Countess Dracula (2 page)

The Grand Guignol atmosphere and hyperbole of Valentine Penrose's work, but not its quirkily obsessive charm, were reheated for the French market with Maurice Périsset's
Comtesse de Sang,
published in Paris in 1975. Périsset recounts a formative episode from the same Countess's childhood (she was born in 1560), an incident that taught the highly strung young girl how the power of life and death could be exercised with impunity over her social inferiors, and how snuffing out their worthless lives could be both exemplary and entertaining. The gypsies on her family demesnes in eastern Hungary were lower in status even than the Slav and Magyar serfs, eking out a living by burning wood for charcoal, mending pots and pans, or selling rotting horseflesh. One of these outcasts was suspected of selling his daughter to the Turks for cash, and was dragged before the local justices and condemned. The pubescent heiress was taken from the manor-house by her parents, or, some say, escaped from her tutor's supervision,
to witness the execution. In a ritual inspired by the pre-Christian nomadic culture of the Great Plain, a horse was disembowelled and the gypsy forced into its stomach, which was then sewn up, leaving him to die slowly inside the putrefying carcass. The young girl, at first repelled by the scene, is finally overcome by the black humour of it, and gives herself up to helpless laughter.

These same tableaux appear in one form or another in most of the literature which has grown up around the persona of the Bloody Hungarian Countess, but there is another scene, essential to her mythos, which is present in all the accounts. This was introduced for the first time to the wider English-speaking readership, or so later commentators have invariably believed, by the author of that rousing Victorian hymn ‘Onward Christian Soldiers', the Reverend Sabine Baring-Gould, in his
Book of Were-wolves
published in London in 1865. But, quite apart from the many entries in continental reference works which had appeared by the 1840s and which would have been accessible to the educated Englishman, there was another publication, rediscovered by this author, which more elegantly set out the essence of the Báthory myth in the English language as early as 1839. John Paget's travelogue, long out of print, contains the following passage:

Elisabeth was of a severe and cruel disposition, and her handmaidens led no joyous life. Slight faults are said to have been punished by most merciless tortures. One day, as the lady of Csejta was adorning at her mirror those charms which that faithful monitor told her were fast waning, she gave way to her ungovernable temper, excited, perhaps by the mirror's unwelcome hint, and struck her unoffending maid with such force in the face as to draw blood. As she washed from her hand the stain, she fancied that the part which the blood had touched grew whiter, softer, and, as it were, more young. Imbued with the dreams of the age, she believed that
accident
had revealed to her what so many philosophers had wasted years to discover – that in a maiden's blood she possessed the
elixir vitae,
the source of never failing youth and beauty. Remorseless by nature, and now urged on by that worst of woman's weaknesses, vanity, no sooner did the thought flash across her brain than her resolution was taken; the life of her luckless handmaiden seemed as nought compared with the rich boon her murder promised to secure.
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This is the nub, the kernel of the fable, which is shared by all the histories, the novelisations, the plays and poems and operas that took Elisabeth Báthory as their inspiration. Paget continues: ‘Not satisfied with the first essay, at different intervals, by the aid of . . . accomplices and [a] secret passage, no less than three hundred handmaidens were sacrificed at the shrine of vanity and superstition.'
⁵

An image of the Lady of the Manor, seated in her marble bath and washing her white breasts and shoulders in blood, is the focal-point in the Paris-based Polish director Walerian Borowczyk's portmanteau film,
Contes Immoraux
(‘Immoral Tales') made in 1974.
⁶
Countess Elisabeth Báthory is played by the fashion designer and socialite Paloma Picasso, daughter of the painter. The juxtaposition of crass soft pornography, action which veers between living sculpture and bedroom farce, and a poetic, surrealist vision of fetishistic beauty is typical of Borowczyk and evokes a quintessentially eastern – now we should say central – European atmosphere: the claustrophobia of landlocked places and the irruption of tragedy into slow, soporific lives.

