The Historical Dracula Is the Real Fiction, Part II: Countess Dracula

For my first October post, I maintained that, while Stoker used the name and a fact or two from the history of Vlad Dracula of Wallachia in his novel, there is really so little similarity between them that it is hard to say Vlad Dracula is in fact the “historical Dracula.” But what about Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Transylvania? She shares Count Dracula’s rank and homeland and exhibited far more vampiric tendencies than Vlad. I would posit that Bram Stoker probably didn’t even know who she was.

By the time of her birth in 1560, the Ottoman Turks, having long before conquered Wallachia, had moved on to Hungary. The Austrian Habsburgs claimed their share of Hungary, and Bathory’s family enjoyed great power in between the two competing empires. Bathory exploited that power to brutally torture and murder perhaps as many as 650 young women within her castles’ walls, earning the grim nickname the Blood Countess.

Can all this be mere coincidence again? Here we have a Transylvanian countess with a reputation for bloodthirstiness lurking within the confines of a castle. She would bite her servants in addition to even more hideous tortures. Even more vampiric are the legends that, in order to preserve her reputed beauty, she applied or even bathed in the blood of young women to maintain her skin’s youthfulness.  It has been pointed out that Dracula also appears younger after feasting upon blood and that this is not a traditional element of vampire lore.  Count Dracula also violently asserts absolute authority over his subordinates, much like Bathory (who was actually even more vicious). A possible echo of Bathory’s recruitment into her service of young maids, who would never be seen again, is Count Dracula’s abduction of children. Count Dracula has three brides whom van Helsing destroys just before they deal with the count himself, and three female accomplices were executed for their participation in Bathory’s crimes. She had one male accomplice, who might be represented by Renfield, or Renfield could represent aspects of the countess herself since they both use blood to seek immortality. Renfield seems to pass in and out from frenzied insanity to calm rationality, like Countess Bathory.

Ironically, even though he seems to resemble her more than his own namesake, Count Dracula was almost definitely not based on Elizabeth Bathory. The differences are again glaring. Elizabeth Bathory was famous for beauty, but Count Dracula is very grotesque in appearance. Count Dracula can be cruel, but he is not sadistic. Violence is merely a means to his ends, whereas Countess Bathory was insanely brutal. Dracula seduces most of his victims, not tortures them. When it comes to abducting infants, the roles are still reversed. Dracula kidnaps children; Bathory lured them in to their demise. Also, Bathory did not bite the necks of her victims, as Count Dracula invariably does.

Even though the numbers and genders of Dracula’s allies match Bathory’s accomplices, they’re not a very good representation of them. The women actively joined her in torturing her victims, while Dracula’s brides do not even accompany him on his quest to conquer England.  Ficzko, Bathory’s manservant, sometimes worked the torture devices for his mistress, but Renfield only grants his master, reluctantly, access to the asylum so that he can feed upon Mina’s blood.

Besides all this, there’s simply no documented evidence that Stoker based Dracula off of Countess Bathory. He did consult The Book of Werewolves by Sabine Baring-Gould, and that work does include a brief passage on Countess Bathory, but writers are somewhat disingenuous when they cite this as Stoker’s source of information about her just because he put other things from the work in his notes. None of those notes includes Countess Bathory, and there is a simple explanation for this. Baring-Gould put her story in the naturalistic part of his book, so Stoker could have missed it if he was focusing just on the folkloric part.

Most significantly, Baring-Gould’s account of Bathory is actually quite brief and does not include most of her similarities to Count Dracula.  He does not provide her title as countess or her Transylvanian origins, focusing mostly on the rejuvenation legend. Baring-Gould’s account also states, incorrectly, that Bathory had two female assistants, not the three found in Dracula.  If Stoker had used this source for Bathory, Count Dracula would actually not resemble her as closely as he does.

As for their common title, it again makes more sense as a coincidence. Countess Karnstein in Carmilla seems more likely as an inspiration for Dracula’s rank than someone Stoker never referred to in his notes. As for their common homeland, Stoker chose it after reading Emily Gerard’s Land Beyond the Forest, not Baring-Gould’s work, which doesn’t even mention Transylvania. All that remains is the rejuvenation legend. It again seems scanty to say he based a character on someone just for that, which is merely incidental to Count Dracula’s story but is at the heart of Countess Bathory’s legend, especially if he didn’t include it in his notes.

I may seem to have belabored coincidence, but the evidence just does not bear out much of a historical basis for Count Dracula. Happily, we have Stoker’s own notes for the book, and all that gives us is one paragraph with a little slice of Vlad Dracula’s life and nothing for Elizabeth Bathory. I guess technically Stoker did sort of base his count off the voivod, but he used so little of his life I prefer to look at it as he didn’t. I do like the books about the “historical” Dracula, though. For my money, they are even more interesting than the novel.