Revenge should be savored

“Revenge should be savored” is Vlad Dracula’s answer when Glynis Wright wants to attack those gathered at the palace. The phrase gives delay the shape of power: he stays her hand, promises that the people will be hers to deal with later, and recasts restraint as a way to make revenge more satisfying. Its meaning darkens as Glynis’s story moves from a concealed account of violence to her final declaration that her family has been avenged and Vlad is no longer her master.

The Phrase in the Palace

The words come as Glynis and Vlad leave the palace for their waiting carriage. Vlad tells her that the people there are hers to do with as she wishes, but not that night; when she asks why, he explains that he wants to keep her from trying to kill him, or perhaps believes she deserves revenge. The exchange leaves his motive deliberately unsettled: his offer may be a means of controlling her, an acknowledgment of what she has suffered, or both.

The immediate occasion is Glynis’s suppressed urge to return to the palace and slaughter everyone there. She also imagines freeing Brice and finding some measure of peace. Vlad stops her, then says, “Revenge should be savored.” Glynis resents his intervention, even as she recognizes that he has a point. The phrase therefore does not extinguish her anger; it converts an imminent attack into a postponed claim, while leaving Vlad in the position of deciding when she may act.

The Injuries Behind the Claim

Glynis’s understanding of revenge is rooted in violence she has struggled to record. In her journal, dated 15 August 1819, she describes finding it difficult to write without being discovered or interrupted. Writing about her rape and the first feast upon her fills her with rage; she hides for three days, and when she is found, she is beaten. She calls that beating a strange release and concludes that it gives her still more reason to hate Vlad. The act of writing preserves a testimony that her circumstances make difficult to speak safely.

Her accusation is also explicit in her confrontation with Vlad: she names what he did as rape, while he answers that he took what was his. Glynis rejects that claim of possession. This conflict gives the language of revenge a personal as well as political force: it answers not only the loss of her family, but also Vlad’s insistence that he can define her body and allegiance as his property.

The public account of the family’s deaths sharpens the contrast between testimony and concealment. A letter read to Andrew Wright describes a carriage swept from Bârgău Pass into a river during a storm, reports that Glynis alone survived, and presents her injuries as the result of an accident. Later, Glynis tells Andrew that their family died in the Carpathian Mountains and that she was helpless against the forces that took them. She describes her grief, loneliness, and despair, then explains that Vlad is at once her husband and protector and, in some ways, her captor. Her account is not a simple report of freedom from him: she says she is bound to him, that he demands her devotion and loyalty, and that she gives them, even as she asks Andrew to help with the plan to go to England.

From Delay to Claimed Revenge

At the palace, delay is still entangled with Vlad’s control: he restrains Glynis and sets the time for the revenge he says she may take. His appeal to a new beginning in England also places vengeance beside a proposed future in which the two will be free and powerful together. Glynis’s anger does not vanish into that promise. She states that Vlad’s offer does not appease it, and the carriage continues toward Buda with her desire for retaliation unresolved.

At the end, Glynis stands over Vlad’s coffin and speaks from a different position. She says that her family is avenged and that Vlad is no longer her master. She credits him with making her strong and says that he liberated her in ways she had not imagined, while distinguishing her bond with him from her love for another: Vlad has her soul, but another has her heart. Her farewell does not erase the violence between them. Instead, it makes the consequences of the earlier phrase legible: revenge has become part of her own reckoning, and the former master can no longer decide when, or whether, she is entitled to claim it.

Narrative Significance

The phrase’s force depends on the gap between the time of injury and the time of telling. Glynis’s journal makes violence recordable even when writing itself risks discovery; the letter to Andrew offers a safer, false account of the family’s fate, while her later confession supplies the grief and coercion that the letter conceals. Against those competing narratives, Vlad’s maxim makes revenge sound like a controlled course of action. The ending complicates that apparent control: Glynis claims that her family is avenged, but her farewell also acknowledges the lasting bond that remains after Vlad has lost his mastery over her.