also a part
of the Austro-Hungarian empire, allied to the German emperor, and thus
England’s rival in its economic expansion towards central Europe. It is not
difficult to detect in Stoker’s novel the echoes of Darwin’s theories,
especially that of Anglo-Saxon superiority over other European races. The
Americans are included too, as descendants of the English colonists.
By contrast, there
exists a counteroffensive of good quality research that promises, in spite of
the fact that the myths about Dracula are so firmly entrenched in the West, to
provide a more balanced and realistic set of images. For example, the novel The
Long Shadows by Alan Brownjohn (which appeared in Romanian in 1996) has
enjoyed great success. Whereas Stoker’s Jonathan Harker arrives in a country
where spirit and will-power had been annihilated by despotism, Tim Harker-Jones
arrives in a Romania that survives both morally and intellectually. Such
approaches help to demolish the time-worn stereotypes and cliches that one
associates with the Dracula myth. Even more important are the initiatives
originating in Romania itself. Two of the options are: to keep the traditional pastoral image of Carpathian
resignation and fatalism, assumed mostly by the Romanian men of culture and
politicians; or to replace it with a
new, energetic image based on the “Dracula” model. The last option would be possible
by inverting values, taking as reference points the positive terms of the
dichotomies that constitute his “vampiric” personality: life-death, energy-passivity,
intelligence-surfeit, courage-cowardliness, passion-apathy,
knowledge-indifference, civilization-nature, urbanity-rurality,
freedom-compulsion, etc. Marian Mincu proposes this solution in his book
Il diario di Dracula (Dracula’s Journal, Milano “Bonpiani”, 1993), where
Dracula is building his own “vampiric” destiny by an act of will and decision:
the rejection of the real world, hostile to him, through the
“self-vampirization” in the world of the text he is creating.
As professor Gail
Kligman asserts, the “vampiric”
myth of Dracula is cherished mostly by her fellow Americans who refuse the real
existence of Transylvania and its historical, geographical and cultural
background. They stick stubbornly to the idea of a legendary Transylvania, a
land haunted by vampires, while for the Romanians “Dracula” remains the voivode
“Vlad Tepes.” And he will remain so forever !
Works Cited:
Buican, Denis. Les metamorphoses de
Dracula: Histoire et legende. Paris:
Edition du Felin, 1993.
Chishull, Edmund. Travels in Turkey and
back to England. London, 1747.
Kaplan, Robert D. Balkan Ghosts: A
Journey through History. New York: Vintage Books, 1996.
Kligman, Gail. The Wedding of the Dead:
Ritual, Poetics and Popular Culture in Transylvania. U of California P,
1998.
Le Goff, Jacques. Civilizatia
Occidentului medieval. Bucharest, 1970.
Maior, Petru. Istoria pentru inceputul
romanilor in Dachia. Vol 1. Bucharest, 1970.
Paget, John. Hungary and Transylvania.
London, 1855.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897. London:
Penguin, 1994.
Williams, Nicola. Romania and Moldavia
(From Tarzan’s birthplace to Ovid’s grave). Hawthorn, Australia: Lonely
Planet, 1998.
Wischenbart, Rudiger. Frica lui Canetti.
Documentari la marginea Europei. Bucharest, 1997.
[1]See, for example, Olivia Manning’s The Balkan
Trilogy; Robert Kaplan’s Balkan ghosts: a journey through history;
and Forbes, toynbee, Mitrany & Hogarth, The Balkans: a History of
Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, Rumania, Turkey.
[2]See Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern
Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1994).
[3]See Athena Vrettos, Imagining Illness in
Victorian Culture (Stanford UP, 1996). Included in the so-called “somatic
fictions,” Dracula is analyzed as a Victorian attempt to solve chaotic
social problems by displacing them onto matters of physiology. This
displacement resulted in the collapse of perceived boundaries of human
embodiment. The author examines the relationships among health, imperialism and
racial theory in such popular novels as Dracula.
[4]Captain Spencer, Travels in France and Germany in 1865 and
1866, including a steamvoyage down the Danube & a ride across the Mountain
of European Turkey from Belgrade to Montenegro. 2 vol. London, Hurst &
Blackett Publishers, 1866.
[5]Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania. The Imperialism of the
Imagination, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1998; See also:
Bill Ascroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (ed.), The Post-Colonial
Studies Reader, London, Routledge, 1995.
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