Imaginary Worlds - Dracula from Nebraska

Episode Date: January 28, 2016

We all know that novelist Bram Stoker based the character of Dracula off Vlad the Impailer, the Romanian prince who fought off the Turks -- or that's the urban legend. Stoker actually didn't research��Vlad that much, or vampire folklore. So scholars have looked into his personal life to suss out Stoker's inspiration. Many think Dracula could've been based on his employer, the famous actor Henry Irving. But Professor Louis Warren of UC Davis has another theory. The novel Dracula was inspired by a very unlikely persona: William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, star and creator of the Wild West show. Featuring voice actor John Keating, and WNYC's Katya Rogers.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Molenski. This was a Dracula indeed. Woe was it that his own unworthy brother, when he had fallen, sold his people to the Turk and brought the shame of slavery on them. It's a story that we all know, or think we know. The Irish novelist Abraham Stoker, otherwise known as Bram Stoker, was inspired to write Dracula when he read the tale of Vlad the Impaler, a 15th century Romanian warlord. Vlad defended his kingdom

against the Turks so fiercely, he hoisted his enemies' heads on sticks outside of his castle. But it turns out the Vlad-Dracula connection is kind of an urban legend. Because Vlad the Impaler was a hero to Romanians, who were really kind of mad about the whole Dracula connection, until Western tourists started showing up looking for Dracula's castle, and they realized they could make a lot of money off this thing. But vampire folklore, they're like, yeah, that's ours. There are many vampire stories that precede Dracula.

Stoker's working in what is a long-established tradition. Louis Warren teaches history at UC Davis in California, and he says what makes Dracula an unusual vampire character is that he comes to London, the height of modern civilization at the time. I mean, prior to that, you see all kinds of vampire stories about women seducing men in remote parts of the countryside and so forth. And it turns out the women are vampires. Vampire mythology, after all, came from Eastern Europe, which is a mostly rural region. And so most of those stories were rural stories.

I mean, they say you should write what you know. And Stoker apparently did not know a ton about vampire mythology, and he clearly knew even less about Vlad the Impaler. So literary scholars have been looking for clues in Stoker's life to figure out where the inspiration for Dracula could have come from. And that's where things get interesting. So for most of his career, Bram Stoker was not known as a writer. He was a theatrical manager for the most famous Shakespearean actor in the world, Henry Irving. Certainly the relationship of manager to star, that relationship we know so well, that kind of fraught relationship is something that Stoker is living in the 1880s and 90s.

And it's awful for him at times. It's just terrible. But he stuck with it. Stoker came to depend completely on Irving for his employment and his well-being and his family's well-being. And remember, Stoker has his own cultural aspirations outside of his relationship with Irving. He wants to be famous as a writer of fiction. Stoker wrote a lot of short stories, but Dracula was his most ambitious project. When Stoker wrote Dracula, he wrote it intending for it to become a play in which Irving would star.

Irving read the novel and dismissed it with one word, dreadful. It would have nothing to do with it. So was Henry Irving the real Dracula? He had the flamboyance, and he certainly had a power to draw people into his orbit and make them do his bidding. Irving's ability to manipulate people, to come to him and to give him what he wanted, always. And even I think Stoker must have been marveling in some level at his own complicity in this, that he continued to work for a man who was in many ways insufferable. But Louis Warren discovered something and came up with a theory about Dracula,

which has been under some debate, but it makes total sense to me. The novel Dracula couldn't exist as we know it if Bram Stoker hadn't met the only entertainer in the world who is more famous than his boss, Henry Irving. William F. Cody, known to the world as Buffalo Bill. So Louis Warren came up with this theory 15 years ago. He was doing research in England on Buffalo Bill's Wild West show and the reception that it got there. And he was delving into British culture at the time, and he decided to read Dracula, even though it came out 10 years after Buffalo Bill was in the UK. If you read the novel Dracula, there's this curious thing where one of the major

characters is from Texas, and he's kind of a cowboy figure. He speaks with a kind of, with at least Bram Stoker's attempt at a Western vernacular. He is a hunter and a fighter when the chase is on and they hunt down Dracula. He's the one who dispenses with Dracula's Romani bodyguards. And when Dracula dies in the novel, it's not with a wooden stake in his heart, but with a Bowie knife, which is put there by this Western guy, this guy named Quincy Morris. And that was really weird. I thought, what is a Westerner doing in this novel? Here we were interrupted in a very startling way. Outside the house came the sound of a pistol shot. The glass of the window was shattered with a bullet, which ricocheting from the house came the sound of a pistol shot. The glass of the window was

shattered with a bullet, which ricocheting from the top of the embrasure struck the far wall of the room. Lord Godalming flew over to the window and threw up the sash. As he did so, we heard Mr. Morris' voice without.

