Rome is less a setting of sustained action than a powerful remembered alternative in Glynis Wright’s life: a city associated with travel, artistic romance, and the possibility of living beyond the restrictions imposed on aristocratic women. Its significance lies in the contrast between the freedom Glynis imagines there and the captivity she later endures under Vlad Dracula.

A Cosmopolitan Destination

Rome appears within the Wright family’s European travels, alongside Venice, Florence, and Paris. Lady Antoinetta Wright invokes those journeys while scolding Glynis for her behavior, insisting that the family would not have been forced into their present “abominable place” had Glynis behaved properly abroad. The travels had a practical social purpose: Edric Wright and Lady Antoinetta Wright were seeking suitable husbands for Glynis and May Wright. Yet Rome belongs to a wider world of movement and cultural possibility that the marriage market cannot fully contain.

The family’s Italian connection complicates this search for acceptance. Glynis and May are considered too foreign by portions of the English aristocracy because of their Italian mother, even though Lady Antoinetta Wright’s Medici lineage does not secure the recognition the family expects. Rome therefore stands between competing identities: it is part of the Italian inheritance that marks the sisters as outsiders in England, but it is also part of the cultivated European circuit through which their family attempts to obtain English social legitimacy.

Glynis’s Imagined Freedom

For Glynis, Rome becomes especially vivid because it represents a life not organized around marriage. She rejects the idea that she should simply become a wife and objects to the unequal freedoms granted to men. In conversation with May Wright, she describes wanting to live as a woman with the freedom conventionally reserved for a man: to act without the constraints imposed by sex. Her longing turns Rome from a geographical stop into an imagined political and emotional space, one in which female desire might escape the surveillance of family and society.

That fantasy is expressed through Glynis’s fascination with Lord Byron. She recalls meeting him despite Lady Antoinetta Wright’s disapproval and remembers him as capable of speaking a beautiful poem. When Glynis imagines the seduction she should have experienced, she places it in a luxurious villa in Rome, where it would be beautiful and passionate. The imagined scene offers romance on terms she can recognize as her own, in deliberate opposition to the violence later inflicted upon her by Vlad Dracula.

Contrast with Captivity

The contrast between Rome and Castle Dracula sharpens after Glynis becomes a Vampire. She remembers her former life as a beautiful distance, while her new existence is confined to Vlad Dracula’s castle and governed by his rules. Her frustration is intensified by the control of her appearance: she is forced to abandon her own clothing for an outfit she regards as degrading, describing her condition as an escape from one restrictive society into another. Rome’s promise of self-fashioning is thus reversed by a supernatural household in which dress and bodily presentation reveal obedience.

This reversal continues when Vlad Dracula prepares to move the household to Buda. He orders special veils so that Andrew Wright will not recognize Glynis and instructs her to avoid dresses, jewelry, and other objects associated with her former English life. The veils conceal her face, while the borrowed jewels and altered wardrobe conceal her history. In this context, Rome represents the opposite of enforced disguise: it belongs to the earlier world in which Glynis could imagine choosing her clothes, her lovers, and the shape of her future.

Romance, Identity, and Lost Possibility

Rome also functions as a measure of how thoroughly Glynis’s desires have been redirected. At Castle Dracula, Cneajna insists that Glynis obey Vlad’s summons because it is her duty, while Glynis resists the language of marital obligation and refuses to let Vlad touch her again. Later, her relationship with Ignatius offers a secret form of mutual attachment, but even that intimacy exists under the shadow of blood bonds, concealment, and danger. The romantic freedom Glynis associates with Rome never becomes an ordinary reality; it survives only as a counter-image to the relationships that entrap her.

When Glynis later appears in an elaborate black-and-gold gown for the opera, she briefly feels alive rather than undead and accepts the public identity of Countess Dracula. The scene echoes the glamour she once projected onto Rome, but its beauty is politically compromised: the gown is supplied by Vlad Dracula, and the title confirms rather than abolishes her attachment to him. Rome’s deepest narrative function is therefore ironic. It is the imagined place of an independent woman’s romance, yet the adult identity Glynis acquires is displayed through the costume and title of the man who claims ownership of her.

Narrative Significance

Rome is a memory of the road not taken. It gathers Glynis’s aspirations toward travel, sensuality, literary culture, and freedom from patriarchal marriage into one setting, then places those aspirations against the physical and psychological confinement of vampirism. The city is never allowed to become a simple romantic refuge: it is filtered through Glynis’s fantasies, family negotiations, and retrospective awareness of what was lost.

Its recurrence gives the narrative a structure of contrast. European travel initially appears to be an instrument of social constraint because it is undertaken to secure husbands, yet Rome becomes the location of Glynis’s imagined self-determination. Against that possibility stand Castle Dracula, the compulsory bride’s wardrobe, the veil hiding her from Andrew Wright, and Vlad Dracula’s insistence that she belongs to him. Rome consequently signifies not merely a place in Glynis’s past, but the freedom she continues to measure against every later form of possession.