Episode Seventy Two - Carmilla and Countess Dracula
This episode deals with two female vampires - one literary and the other a historical “monster.” Carmilla, by Sheridan LaFanu, is frequently cited as the first lesbian vampire story. And Elizabeth Bathory (largely because of her habit of bathing in the blood of young girls) has been suggested as a possible source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Episode Seventy Two - Carmilla and Countess Dracula
This episode deals with two female vampires - one literary and the other a historical “monster.” Carmilla, by Sheridan LaFanu, is frequently cited as the first lesbian vampire story. And Elizabeth Bathory (largely because of her habit of bathing in the blood of young girls) has been suggested as a possible source for Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
0:00 Introduction
Welcome to Celebrate Poe - a examination of the life, works, and times of America’s Shakespeare, Edgar Allan Poe. This podcast also looks at some of the many influences ON Poe’s writing, as well as some of the countless writers who have been influenced BY Poe. This is episode Seventy Two —Carmilla and Countess Dracula
00:34 Request for email
And if you have any comments or questions please contact me at celebratepoe@gmail.com. - especially if you have any suggestions for areas that you would like to learn more about.
01:04 Carmilla (Introduction and Plot)
And yes, this podcast is getting closer to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. But first I want to talk about Carmilla - a feminine vampire story that was written by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu in 1872. Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu were both Irish, and actually knew each other, but Carmilla precedes Dracula by 26 years.
The character of Carmilla appears to be young but is actually a 200-year-old aristocrat. Carmilla takes on the appearance of a young girl, and befriends Laura, who is approximately the same age. She constantly tries to ask Laura about her private life, and even appears to make advances towards her - but not in an obviously forward manner - AFTER ALL this was the nineteeth century - tho there is definite homoerotic element. This homoerotic subtext is why the Carmilla is often referred to as the first lesbian vampire story. Now don’t confuse Le Fanu’s version of Carmilla with the recent online version of Carmilla where the lesbian subplot is far more obvious.
Now getting back to the 1872 written version, as Laura begins to spend more time with Carmilla, Laura begins to slowly waste away. Possessed of amazing strength, Carmilla can shape-shift, often stalking her prey in the form of a black cat. Carmilla appears to die, and family and friends finally put two and two together. They locate Carmilla’s tomb, strike her head from her body, and drive a stake through the heart.
Now before Carmilla, vampires tended to be hideous and totally disgusting. But Le Fanu’s lead character was at both horrifying and desirable - characteristics that Stoker’s Dracula also shared. And some critics have said that Carmilla is a far more complicated vampire - that she becomes involved with her victims both emotionally and (theoretically) sexually. The duality of Carmilla's character is suggested by her human attributes, the lack of predatory demeanour, and her shared experience with Laura.
03:50 Section from Carmilla
The story of Carmilla has a rather complicated plot, but I would like to read about a page from the story to give you an idea of what a great job it does communicating suspense.
This following brief section is told from the standpoint of Laura:
I had a dream that night that was the beginning of a very strange agony.
I cannot call it a nightmare, for I was quite conscious of being asleep.
But I was equally conscious of being in my room, and lying in bed, precisely as I actually was. I saw, or fancied I saw, the room and its furniture just as I had seen it last, except that it was very dark, and I saw something moving round the foot of the bed, which at first I could not accurately distinguish. But I soon saw that it was a sooty-black animal that resembled a monstrous cat with the lithe, sinister restlessness of a beast in a cage. I could not cry out, although as you may suppose, I was terrified. Its pace was growing faster, and the room rapidly darker and darker, and at length so dark that I could no longer see anything of it but its eyes. I felt it spring lightly on the bed. The two broad eyes approached my face, and suddenly I felt a stinging pain as if two large needles darted, an inch or two apart, deep into my breast. I waked with a scream. The room was lighted by the candle that burnt there all through the night, and I saw a female figure standing at the foot of the bed, a little at the right side. It was in a dark loose dress, and its hair was down and covered its shoulders. A block of stone could not have been more still. As I stared at it, the figure appeared to have changed its place, and was now nearer the door; then, close to it, the door opened, and it passed out.
I was now relieved, and able to breathe and move. My first thought was that Carmilla had been playing me a trick, and that I had forgotten to secure my door. I hastened to it, and found it locked as usual on the inside. I was afraid to open it--I was horrified. I sprang into my bed and covered my head up in the bedclothes, and lay there more dead than alive till morning.
06:31 Comparison of Carmilla and Dracula
Although Carmilla is a lesser known and far shorter vampire story than Dracula, it can be argued that Stoker’s masterpiece was highly influenced by Le Fanu's work:
• Both stories are told in the first person. Dracula even expands on the idea of a first person account by creating a series of journal entries and logs of different persons and creating a plausible background story for their having been compiled. In this sense, Dracula is a bit like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein - in that both are stories told from various viewpoints.
• The descriptions of the title character in Carmilla and of Lucy in Dracula are very similar. Additionally, both women sleepwalk.
• Stoker's Dr. Abraham Van Helsing is similar to Le Fanu's vampire expert Baron Vordenburg: both characters investigate, try to explain what is happening, and take actions in opposition to the vampire.
• The symptoms described in Carmilla and Dracula are highly comparable.[29]
• Both Carmilla and Dracula pretend to be the descendants of much older nobles bearing the same names, but are eventually revealed to have the same identities as those nobles.
08:15 Countess Catherine Bathory
For the rest of this podcast, I would like to talk about one of the real life female monsters who may have been the inspiration for Dracula - Countess Catherine Bathory.
