Undead Blond Hair in the Victorian Imagination: The Hungarian Roots of Bram Stoker’s "The Secret of the Growing Gold"

Abstract

The Hungarian folktale “Woman with Hair of Gold” is a part of what Nina Auerbach calls feminine mythos in Woman and the Demon. It is a story about the murder and revenge of a “very strange but beautiful woman with golden hair as fine as spun gold.” This paper explores how Bram Stoker’s short story “The Secret of the Growing Gold” reworks this folktale, stripping away its uniquely feminine voice, to create a story expressing British Victorian racial anxieties. The message of Teutonic superiority, which Stoker links with Hungarian folklore, is this author’s most dangerous and nefarious fiction.