A peculiarly French tradition of the avant-garde which appropriates historical figures for a cult of sin and erotic excess lies behind the work of Penrose, Pizarnik, Borowczyk who was in exile in Paris and the several operas and plays produced in the 1970s and 1980s which portrayed Elisabeth Báthory as a symbol of tragic, almost heroic, abandon. This tradition is epitomised by the writings of Georges Bataille, high-priest of transgression and promoter of an aesthetic of the morbid and the pornographic, coiner of slogans such as ‘eroticism is the affirmation of life, even unto death'. Bataille writes of Báthory as one of his
outrés et dépensés
exemplars of redemption through the practice of evil in works such as
Les Larmes d'Éros
(‘The Tears of Eros'). Her most memorable, indeed only, appearance under her own name in the English-speaking cinema was in a film which was to become a staple of late-night horror festivals and celebrations of kitsch cinema. It was this film, the 1970 production
Countess Dracula,
that introduced the nickname by which Elisabeth Báthory is often known in the English-speaking world.
⁷
The film was firmly fixed within the popular horror genre for which Hammer films were known: the introduction of a female vampire was a logical progression from the standard plots based on variations of the Dracula, Frankenstein, werewolf and mummy clichés which Hammer had reinterpreted
ad nauseam.

Countess Dracula
was produced and directed by Alexander Paal and
Peter Sasdy, both expatriate Hungarians. This concept was credited to the Hungarian writer Gabriel Ronay, who later produced a book,
The Truth about Dracula,
which claimed that Countess Báthory had indeed been a living vampire and the precursor of Bram Stoker's Count, but that the drinking of human blood and the bathing in the blood of virgins had been thought too shocking and had been removed from the official evidence given against her in her lifetime (hardly a credible thesis given the horrors that were recorded).
⁸
Despite its originators' nationality there is no sense in the film of the primary colours of the hot Hungarian landscape in summer, nor of the black-and-white Slovak winter when an iron cold settles on the stark forests and mute villages. The sense of life as a gallop and a dance, punctuated with moments of passionate melancholy, that can sometimes still be felt in Hungary is missing.

At least 320 films with a vampire theme were released between 1920 and 1990. Strangely, for a medium and a genre that have thrived on exaggeration, the handful of horror films which have been based on the legend of Elisabeth Báthory have shied away from confronting the enormity of her wickedness. A straightforward dramatisation of the crimes alleged against her in her lifetime – the murder of more than 600 women, genital mutilation, cannibalism – would entail a bloodbath – figuratively and literally – that would stretch the tolerance of the most liberal of end-of-century censors and risk unsettling even the most hardened
aficionado
of splatter-movies.

Of the films based on Countess Báthory's career only Peter Sasdy's made the explicit link with ‘Dracula', borrowing the name for purely commercial reasons which had nothing to do with the plot. Nevertheless, the idea that the Irishman Bram Stoker's fictional Count Dracula was indeed based to a large extent on the personality of Elisabeth has been promoted by Raymond McNally, the American author who, sometimes writing with the Romanian Radu Florescu, has contributed a whole series of books and articles to recent vampire literature. After producing a biography of the historical Dracula, Vlad Tepes ‘the Impaler', McNally briefly visited Austria and the then Czechoslovakia and wrote
Dracula Was a Woman,
subtitled
In Search of the Blood Countess of Transylvania,
(1983) which provided a brief summary of the career of Countess Báthory together with a long vampire-related bibliography and filmography.

McNally points out that there are several elements in Stoker's
novel (first published in 1897) which cannot be directly inspired by Vlad: Stoker's vampire is one of the Székely people of Transylvania, ethnically Magyar not Wallachian; he is a count rather than a prince, and – perhaps most importantly – he enhances his youthfulness by drinking human blood, a detail not found in any of the other sources known to have been consulted by Stoker. The difficulty in confirming any such connection is that Bram Stoker kept copious notes during the long gestation period that his novel went through, and although it is known that he met the Hungarian Ármin Vambéry, an expert on his country's history, there was no mention at all of Countess Báthory in those notes. It is certain, however, that Stoker was familiar with Baring-Gould's
Book of Were-wolves,
quoted above, but had he been considering writing about a vampire
femme fatale
with strongly sapphic tendencies, Stoker need have looked no further back than 1871, to Carmilla, the heroine of the novella of the same name published by J. Sheridan le Fanu, another Victorian author of Irish blood.
⁹