It’s rather obvious that humans love dark stories about the undead, but we’ve been loving those stories long before Bram Stoker ever wrote the first word of his novel, Dracula. Perhaps one reason we like vampire stories so much is that vampire stories deal with the question “what happens to us after we die.” Possibly two of the main influences on Dracula were two women - the fictional character of Carmilla, and the historical character of Elizabeth Bathory.
Born in 1560, Elizabeth Barthory is often called “Lady Dracula” by many sources, and for good reason. Bathory is the most prolific female serial killer of all time, and who the dubious distinction of being the most prolific female mass murderer in history - let me say that another way - no woman in history has ever murdered so many people. Some sources claim that the reason she killed so many woman was as a way (in her mind) of staying young by being able to bathe in their blood.
Before we go any further in this episode, let me warn you - the rest of this podcast - and for that matter, the upcoming episode about Vlad the Impaler, as well - get pretty graphic.
10:02 Stoker’s notes on Bathory
Now Bram Stoker spent years in preparation and research before he started writing Dracula. On page 139 of an online copy of Stoker’s original notes for Dracula, he makes the following notation about the Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory
“She was wont to dress well in order to please her husband, and spent half the day over her toilet. On one occasion, a lady’s-maid saw something wrong in her head-dress, and as a recompense for observing it, received such a severe box on the ears that the blood gushed from her nose, and spurted on to her mistress’s face. When the blood drops were washed off her face, her skin appeared much more beautiful—whiter and more transparent on the spots where the blood had been.
“Elizabeth then formed the resolution to bathe her face and her whole body in human blood so as to enhance her beauty ...”
11:17 Some very “gruesome” exploits
In his excellent book, Rejected Princesses: Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics, author Jason Porah writes about some of the strongest women in the world - women who have really made a difference. He includes such women as Countess Elizabeth Bathory - certainly not because she displayed behavior that should be emulated, but because of her influence on history and larger than life personality.
Now the next part can get really gruesome -
Porah writes that according to Countess Bathory’s surviving testimonials, she kept her servants chained up every night so tight that their hands turned blue and they sprurted blood - there’s that word spurted again.
She would beat her servants at the slightest pretext - beat them so much that there was blood on the walls and beds. She was said to have become so angry with a servant that she strangled the servant to death with a silk scarf.
She burned her servants with metal sticks, red-hot keys and coins, ironed the soles of their feet, and slowly stuck burning irons rods into their vaginas.
On occasion, she would stick needles into their mouths and fingernails, and cut their hands, lips, and noses with a set of large scissors.
Sometimes, she would simply sew their lips and tongues together.
Are you grossed out yet?
Often she would keep her servants from eating for a week at a time, and if they got thirsty, forced them to drink their own urine.
She enjoyed forcing them to stand outside in the winter standing in tubs of ice water up to their necks until they died.
She also enjoyed forcing her servants to cook and eat their own flesh (usually from the buttocks) For variety, she would often have the servants make sausages from their flesh and serve it to guests.
She also enjoyed heating up a cake to red-hot temperatures, and forcing a servant eat it.
And last - but definitely not least - Bathory especially enjoyed torturing young girls. She even had a whole torture chamber set up in her castle, and liked to take her female servants there. When the unlucky ladies arrived there, she would jam pins and needles under their nails before killing them. If somehow, that didn’t seem to satisfy her thirst for blood, she began to abduct peasant girls and go to all kinds of sadistic lengths to kill them. It’s recorded that she even would often bite chunks out of the girls’ face and arms. And eventually she became infamous for believing that drinking the blood of young girls would keep her young forever and make her immortal. Elizabeth Barhory DID come close to getting caught when she began going through elaborate, deceptive means to lure pretty girls from ruling families in Transylvania. And while Bathory was imprisoned, she never had a trial. She never really got to speak in her own defense, and her family records were mostly destroyed.
14:54 Questionable stories and summary?
Of course, some of the stories surrounding the countess may very well be questionable. There were certainly enough people in her country who had a grudge against her or wanted revenge, and exaggerated events to make her look bad. Another reason that some of the stories surrounding here might be exaggerated or even false was that the printing press had been invented around this time - in other words, the beginning of mass communication. Gruesome or scandalous stories always have a built in audience, and the exploits or crimes of Elizabeth Bathory would have made for popular reading.
We DO know that she was a mass-murder - but will probably never know the exact number of victims. Hopefully, you can now see how Bram Stocker might have used stories or legends surrounding the countess to create a character that, like Dracula, also drank blood to remain immortal.
Sources
Sources for this episode include Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu, The Vampire Book: The Legend, the Lore, the Allure by Sally Regan, Tales of History’s Boldest Heroines, Hellions, and Heretics, by Jason Porah, Dracula by Bram Stoker, and Bram Soker’s Original Foundation Notes and Data for His Dracula” by Bram Stoker, Annotated and Transcribed by Robert Bisang and Elizabeth Miller.
Why not visit my podcast web site at celebratepoe.buzzsprout.com - click on the episode you want to learn more about to see its show notes and a transcript.
17:09 Future Episodes
In the next episode I want to talk about a bloodthirsty ruler who frequently is cited as the inspiration for Stoker’s masterpiece - the original Dracula - also known as Vlad the Impaler. And if you think that Elizabeth Bathory’s exploits were gruesome - wait until you learn about the cruel murders and disgusting tortures committed by the historical Dracula. Then I would like to take a brief look at how Poe used torture in two of his most famous works - The Cask of the Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum.
This month I want to concentrate on vampires - Bram Stocker’s Dracula, some of the print and film versions, and Edgar Allan Poe’s stories about the undead.
Then Celebrate Poe will specifically cover Poe’s years as a child in England - especially his education . I am finding some exciting stuff regarding the information that he learned - especially in the form of classical rhetoric - to become one of America’s greatest writers.
Outro
Thank you for listening to Celebrate Poe.