Sorry, I fear I've alarmed you. It was an idiotic thing of me to do, and I ask your pardon, Mrs. Harker, most sincerely. I fear I must have frightened you terribly. But the fact is that whilst the professor was talking, there came a big bat and sat on the windowsill. I've got such a horror of the damned brutes from recent events that I cannot stand them. And I went out to have a shot, as I've been doing of late of evenings,

whenever I've seen one. Did you hit it? asked Dr. Van Helsing. I don't know. I fancy not. For it flew away into the wood. Louis Warren started to wonder, was Bram Stoker at the Wild West show when it played in London? Turns out Stoker was there. In fact, he helped Buffalo Bill cross the Atlantic.

It all started in 1886. Bram Stoker was in New York because his boss, the world-famous Shakespearean actor Henry Irving, was performing there. And they went together to see the Wild West show, which was playing on Staten Island. Now, the Wild West show started out with Bill Cody telling stories about his days as a buffalo hunter and a scout for the army. And, you know, Annie Oakley would shoot glass balls in the air. But it eventually evolved to the point where Cody had this huge troop that would reenact entire battles from the Indian Wars, like Custer's Last Stand. And it was insanely popular. Native Americans signed up to be in the Wild West show because they got off the reservation, they got to see the rest of the country, and send money back home. Even though the context was humiliating. I mean, they were often reenacting

their own defeat in front of white audiences. Now, a performer like Henry Irving, with a gigantic ego, could have been jealous of Buffalo Bill Cody. Instead, he develops a huge man crush on him. And Henry Irving proposes that they bring the whole Wild West show to London. Cody loves this idea. London. Cody loves this idea. What this does for Cody is allow him to get a lot of what I would call middle class respectability. There were real concerns at the time that these were low class poor people who were going to be entertaining Americans with shows of gunplay and violence. It could be a real problem to attract the middle classes who really had the most money at the time, to attract them to your show.

And Cody had learned in his theatrical career that the way to do that was to get middle class women to come to your show. And they'll say to each other, Queen Victoria attended it and she loved it. Yes, it was. That was a huge plus. That was probably the biggest endorsement that Cody ever got. And in many ways, it was, you might say it was the only one he ever really needed. Yeah. Irving's like, you want Queen Victoria there? I can make that happen. And he's right.

She goes there twice because of his recommendation. They take Cody around to the various gentlemen's clubs and theatrical associations. They're at all of these fancy dinners together. And at one point, Cody goes on a coaching drive, and they drive in an open carriage with Henry Irving through Oatlands Park in London, and Bram Stoker is with them. And Stoker, many years later, would recall that coaching trip, he said, as they went through this park in a carriage. He said that that was the season that Buffalo Bill struck London like a planet.

It's funny, there are political cartoons from this time making fun of Henry Irving for being smitten with this American rube. And Stoker may have felt the same way. Buffalo Bill type characters start showing up in his fiction way before Quincy Morris hunts down Dracula. There are two male Western characters who show up in other Bram Stoker stories. They're both very similar to Quincy Morris. And they're both buffoons. One of them is in a story that he published initially in some years before Dracula, in which a Westerner named Elias P. Hutchison, who's from Nebraska.

And Cody was from Nebraska. Cody was from Nebraska, absolutely. And Elias P. Hutchison, in this story that Stoker writes, is an idiot who, they're visiting a castle in Nuremberg, Germany, and Elias P. Hutchison accidentally kills a kitten belonging to a black cat, and then he goes into the torture chamber, and he decides to climb into the Iron Maiden, you know, that big device with spikes on the inside, to see what it was like, and the cat triggers the switch on the Iron Maiden and manages to kill Elias P. Hutchison.

Then there's another story from actually just a couple of years before Dracula called The Shoulder of Shasta. And this western frontier figure is this rugged mountain trapper who dresses much like Buffalo Bill Cody did in his show with these thigh length boots and this fancy kind of beaded buckskin outfit and speaks in that Western vernacular, but he's a complete buffoon. His name is unfortunately Grizzly Dick. And in the story, a young English woman actually rescues Grizzly Dick from a bear. And then she falls in love with him and begins to pine away. And she is rescued from this unfortunate love affair with an American who's never suitable for her by the appearance of a strapping athletic English artist named Reginald. Buffalo Bill actually has another thing in common

with Dracula. Well, we all know Dracula is irresistible. Women cannot resist his gaze. And Cody, when he arrived in England, was hailed as an extraordinarily handsome man. One eyewitness said that bouquets of flowers arrived at his apartment hourly, sent by English women to him. What struck some commentators in the popular media was how unsavory this was, that he is known for his violence, and he shows up over here with a big entertainment, and suddenly English women are throwing themselves at him. I don't know if there'd be a Mrs. Buffalo Bill. If there is, she must at this moment be tearing her own or more likely her husband's lovely black hair out by the yard with jealousy.

