Bram Stoker's Dracula - more Irish than Transylvanian?
It has inspired more than 1,000 movies and after the bible it's the
biggest selling book of all time. But does Bram Stoker's gothic novel
Dracula owe more of its inspiration to Ireland than to Transylvania?
Was Count Dracula really a bloodsucking Irish landlord who preyed on
his19th century tenants? And were the undead and the gaunt haunted
figures that fill the pages of Stoker's famous book straight out of
Ireland's Great Famine?
These are the claims of director of the Bram Stoker's Dracula
Organisation Dennis McIntyre, who says that very few people know that
Stoker was in fact an Irishman.
"A lot of people are under the impression that Bram Stoker was an
American, an Englishman, or a Romanian, but he wasn't. He was very
much an Irishman," McIntyre said in an interview with Ireland's RTE
Radio 1.
First published in1897, the took has never been out of print and has
been translated into over 50 different languages. But while the story
of Dracula is known by every generation throughout the world, many
moviegoers and readers are unaware of its origins.
It's widely believed that Bram Stoker's Dracula tells the story of the
15th century bloodthirsty Romanian Prince Vlad Dracula III, better
known as Vlad the Impaler.
The Transylvanian prince earned this name because of his reputation
for impaling his enemies and watching them slowly and painfully die.
But according to Dennis McIntyre there the similarities end, and with
the exception of the setting the story is a very Irish one.
He points out that the name Dracula comes from the Irish word "Droch
Ola", which means "bad blood". Stoker's mother was from the West of
Ireland and she told Bram about a cholera epidemic in 1832 when she
witness large graves and people being pushed into them with wooden
poles while they were still alive.
"They were literally buried alive. Did he get the idea of the undead
being one of these?" McIntyre asked. If you committed suicide in
Stoker's time it was actually believed that you became a vampire
unless you got the stake through the heart treatment, he added.
There was a suicide burial plot in Clontarf, Dublin, where Stoker
lived. As a boy the author used to spend hours playing in that
graveyard and St. Michan's Church, where the Stoker family had a
burial vault. "By some atmospheric freak in this church bodies are
preserved by a natural mummification or they were in the past," said
McIntyre.
Bram Stoker was born in Dublin in 1847 at the height of the Great
Famine. This was one of the most catastrophic events in Irish history,
with hundreds of thousands of people dying from starvation and disease
or emigrating in 'coffin ships' to America.
The famine may have inspired the visual characteristics of Count
Dracula and also his infamous obsession with bloodsucking, McIntyre
believes. "So metaphorically speaking we think that Count Dracula
might be the landlord up at the big castle sucking the blood of the
peasants."
Stoker's Dracula is also full of Irish symbols - storms, fog, rats,
gypsies, castle, abbey, etc.
Stoker was educated in Trinity College Dublin, spend 10 years working
as a civil servant in Dublin Castle and lived his first 31 years in
Dublin before moving to England. But he has been the forgotten man of
Irish literature, McIntyre believes.
"In Ireland we rightfully sing the praises of Yeats, Joyce, Beckett,
Wilde, Shaw, O'Casey, Swift, Goldsmith, Synge, Behan and Kavanagh -
but where is Bram Stoker?"
His Dublin based organization was set up as a global focal point for
the study of Stoker, and to gain for author the international
recognition his work and achievements s deserve.
"Sadly and shamefully the author is totally neglected in his own
birthplace, by his own people," the organization's website claims.
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