Dracula is no Voldemort
My search for the backstory of a bad guy
There aren’t many books I’ve read multiple times. Dracula by Bram Stroker is one of the few. Recently, when I was waiting for my turn at a great new audiobook my husband was finishing, I pulled up an audiobook version of Dracula and started listening. Now, I no longer need to wait my turn for the new book, but I can’t stop reading Dracula.
I first encountered Dracula as part of a Gothic fiction course in college. In my late teens I was super interested in the young ladies in the story: Lucy and Mina. Their perspectives and stories interested me the most. Lucy, the young woman who received three proposals in one day, intrigued me, but I knew I was far more a Mina—practical, helpful, loyal, and plagued-slash-gifted with a tendency to take on too much responsibility.
Many years later, I still love Lucy and Mina’s stories, but during my current read my curiosity is less focused on young women anticipating marriage, and more on other aspects of thenovel. Different details and perspectives are calling out to me, and the one that has fascinated me most is the historical roots of Count Dracula.
I’ve often read that Stoker’s fictional Dracula was based on the real-life historical figure, Vlad Dracula, aka Vlad the Impaler. Yet, as I researched to understand the origin story Stoker provided for his iconic villain, I was constantly lead down confusing rabbit holes. One thesis papers suggested a strong link between Vlad III and the fictional Dracula; another argued against the link. I pecked out some queries to my trusty AI research partner, only to be met with a series of obvious hallucinations.
What was going on? And what did it all mean for my study of one of the most iconic villains in English literature?
Vlad the Impaler
Vlad (Tepes) III, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, son of the dragon. All names of the historical Prince of Wallacia, a Romanian kingdom in the Balkans.
The trouble for Vlad begins when his father, Dracul falls out with numerous local political factions surrounding Wallacia and needs the support of the Ottoman Empire. Dracul sends Vlad and his little brother as hostages to the Ottomans. The boys are a sort of insurance policy to guarantee the family’s loyalty. Far from a friendly arrangement for the boys, the Ottomans treated Vlad and his brother as captives, prisoners. Distrust, mistreatment, and physical and emotional abuse ensued. Apparently little brother eventually ingratiated himself with the Ottomans by converting to Islam, But Vlad stubbornly remained Christian, and at long last returned home ready to resist the Ottoman Sultan. Vlad and Sultan Mehmed II fought a series of battles prompted by accusations of betrayal and disloyalty. The history is bloody: attempted assassinations, murdered envoys, trickery, slaughter, at least 20,000 victims impaled in the battles plus over 23,000 Turks impaled in Bulgaria.
It’s not a mystery how this bloody leader got his name. The mystery comes from how much he has in common with the fictional Dracula.
The Fictional Dracula
Stoker’s Dracula, the story is also set in Romania, but in Transylvania, not Wallacia. Like Vlad, Dracula is from a noble family. He’s characterized with strong pride in his family history. His pride is so strong, that when planning his move to England, he worries greatly over his accent because he cannot bear to be looked down upon in England after belonging to a multi-generational noble family. Stoker paints Dracula’s history in broad strokes. Given the history of multiple warring ethnicities ravaging Dracula’s region, he has the blood of multiple conquerers in his veins (Szeckler and Hun blood, to be exact).
The fictional Dracula inhabits a world of vague conflict—different races, different religions and above all (as several thesis papers pointed out), superstition. In fact, unlike the historical Vlad III, Dracula has no specific origin story to set him on his path of vile retribution. How did Dracula even become a vampire? We have, again, hints of superstitious happenings: dark arts, deals with the devils, sorcery, necromancy. We’re told and observe that he’s intelligent and cunning, but are provided with no specific event or trauma which catapulted him into villainy.
Whether combing through recently read passages in Dracula, consulting thesis papers, reading Wikipedia articles, or pinging various AI for leads, I couldn’t find a solid origin story for Dracula. I was particularly struck by how various AI would begin to invent connections between the stories of Vlad and Dracula that didn’t exist.
Where is the fictional Dracula’s origin story? Everything I’ve studied about how to construct a compelling character insists characters need compelling backgrounds that emotionally resonate with their journey through the novel. I look to Voldemort, the villain in another famous series, and find his origin story so solid and emotionally logical. An orphaned boy ashamed of not being Pure Blood grows up to coalesce his desired identity by persecuting Half Bloods. Even after days of research, I can offer no such succinct explanation of Dracula’s career of evil.
Backstory of a bad guy
Sorting through the backstory of Dracula felt like reaching out to grab a ghost. Every time my fingers began to close on plausible, rational explanations for his character background, they evaporated like so much eerie mist.
I think there’s a reason for that.
Although I’ll never pretend to know what Stoker was thinking when he created the villain that drove his famous story, my point in this study was to reverse compile the creation of an iconic villain to see what I could learn. The lesson turned out to be: there’s more than one way to create a villain.
In Harry Potter, we have a character-driven story with rich, fanciful world building. The villain, Voldemort, has a highly personal, concrete backstory to match. In contrast, Dracula is a vague and atmospheric villain. He rides on vagaries. Romania and its aura of superstition. Overtones of Vlad Dracula aka Vlad the Impaler, along with his real-life, yet unspecified history of betrayal and violence. Dracula is painted with animalism—sometimes a bat, sometimes a wolf. The many associations with animals in the story, including of his devotee, Renfield, rubs off on Dracula, as does a certain hunger and wild lust. Dracula is made of the suggestion of blood, an exploration of the line between life and death. He’s cobbled together with vague legend. He’s a being of smoke and mirrors, whose origins and motivations are never more than guessed or hinted at. Dracula is a mystery never fully solved.
He is, in short, the perfect villain for the novel he haunts. An atmospheric novel. A novel where spookiness and fog and sleepwalking and blushing cheeks and wan faces and longing and despair create the impression of horror and insinuate death and darkness without getting too deep into the gory details.
So what did I learn from all these vaguaries? I learned that villains are as unique as the stories they haunt. Villains are neither plot tools nor pure characters. Villains set the tone for their novels. They echo and parallel their unique protagonists. A story’s villain, as much as its protagonist, defines its style.