Carmilla’s Kindred: Countess Dolingen and Dracula’s Guest

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Women Write About Comics celebrates the 150th anniversary of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla with a series of posts on female vampires in nineteenth-century literature. This is the last in the series.

No discussion of female vampires in nineteenth-century literature would be complete without mentioning “Dracula’s Guest”, even though this story did not see publication until the twentieth century. It debuted in Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, a 1914 posthumously-published collection of tales by Bram Stoker. Florence Stoker, the author’s widow, wrote a preface indicating that her late husband originally wrote “Dracula’s Guest” back in the 1890s as a portion of Dracula:

A few months before the lamented death of my husband—I might say even as the shadow of death was over him—he planned three series of short stories for publication, and the present volume is one of them. To his original list of stories in this book, I have added a hitherto unpublished episode from “Dracula.” It was originally excised owing to the length of the book, and may prove of interest to the many readers of what is considered my husband’s most remarkable work.
The other stories have already been published in English and American periodicals. Had my husband lived longer, he might have seen fit to revise this work, which is mainly from the earlier years of his strenuous life. But as fate has entrusted to me the issuing of it, I consider it fitting and proper to let it go forth practically as it was left by him.

In recent decades, some commentators have questioned this account of the story’s origins, as we shall see later.

Cover of Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories, showing a man being attacked by a wolf.

“Dracula’s Guest” begins with an unnamed Englishman setting out by carriage from Munich, only for the journey to be halted by his superstitious coachman Johann. Walpurgis Night is due to fall; the carriage has arrived at a crossroad, a location associated with the burial of those who die by suicide; and the sound of wolves can be heard, even though there are supposedly no wolves so close to the city.

The Englishman tries to get specifics from Johann as to exactly where the present road leads, only to be given a strange tale of vampires:

[H]e burst out into a long story in German and English, so mixed up that I could not quite understand exactly what he said, but roughly I gathered that long ago, hundreds of years, men had died there and been buried in their graves; and sounds were heard under the clay, and when the graves were opened, men and women were found rosy with life, and their mouths red with blood. And so, in haste to save their lives (aye, and their souls!—and here he crossed himself) those who were left fled away to other places, where the living lived, and the dead were dead and not—not something. He was evidently afraid to speak the last words.

Frustrated by these superstitions, the protagonist dismisses Johann and heads off alone on foot. He looks back to see Johann on the return trip to Munich with his horses – a trip interrupted by the arrival of a tall, thin man from over a nearby hill. The horses are thrown into a panic at the sight of this mysterious stranger, who disappears as the animals flee into the distance.

The Englishman carries on and comes to the deserted village where he finds a cemetery containing a vast marble tomb. An epitaph in German reveals that the occupant is one Countess Dolingen of Graz in Styria, who “sought and found death” in 1801. The back of the tomb has another message, this time written in Russian letters: “The dead travel fast” (this phrase, a quotation from Gottfried August Bürger’s “Lenore”, also turns up in Dracula), A large iron spike or stake protrudes from the top of the tomb – and appears to have been driven down inside.

The traveller’s dismissive attitude towards Johann’s superstition vanishes at the realisation that he is alone in such a place on Walpurgis Night, the time when the Devil is said to be abroad in the world. Meanwhile, a storm that has been brewing in the background becomes still more intense: the ground shakes, and huge hailstones penetrate any shelter provided by the trees. The Englishman’s only escape is down into the marble tomb. As he begins to descend, he meets an alarming sight:

The shelter of even a tomb was welcome in that pitiless tempest, and I was about to enter it when there came a flash of forked-lightning that lit up the whole expanse of the heavens. In the instant, as I am a living man, I saw, as my eyes were turned into the darkness of the tomb, a beautiful woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier. As the thunder broke overhead, I was grasped as by the hand of a giant and hurled out into the storm.

