Counterfeit Castles: The Age of Mechanical Reproduction in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes

In 1891, the French daily Le Matin reported that visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition, due to be held two years later in Chicago, would be treated to performances by the world-famous opera star Adelina Patti. The celebrated prima donna would be especially conspicuous, however, by her absence. Attendees would instead witness

a mechanical figure representing Madame Patti in life-size form [en grandeur naturelle]. An electrical device will automatically reproduce the diva’s particular gestures, smile and muscular facial movements. Hidden inside the figure, there will be a phonograph equipped with previously recorded clips of the singer’s voice. Visitors to the exposition will therefore be able to hear Madame Patti at any time of day.

(“Tablettes” 4)¹

There is a delicious perversity in this description of the facsimile representing La Patti “en grandeur naturelle,” for while it may have been to scale, this spectacle would have been anything but natural. Little over a decade earlier, Edison, the famed inventor of the phonograph, had himself envisioned the potential of his creation one day to attain a “perfect reproduction at will of Adelina Patti’s voice in all its purity” (“Phonograph and Its Future” 534), while simultaneously acknowledging the possibility of “the captivation of sounds, with or without the knowledge or consent of the source of their origin” (530). This proved to be ironically prophetic, since in 1890,² the French press reported that the furious diva intended to bring proceedings against an American impresario who had covertly “captured on phonograph several pieces she had sung in a performance in San Francisco” (Maître X … 3). It was this same “unscrupulous investor” (“Perfide rival” 2) who conceived the exhibit at Chicago, thereby successfully exploiting the potential of emergent recording technologies to offer new modes of perversion and fetishism in their transmogrification of the cult of relics through increasingly and uncannily accurate mechanical reproductions. What had until then been priceless and ephemeral could now be commodified and endlessly reproduced, regardless of the presence or intentions of the original source. The age of the simulacrum had well and truly arrived.

Jules Verne’s Le Château des Carpathes (variously translated into English as The Castle of the Carpathians, The Carpathian Castle, and The Castle in Transylvania) was, therefore, very timely upon its serialization and publication in 1892. A gothic parody, it evokes the uncanny aspects of modernity in its depiction of the Baron Rodolphe de Gortz’s repeated, compulsive listening to an unauthorized personal phonograph recording of the final performance of La Stilla, “a famous singer, whose pure voice, accomplished technique, and dramatic skill aroused the admiration of the dilettanti” (Verne 128–29).³ The identity of the inspiration for the twenty-five-year-old Stilla has long been a subject of speculation among Verne specialists, who, between them, have suggested Estelle Duchesne, Verne’s one-time mistress (Vierne 343; Albessard 13), and the opera singer Maria Malibran (Bailbé 175; Miller Frank 166), both of whom were not even thirty when their lives were cut short.⁴ Not one of these scholars, however, has noted the likely significance of the unauthorized recording of Patti and her proposed mechanical double. Although Verne had completed the manuscript of Le Château by the end of 1890 (Noiray 2: 177), thus precluding the possibility of his having learned of the proposed simulacrum of La Patti in advance of penning the novel, the reports of the unauthorized recording did emerge prior to its finalization.⁵

The present study argues that Verne, propelled by the contemporary reaction to this publicized appropriation of the utterances of another, exploits the metaphor of the disembodied voice in Le Château to express a specifically fin-de-siècle anxiety concerning authorship and human agency, not only in relation to then-nascent reproductive technologies, but also with regard to the newly destabilized relationship between signs and their referents. The French press, for example, called to attention the fact that, once recorded, Patti “[could] not ‘unsing’ her arias” (“Perfide rival” 2): her utterances...