Glynis’s Suicide Attempt

Glynis Wright’s attempted suicide marks the point at which escape from Vlad Dracula’s rule becomes, for her, inseparable from escape from life itself. In pain and afraid of an eternity imposed on her, she makes her way to a battlement above the river and falls. The attempt does not free her: Cneajna, Ariana, and Elina stop her descent and bring her back to Vlad, leaving her alive but still in the power she had tried to refuse.

Causes and Background

Glynis’s decision follows Cneajna’s promise that she will soon belong to the vampire household and share an eternity bound to Vlad. Cneajna presents this future as a sisterhood and a marriage, but Glynis hears it as the loss of any life she might choose. Alone in the great bed after Cneajna fades into the shadows, she weeps and thinks not only of her family but of her own soul. The prospect of living forever in the castle seems intolerable to her.

The wish to escape has roots in Glynis’s earlier resistance to the limits placed on women. Before the castle, she had described wanting to live as a woman who could act with the freedom granted to men. The battlement episode gives that desire its most desperate form: she cannot find a way to live freely in the world around her, so she tries to end the life that others have claimed the right to direct. Her choice is not presented as a considered acceptance of the vampire household’s terms. It is a refusal of the future Cneajna has just described.

The Attempt

Despite being wracked with pain, Glynis pushes herself out of bed and crawls to the door, which is unlocked. She crosses the dim corridor and climbs a crumbling stairwell. The physical difficulty matters: this is no sudden dash from the room, but a determined passage through the castle while her body can barely carry her. At the top, the night sky opens over the battlement, with the Carpathian Mountains surrounding the castle. She realizes that this part of the structure stands beside a sheer drop to the river.

Glynis approaches the edge barefoot and looks down at the moonlit water. Its darkness appears soft to her, and she prepares to fall. Vlad arrives on the roof and calls out for her to stop. She turns to face him, smiles serenely, and lets herself fall backward. As she descends, she imagines the river swallowing her and bringing the freedom she believes she cannot otherwise obtain. The contrast between her calm resolve and Vlad’s intervention makes the moment a direct confrontation: she chooses an ending for herself, while he tries to prevent her from escaping his reach.

Interruption and Consequences

Glynis’s fall is stopped before it becomes the death she intended. Cneajna catches her in strong arms; Ariana appears above and takes one hand, and Elina seizes the other. Together, the three Brides of Vlad Dracula lift Glynis back toward the waiting Vlad. Their rescue does not answer her plea or offer her a route out of the castle. Instead, it returns her to the person whose authority she was trying to escape. When she is set down before him, Vlad angrily challenges her belief that she could get away so easily. Glynis answers through sobs that she wants only death.

The failed attempt therefore reverses the apparent promise of the open sky and river. The battlement offers a physical route away from the castle, but the women who belong to its supernatural household can reach Glynis even in midair. Their intervention preserves her life without restoring control over it. In the scene’s immediate outcome, the effort to escape becomes another episode of captivity: she is brought back before Vlad, and her stated wish is made plain to him without changing her situation.

Aftermath and Significance

Later, Glynis describes her life in the castle as a torment of confinement and calls herself Vlad’s slave. Her distress is not limited to the immediate threat of becoming his bride: she resents having to exchange her own clothes for an outfit she finds degrading, and she remembers the pleasures of hunting even as she is disturbed by them. These later reflections give the leap a wider context. Glynis is struggling against a new identity and its rules, while also confronting the fact that the vampire life has begun to offer forms of power and pleasure that trouble her former understanding of herself.

Clothing continues to make that struggle visible. When Elina summons her to Vlad’s library, Glynis chooses her own blue Italian silk gown instead of the garment she has been wearing and refuses a corset. Later, when Vlad arranges a journey to Buda, he dictates which clothes and jewels she may take so that Andrew will believe the family’s belongings were lost in the accident. He also orders her to wear a veil around her brother. Glynis’s frustration with the veil and her delight at seeing Andrew show that the attempt on the battlement is part of a continuing resistance to being arranged and concealed by others. The fall is not the end of that struggle, but its starkest early expression: when every future presented to her belongs to someone else, she tries to claim at least the decision of how it ends.