THE READING RHEUM: THE LADY OF THE SHROUD (1909)

 

SPOIILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

I don’t know what was going on in the mind of Bram Stoker in 1909 when he wrote his second-to-last novel THE LADY OF THE SHROUD (succeeded by THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM). I don’t even know how he felt about his 1897 masterpiece DRACULA, given that one account claimed the book didn’t sell all that well. But the first time I read SHROUD over thirty years ago, my impression was that Stoker was re-purposing old story-tropes and turning them on their heads, while unfortunately showing little awareness of what the tropes appealing in the first place.

SHROUD, like DRACULA, is a novel told via the letters exchanged by various characters. The action of the novel is the geographical reverse of DRACULA, since (aside from a short prelude) the story starts in England and then shifts for the remainder of the narrative to Eastern Europe. Instead of setting the novel in a real country e.g. Transylvania, Stoker takes a page from Anthony Hope and invents a small Balkan nation and gifts this fictional locale with the wordy cognomen “The Land of the Blue Mountains.” (In my review I will just call it “that Balkan place.”) Whereas DRACULA only devoted fleeting attention to the culture of Transylvania, SHROUD reads like a Balkan chamber of commerce report, with the author constantly extolling the steadfast charms of the locals.

SHROUD also includes vampirism, but (remember my spoilers) it’s of the fake variety. Stoker doesn’t even concoct a decent Gothic hoax, for his main interest is in providing a wish-fulfillment fantasy for his main character, an impoverished young adventurer who ends up becoming the ruler of this untamed Balkan land. Rupert Saint Leger, a poor relation to a rich family (whose history is given in exhausting detail in the novel’s first fifty pages), lives the life of a footloose adventurer, which includes investigating a lot of cultures and their claims to making magic. Then he’s summoned to England to receive a rich relative’s bequest. I’m not sure who was the first author to have a legatee forced to stay in an old mansion to gain his inheritance, but Rupert may be among the first. Rupert inherits his uncle’s castle in the Balkan place, but only if he stays there a year, overseeing all of the uncle’s business affairs with the Balkanians. Rupert happily accepts, for he has almost no real family ties. His father perished as a soldier in India at some unspecified time, and Rupert was twelve when he lost his (never named) mother. He does have strong ties, though, with his maternal aunt and surrogate mother Janet, who eventually joins Rupert in his new castle.

Rupert, who immediately appreciates the Balkanians for being as flawlessly noble and generous as he is, only encounters one impediment to success. One night a beautiful woman clad in grave-clothes wanders into his castle. She doesn’t give him her name or her history, and then wanders away again. On her second visit Rupert trails her and finds that she’s sleeping in a mausoleum, which is enough proof for Rupert that she must be a vampire (though she never claims to be such). Considering that the young man dismisses most occult beliefs as superstition, his credulity might raise a few eyebrows. Naturally love takes Rupert by storm, and he even marries the unnamed shroud-lady believing she’s undead, before eventually learning that she’s participating in an involved (but non-malicious) hoax.

The charade is so transparent, and Rupert is so dumb, that I’m tempted to banish LADY OF THE SHROUD from the annals of metaphenomenal literature. However, dull though all the pseudo-vampirism stuff is, I suppose the book still qualifies as an uncanny Gothic. But Stoker’s passion is clearly not for the phantasmal but for the political, for he devotes many sections to the role of the Balkan state in the European political scene of the time. Over time noble-souled Rupert becomes a noble in truth, for his phony vampire-lady is actually a real Balkan princess, and Rupert’s courageous defense of the Balkan people against invading Turks propels him to the position of the Balkan place’s king. But even as a political thriller, LADY OF THE SHROUD feels like a poor man’s PRISONER OF ZENDA—at least in part because Rupert is so fearsomely dull.

Given that DRACULA has been subjected to a thousand and one psychological readings, one would hope that SHROUD would at least hold some interest in that department. But Big Sigmund would have found little of interest here. Rupert’s father is barely mentioned, nor does any character serve as a credible paternal surrogate. Rupert’s mother is equally under-characterized, with Aunt Janet serving as the maternal substitute. The fact that Rupert brings Janet to the castle to live with him could be interpreted as “desire for the mother,” but there are only two suggestive moments. In one scene, Rupert observes that his very aged aunt has nevertheless kept her “girlish figure.” In another scene, he imagines his aunt (who is irritated with him for some reason) trying to spank him, a grown man, the way she did when he was a child. But this reflection is played for comedy, as are Aunt Janet’s unsubstantiated claims to “the second sight.” Since Rupert’s mother died when he was twelve, he ought to remember her, and Stoker could have drawn some parallels between the lost mother and the recrudescent Lady of the Shroud. Such parallels could have been maintained even once the revenant-fantasy was dispelled. But Stoker’s characters are such stock types that even this line of thought leads nowhere, and the novel is at best a curiosity, being an attempt to crossbreed tropes from both political thrillers and “fake supernatural” Gothics.