COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
036
In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the book’s history. Following the commentaries, a series of questions seeks to filter Bram Stoker’s Dracula through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

COMMENTS

ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE

[Dracula] is the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years. It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax.
—from a letter to Bram Stoker (June 16, 1897)

CHARLOTTE STOKER

My dear, it is splendid, a thousand miles beyond anything you have written before, and I feel certain will place you very high in the writers of the day.... No book since Mrs Shelley’s ʽFrankenstein’ or indeed any other at all has come near yours in originality, or terror—Poe is nowhere.
—in a letter to Bram Stoker (no date)

ATHENAEUM

Stories and novels appear just now in plenty stamped with a more or less genuine air of belief in the visibility of supernatural agency. The strengthening of a bygone faith in the fantastic and magical view of things in lieu of the purely material is a feature of the hour, a reaction—artificial, perhaps, rather than natural—against late tendencies in thought. Mr Stoker is the purveyor of so many strange wares that ʽDracula’ reads like a determined effort to go, as it were, “one better” than others in the same field. How far the author is himself a believer in the phenomena described is not for the reviewer to say. He can but attempt to gauge how far the general faith in witches, warlocks, and vampires—supposing it to exist in any general and appreciable measure—is likely to be stimulated by this story. The vampire idea is very ancient indeed, and there are in nature, no doubt, mysterious powers to account for the vague belief in such beings. Mr Stoker’s way of presenting his matter, and still more the matter itself, are of too direct and uncompromising a kind. They lack the essential note of awful remoteness and at the same time subtle affinity that separates while it links our humanity with unknown beings and possibilities hovering on the confines of the known world. ʽDracula’ is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power, though even these are never productive of the tremor such subjects evoke under the hand of a master. An immense amount of energy, a certain degree of imaginative faculty, and many ingenious and gruesome details are there. At times Mr Stoker almost succeeds in creating the sense of possibility in impossibility; at others he merely commands an array of crude statements of incredible actions. The early part goes best, for it promises to unfold the roots of mystery and fear lying deep in human nature; but the want of skill and fancy grows more and more conspicuous. The people who band themselves together to run the vampire to earth have no real individuality or being. The German man of science is particularly poor, and indulges, like a German, in much weak sentiment. Still Mr Stoker has got together a number of “horrid details,” and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled. Isolated scenes and touches are probably quite uncanny enough to please those for whom they are designed.
—from the Athenaeum 109 (June 26, 1897)

THE SPECTATOR

Mr Bram Stoker gives us the impression—we may be doing him an injustice—of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula to eclipse all previous efforts in the domain of the horrible,—to “go one better” than Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed), Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping school. Mr Stoker’s clever but cadaverous romance’s strength lies in the invention of incident, for the sentimental element is decidedly mawkish. Mr Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he has made of all the available traditions of vampirology, but we think his story would have been all the more effective if he had chosen an earlier period. The up-to-dateness of the book—the phonograph diaries, typewriters, and so on—hardly fits in with the mediaeval methods which ultimately secure the victory for Count Dracula’s foes.
—from The Spectator 79 (July 31, 1897)

QUESTIONS

1. Dracula has never been out of print, and more movies have been derived from Dracula than from any other novel. To what do you attribute this continuous popularity? The story, in one form or another, has been popular in many countries over a long period of time. Does that suggest that it answers some need that is simply human rather than social or historical?
2. Dracula’s blood-sucking is often described as a disguised form of sexual assault, with the victim unconsciously willing. What do you think?
3. Lucy seems more susceptible to Dracula than Mina. What is it in Lucy that makes her more susceptible; what in Mina makes her more resistant?
4. Could the end of the novel be fairly described as the triumph of scientific teamwork over superstition, the rational over the irrational, the light of modern Western European civilization over Eastern medieval darkness?