Vampires & Mirrors: Shattering a Myth
With the blogger’s correction on the mirrors reflection I’m fact-checking with myself
In so many vampire tales, there’s a moment when the hero learns what a vampire is and how to destroy it. Sometimes the messenger is a wise Professor Van Helsing, sometimes it’s a comic-book reading Corey Feldman. But all too often, the hero is just a little too credulous.
And in this case, that wide-eyed, easily led “hero” was me.
In an earlier blog, I noted that the trope of “mirrors not reflecting the image of a vampire” was an invention of Bram Stoker in an obscure little novel called Dracula. Why did I venture such a statement?
Because. Every. Single. Source. I. Read. Said. So.
Check my work.
But then I did something upsetting. I read Alexandre Dumas.
Yeah, that Alexandre Dumas, and he’s created a problem for us. His short story “The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains”, also known as “The Pale Lady” is easy to overlook considering Dumas’ better known work like The Three Musketeers, The Man In The Iron Mask, and The Count Of Monte Cristo. The short has only been translated to English a handful of times — and at least twice it was in a badly truncated form.
So it’s no wonder that so many vampire literary critics, bloggers, vampirologists, and scholars — on whom I depend to make me not look like a blathering idiot— missed it.
The tale is of a woman accosted by brigands in the Carpathian Mountains, led by a cruel dickbag of a warlord who “dies” and returns, pausing to puncture her neck. Sunlight isn’t a problem for the outlaw, except in that he casts no shadow. And most notably, he has no reflection:
The mirror and shadow thing don’t get a lot of play in the tale. Blink and you’d miss it. But Dumas’ short story precedes the publication of Dracula by almost fifty years, making it — I don’t want to say “firsties” because I’ve been burned once— the earliest case of mirror-vampire dysfunction I know of.
To be clear: despite the widespread claim that Stoker invented the mirror trope, Dumas had it in a book five decades earlier.
Incidentally, this isn’t the only time the great Dumas danced with vampires. Two years after “The Vampire of the Carpathian Mountains”, he published a stage play, Le Vampire, that adapted John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Charles Nodier’s play The Vampire.
Back then, wholly original titles just weren’t a thing.
But what was a thing was inventing new attributes for vampires. And until someone smarter than me steps up, I’m going to go with the Napolean of French novelists as being the guy who decided that vampires don’t show up in mirrors.
I’ve since corrected my earlier blog because I skipped that day in Journalistic Ethics class. In fact, I skipped all the days because I did not major in journalism. Or ethics.
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Image sources: Shutterstock, Berkeley Books with an assist from Archive.org, GECEP Éditions, The Rut by Phil Selby,
