Dracula Was A Woman

Bath Awry

Dracula Was A Woman - In Search Of The Blood Countess Of Transylvania
by Raymond T. McNally
Book Club Associates (No obvious ISBN)

Dracula Was A Woman - In Search Of The Blood Countess Of Transylvania is one of the earlier books, published in 1983, about the famous Countess known as Elisabeth Bathóry (or Báthory Erzsébet, as it is in Hungarian). And, a fair amount of research has gone into it so, for that reason alone, the volume is worth some consideration. This one was a Twitter recommendation I saw flying by in my timeline and, after procuring a very cheap, second hand hardback copy from Amazon, I was all set to read about a pretty legendary... in terms of being infamous... person who has been exploited as a character in many a movie over the last six or so decades (and probably in a lot of other media too, such as literature) and has become, of late, something of a pop culture phenomenon.

Now there’s good and bad about this book and, mostly, I’d have to say that this one gets an A for effort but a C minus in terms of being a focussed, coherent and ‘on topic’ read.

Now, I’ve not read any of Mr. McNally’s books before but the four books he both wrote and co-wrote before this one have all been about Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the inspirations behind it so... this is definitely the kind of thing he's a bit of a specialist on. And, to be fair, the first chapter is set out in diary fashion and captures the imagination a little because, in this way of writing and only for that opening after his introduction to the book, he is deliberately echoing the diary style narrative of the content of Stoker’s novel itself. So we witness the author and his wife have a bit of a ‘research holiday’ in Munich, Vienna and Bratislava and find that ‘Transylvania’ certainly exists in these parts as a place because, as he explains, it’s an expression that comes from the latin for “the land beyond the forest’. Which is quite interesting and not something I knew before reading this so, while I was a little disappointed in certain sections of the tome, I was at least learning things as I went so you really can’t judge a book too harshly if you’re being educated on the journey from cover to cover.

After McNally finishes his research tour, in which he makes friends with various people ‘in the know’ in the relevant countries, he finds himself in possession of a fair amount of knowledge gleaned from ‘new documentation’ that has been found in order to aid his trip. And when I say new documentation, I mean newly discovered documentation, as various people have dusted away the cobwebs and presumably opened boxes and drawers they’d never bothered to open before.

This all flows very nicely for the author to build up a picture of Bathóry over the next few chapters and help give at least a little... well not so much ‘evidence’ but an unearthing of the possibility that Stoker took the myths (not facts, as it turns out) about the lady in question and used them in Dracula. And by this we are, of course, talking about Bathóry’s spoken legacy that she bathed in the blood of freshly killed virgins in order to keep herself young and healthy. Indeed, there is a passage in Stoker’s novel where the grey old man who is Stoker’s original version of the famous Count, becomes visibly younger after drinking the fresh blood of one of his victims. So, yeah, I’m sure the idea for this may well have kickstarted the brain of Stoker and it’s possible Elisabeth Bathóry was an influence on his creation. Or... not, we just don’t really know. Or at least, we didn’t back when this book was written. It may be that one of the other volumes written about the subject in the intervening decades were able to throw light via even more newly discovered documentation but, since I’ve not read any of them, I can’t offer up any kind of confirmation of that.

Certainly here, apart from one tale about Bathóry accidentally cleaning some blood off her cheek and finding the tissue under where the blood splashed had become somewhat rejuvenated, there’s no evidence to support the famous blood bathing claims which have arisen in numerous films based on the legends such as, for example, Hammer’s Countess Dracula (reviewed by me here back in the early days of this blog). However, as McNally suggests, there is no real evidence to support the claim that this was part of the Countess’ practices.

What is pretty clear though, from the more historical and very dry first half of the book, is that Bathóry and her accomplices tortured and killed possibly over 650 young women and that a trial was held in an effort to punish these people not because the powers that be were all that bothered about somebody killing the peasants in fairly harsh and brutal ways... but because they wanted to get hold of the land and so on that the Countess owned (if I’ve been reading this account correctly).

So far so good but, then we have the second half of the book where the writer seems to somehow use the excuse of all his further, elliptical research... perhaps because he’d be in trouble with his wife if he wasn't looking at all this stuff in order to write a book, I somehow suspect... to write about all manner of things which really do seem to be tangentially related to the subject at hand.

Some of it, such as random accounts of the various rituals and practices of drinking blood throughout history and the demonisation of women due to various cultures rejecting the concept of menstruation, seems somewhat relevant. As does, at a stretch, the stuff about vampires. However, when he starts going into werewolfery and justifies this examination of lycanthropy (which actually doesn’t mean quite what a lot of people think it means, it seems to me) just because Bathóry tended to rend the flesh of many of her victims with her teeth... well, the whole thing loses a fair bit of credibility for me.

So yeah, as interesting as it is to learn about things like the female undead Eskimos devouring their victims with their vaginas and various blood deficiencies leading to ‘living vampires’ in real life, so to speak... well, the stuff all comes seemingly randomly with no real focus, it seemed to me... let alone being relevant to the title and subject of the book a lot of the time. What finally wrecked this book for me, though, was when the author tried to talk about films at various points...

As far as I know, for example, 2001 - A Space Odyssey is not based on Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. I mean, sure, the movie has a piece of music in it based on that but... you know... that’s just the music. Also, there certainly wasn’t two seasons of Kolchack - The Night Stalker ever made... sadly (and this was written decades before the stillborn attempt at a remake of that property too). And what the hell have films like Halloween, The Haunting or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre got to do with Elisabeth Bathóry? The straw that broke the camel’s back for me with this book, though was when he was talking about my favourite werewolf movie, Werewolf Of London and said that a werewolf played by Warner Hand bites Henry Hull’s character at the start of the movie. Um... nope... that would be the great Charlie Chan actor himself, Warner Oland, in this role. Honestly, how can you get your facts so wrong. It’s like he was writing it in long hand and the person typing it up couldn’t read Oland properly and put Hand instead. Seriously?

And that for me, alas, is where the book unravels a little bit for me because... look, I know the man is a historian and not touting himself as an expert on film but these are basic mistakes and incorrect assertions and the worrying thing for someone like me who is a complete novice on the subject of Bathóry is... if he gets really obvious stuff like  this wrong, then who’s to say he’s not also making some terribly obvious mistakes in all the other stuff he’s purporting to be ‘fact’ here?

Now, I don’t really like conclusions in academic(ish) works but I was kinda looking forward to one here because I was really rooting for the author to somehow tie all these marvellously ‘off point’, randomly appearing anecdotes together and say ... "Aha! You thought this was irrelevant but here’s why it isn’t!" Alas, although there is a conclusion section to the book, it doesn’t seem to shed anymore light on the subject and so I have to say that I can’t really recommend this book to many people, although to be sure it does have some interesting content and it’s certainly whet my appetite to find out some more about the subject in more modern tomes at some point... especially since Bathóry’s such a well referenced, somewhat inspirational (if you know what I mean) figure in the arts these days. Following the conclusion there are a couple of short documents translated into English regarding the findings of the original trial and the very grim punishments put to the lady’s accomplices which is kinda interesting but isn’t enough really, to my mind, to save Dracula Was A Woman. However, applause to the writer for at least attempting this book when, frankly, not many people of the time were writing too much about it, it seems to me (despite film culture having already gone into overdrive on this particular person by a good two or three decades before this was written). So, enter the lady’s chamber if you will but, in terms of actual factual accuracy of the subject matter... enter at your own risk.