He catches sight of the woman one last time as the storm reaches its peak:

Just then there came another blinding flash, which seemed to strike the iron stake that surmounted the tomb and to pour through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in a burst of flame. The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash. The last thing I heard was this mingling of dreadful sound, as again I was seized in the giant-grasp and dragged away, while the hailstones beat on me, and the air around seemed reverberant with the howling of wolves. The last sight that I remembered was a vague, white, moving mass, as if all the graves around me had sent out the phantoms of their sheeted-dead, and that they were closing in on me through the white cloudiness of the driving hail.

He loses consciousness, and awakens to find a gigantic wolf licking at his throat. But the wolf is driven away by a troop of horsemen, who nurse him back to health. One of the soldiers comments that there is no point in going after the wolf – they lack the sacred bullet necessary for the job.

Back in Munich, the Englishman learns that he owes his rescue to the owner of his hotel, who sent out a search party for him after receiving a telegram from a certain aristocrat:

Bistritz.
Be careful of my guest—his safety is most precious to me. Should aught happen to him, or if he be missed, spare nothing to find him and ensure his safety. He is English and therefore adventurous. There are often dangers from snow and wolves and night. Lose not a moment if you suspect harm to him. I answer your zeal with my fortune.—
Dracula.

Controversy surrounds the exact relationship between “Dracula’s Guest” and Dracula, the novel from which it was supposedly excised. While Stoker’s extensive notes for his famous novel were later found, and eventually published in 2013 as Bram Stoker’s Notes for “Dracula”: A Facsimile Edition, to date nobody has traced the manuscript for “Dracula’s Guest” for comparison with the published edition.

In his Bram Stoker biography Something in the Blood, David J. Skal comments that the story “is a notably polished piece of prose, free from the clumsy syntax that often mars Stoker’s writing, including Dracula.” Skal also points to anecdotal evidence from Noel Stoker – the son of Bram and Florence – that a man named Jarvis provided assistance in preparing “Dracula’s Guest” for publication. How much of the story is Bram Stoker’s work, and how much was provided by Jarvis or some other posthumous collaborator, may never be known.

That said, Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller provide evidence in their annotated facsimile of Stoker’s notes that “Dracula’s Guest” does indeed have its roots in an early draft of the novel. Stoker intended to start Dracula with correspondence between the Count and his lawyers, followed by the various exploits of protagonist Jonathan Harker in Munich. The author’s scattered notes show that the Munich sequence would have contained, alongside mundane activities such as a trip to a museum, an encounter with a wolf and a snowstorm in the run-up to Walpurgis Night.

Meanwhile, Stoker’s typescript features lines deleted from the final draft of the novel – lines that clearly relate to events from “Dracula’s Guest”. Harker mentions having his throat licked by a wolf; he later tells Dracula about an incident in Munich that involved the arrival of soldiers. Another deleted passage comes from the famous sequence where Harker encounters three female vampires: “it suddenly dawned on me that she was the woman – or her image – that I saw in the tomb on Walpurgis Night.” A remnant of this connection remains even in the published version of Dracula, where Harker finds one of the three women strangely familiar: “I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where.”

If “Dracula’s Guest” is truly an excised portion of Dracula, then it is significant as a Stokerian vampire encounter distinct from the novel’s other, more frequently adapted and imitated sequences: the encounter with the “weird sisters”; the death and resurrection of Lucy; the various incidents concerning stakes and beheadings.

Perhaps most notably, the story turns out to evoke J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla as much as it does the familiar stretches of Dracula. The setting of an abandoned village inhabited only by vampires is one also used by Le Fanu. The fact that the vampire Countess Dolingen is associated with Styria makes another Carmilla connection, as the latter story takes place in that state.

Dracula may be the most famous vampire of all – but we should not forget that Carmilla helped pave his way.

Series Navigation<< Carmilla’s Kindred: Ivan Turgenev and Unhappy Clara
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Doris V. Sutherland

Doris V. Sutherland

Horror historian, animation addict and tubular transdudette. Catch me on Twitter @dorvsutherland, or view my site at dorisvsutherland.com. If you like my writing enough to fling money my way, then please visit patreon.com/dorvsutherland or ko-fi.com/dorvsutherland.

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