From folklore and anthropological studies le Fanu took the notion of an unquiet soul who returns to earth in human or animal form to drain the life gradually from its mortal victims. In his tale, set in the Styrian region of Austria, an undead countess, Carmilla Karnstein, befriends the heroine Laura, who, after half-remembered nocturnal visits from her strange acquaintance, finds herself wasting away. Le Fanu nowhere acknowledged the Báthory legends as the source of his work, and he need not have known of them firsthand to have introduced the device of a female aristocrat as villain; the concept had been rehearsed in Tieck's
Swanhilda,
Hoffmann's
Aurelia
and Poe's
Berenice
among others. But the setting of the story in the lands of the Habsburg Empire may be significant, for it was there that the legends of the historical Countess Báthory had become embedded in folklore.

Thus it does seem likely that Elisabeth had infiltrated the literary consciousness of horror writers in English but was not acknowledged. Why was she herself not celebrated in Victorian fiction? European neighbours have found it difficult to appreciate the extent of a puritanism in Victorian society (even allowing for its seamier underworld) which lingered well into the 1960s. Any more than a hint of lesbianism, for example, let alone unnatural love coupled with female sadism, was a taboo until recently; and many people have found blood-drinking distasteful and blood-bathing even more so. One
hundred years ago for a writer like Stoker, the idea of choosing as a heroine a blood-obsessed lesbian mass-murderess would have been a short cut to literary obscurity.

The first and last appearance of any Báthory in English literature was the invention of the fictional ‘Bethlen Báthory' – an amalgam of Elisabeth Báthory's nephew Prince Gábor and his successor, Gábor Bethlen, by Coleridge for his play
Zápolya
(his least successful work), which in its risibly confused version of Hungarian history – the historical tyrant King John Zápolya
¹⁰
is transformed into Báthory's mother – is characteristic of the cavalier way in which Hungary's history has been toyed with by outsiders when they have bothered to consider it at all.
¹¹

To locate and make sense of Elisabeth Báthory is not going to be an easy task. Looking for her demands an imaginative displacement in space and time, to a part of Europe which, almost a century after the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and half a decade on from the end of communism, is still largely unknown or misunderstood, and to a time which forms a precarious bridge between our own post-Enlightenment reality – difficult enough to negotiate if we look back more than a generation or two – and the almost unknowable mediaeval world which went before.

During the long years of the Turkish wars Hungary was a place where only a handful of mercenaries and adventurers from the rest of Europe cared or dared to go. Captain John Smith, the husband of Pocahontas, fought there against the infidel, as did several of the Devonian ‘gentlemen of the West' in Walter Ralegh's circle.
¹²
News of Magyar heroism and rumours of Byzantine excesses committed inside the ramparts of mysterious Transylvania filtered back to London and Paris by way of Constantinople, and when the Turks withdrew at the end of the seventeenth century there was an intense curiosity, especially in neighbouring Austria and Italy, about what really lay in these once forbidden territories on the ill-defined eastern fringes of the Christian world.

Vampire fiction has invariably been refracted to us through a Germanic lens – its dramas have been set among dank forests, brooding, cold fortresses, but Elisabeth Báthory's history was played out not to the sound of groaning pipe-organs and beer-songs, but in a region where cimbalom and cithare music hangs in the warm air.
The Scot William Lithgow records several times his wonder at the late-summer landscape of Hungary in 1616: ‘. . . Hungary . . . may be termed the granary of Ceres, the garden of Bacchus, the pasturage of Pan, and the richest beauty of Sylvan; for I found the wheat here growing higher than my head, the vines overlooking the trees, the grass justling with my knees, and the high sprung woods threatening the clouds.'
¹³
Other later travellers from Britain and France indulged their prejudices and frequently complained about the bad conditions of the roads in Hungary, the ferocious aspect of the people, and the discomfort suffered in the inns and taverns which they were forced to patronise.
¹⁴