One female professor of the Blood Royal, three duchesses, seven countesses in their own right, and eight sixth dittos with no rights excepting wrongs, have each and every debretted one of them offered up their richly jeweled hands and highly chaste hearts to beauteous Buffalo Bill. There actually was a Mrs. Buffalo Bill back home tearing her hair out until she got a good lawyer, but that's a whole other story. Now, some journalists wrote at the time that Cody's reception reminded them of two other famous instances when foreigners took London by storm and seduced high society ladies. But Louis Warren thought that these were really weird comparisons because in both of those instances, the foreign dignitaries were not white. Cody is clearly and proudly Anglo-Saxon, but one political cartoonist draws him as a dark-skinned, bushy-haired wild man, lounging in a tux as ladies in gowns swoon

all over him. England and America in this period claimed kinship. There was a great deal of fascination with what was called the empire of Anglo-Saxon-dom. But it has a kind of counterpoint in this idea that emigrating to a different country and encountering a different environment and conquering that environment turns you into something else. Endless warfare on a savage frontier with pagan peoples ultimately can turn the Anglo-Saxons or whoever else into a bloodthirsty menace in their own right. Wars that don't end make for bloodthirsty people. I think that Stoker plays this out, this fantasy out on the dark side in the novel Dracula. One of the things about Dracula himself that is often missed in the films that we see of Dracula is that he comes from a frontier, and it's called a frontier, the frontier of Turkey land, where he's been

fighting the Turks. And his story, when he recounts it near the beginning of that novel, is that he fought the Turks decade after decade. And we learn in the course of the novel that he made a pact with the devil to fight the Turks. And to be able to beat the Turks, he received this gift of being undead. It's not so much a gift, it's a curse. But it's his need to stay eternally awake on that frontier to push the Turks back and to constantly fight these battles that makes him that kind of nightmare figure. to keep fighting forever. When would he be seduced and to go over to the dark side on the other side of the line? Which is what has essentially happened to Dracula. He's not become the Turk. He's not become Muslim. What he's become is a monster that must feed his own appetite for blood endlessly. And when the Turk is held at bay, that monster will consume the people that it purported to defend. In fact, Louis says

the Gothic stories that Bram Stoker liked to tell aren't that different from Wild West narratives. These stories are inversions of each other. They are ways of imagining what happens when we go beyond borders, when we seek things in strange places. Whatever our motivations and intentions, those places can change us. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well. As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph. But on the instant came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife.

I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart, it was like a miracle. But before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight. I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there. Mr Morris, who had sunk to the ground, leaned on his elbow, holding his hand pressed to his side. The blood still gushed through his fingers. In the novel, it's actually Quincy Morris' death that ends the action.

He struggles with Dracula and kills him, drives his bowie knife through his heart, but in the process has killed himself. And he's the last one to die. Jonathan knelt behind him, and the wounded man laid back his head on his shoulder. With a sigh he took, with a feeble effort, my hand in that of his own which was unstained. He must have seen the anguish of my heart in my face, for he smiled at me and said, I am only too happy to have been of service. Oh God, he cried suddenly, struggling to a sitting

posture and pointing to me. It was worth for this to die. Look, look. The sun was now right down upon the mountaintop, and the red gleams fell upon my face, so that it was bathed in rosy light. With one impulse the men sank on their knees, and a deep and earnest Amen broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. broke from all as their eyes followed the pointing of his finger. The dying man spoke. Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain. See, the snow is not more stainless than her forehead. The curse has passed away.

It's a way, I think, that Stoker stages a meeting between the hero of the first frontier, now become this dark, monstrous anti-hero figure of Dracula, and the hero of the last frontier, Quincy Morris. And the two collide, and that energy, that endless war that they carry on, in that spirit that they can't let go. They can never stop fighting. They cancel each other out. And this leaves the Englishmen, the civilized Englishmen and the Dutch professor and the woman, Mina Harker, who is the woman they're saving from becoming a vampire,

leaves them to all go back to England together and to be civilized and genteel. But these two frontier figures are gone. And it's almost as if Stoker is saying, you know, we're better off without that kind of problem. The Stokers' financial problems never ended. Bram Stoker's boss, Henry Irving, died in 1905. Stoker is still working for him at that time. And then he himself died seven years later.

He didn't live to see Dracula become a world-famous icon, but his widow, Florence Balcombe, did. She filed a lawsuit against the German filmmakers who created Nosferatu in the 1920s for copyright infringement. And she helped stage a successful play of Dracula, which got the attention of Universal Pictures and Hollywood. She finally began to reap the financial benefits of Stoker's creation in the 1930s. And then she died. In many ways, the whole story of Dracula and its production afterwards is the production of the novel and of the character becomes a sort of story of a figure who's endlessly adaptable and uncontainable, even by the artist that created him. As for the frontier, those wars without end,

they keep adapting to the present moment. And when we can't find a hero to protect us, we'll settle for a monster in the end. Well, that's it for this week's show. Thanks for listening. Special thanks this week to Louis Warren, John Keating, and Katja Rogers. You can like Imaginary Worlds on Facebook, a tweet at emolinski. The show's website is imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Panoply