INTRODUCTION
Upon its publication in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was seen as nothing more than a slightly cheesy thriller, if an unusually successful one. Most such “shilling shockers” were forgotten within a year or two. But this one was different: Over the course of the next century Count Dracula, the aristocratic vampire, left his natural habitat between the pages of a book and insinuated himself into the world’s consciousness as few other fictional characters have ever done. Now, more than a hundred years after his appearance in print, Dracula has shed the status of “fictional character” altogether and has become an authentic modern myth.
Why has this odd and terrifying figure exerted such a hold on our collective imagination? Why does the image of the vampire both attract and repel, in apparently equal measure? If, as has been argued, Dracula owes its success to its reflection of specific anxieties within the culture, why then has its power continued unabated throughout more than a century of unprecedented social change? Late-Victorian anxieties and concerns were rather different from our own, yet the lure of the vampire and the persistence of his image seem as strong as ever.
Dracula’s durability may in part be due to Tod Browning’s 1931 film, for when most people think of the character, it is Bela Lugosi’s portrayal that springs to mind. But in spite of memorable performances by Lugosi and by Dwight Frye as Renfield, the film is awkward and clunky, even laughable in parts; in terms of shocking, terrible, and gorgeous images, it cannot compare with the novel that inspired it. It is hard to believe that, on its own, it would have created such an indelible impact.
Once Dracula became lodged in the popular imagination, it began to accrue ever-new layers of meaning and topicality. The novel has provided rich material for every fad and fancy of twentieth-century exegesis. It has been deconstructed by critics of the Freudian, feminist, queer theory, and Marxist persuasions, and has had something significant to offer each of these fields. Today, in the age of AIDS, the exchange of blood has taken on a new meaning, and Dracula has taken on a new significance in its turn. For post-Victorian readers, it has been a little too easy to impose a pat “Freudian” reading on the novel, in which the vampire represents deviant, dangerous sexuality, while the vampire-hunters stand for sexual repression in the form of bourgeois marriage and overly spiritualized relationships. This interpretation certainly contains a large element of truth, but the novel’s themes are much richer and more complex than such a reading might suggest.
Readers coming to Dracula for the first time should try to peel away the layers of preconception that they can hardly help bringing to the novel. We should try to forget Bela Lugosi; we should try to forget easy (and anachronistic) Freudian cliches; we should put out of our minds all our received twentieth- and twenty-first-century notions of friendship and love, both heterosexual and homosexual. If we let the novel stand on its own, just as it appeared to Bram Stoker’s contemporaries in the last years of the Victorian era, what exactly do we find?
We find a thriller, but one that is imagined at an unusually high level of art and constructed with the kind of craft and skill that is seldom squandered on mere potboilers; Dracula bears comparison, in fact, with any of the great nineteenth-century examples of the genre—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein ( 1818), for example, or Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White (1860), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), or Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories. Stoker’s first readers were, on the whole, enthusiastic (though the reviewer in the influential Atheneum magazine gave it only a lukewarm and qualified endorsement). Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of the swashbuckling classic The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), wrote to Stoker, “Your vampires robbed me of sleep for nights” (Belford, p. 275); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, one of the few fictional characters that has rivaled Count Dracula in popular appeal, thought it “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” (Belford, p. 275). Contemporary readers tended to agree; what is more, they seemed to find nothing sexually odd about Dracula-or if they did, they forbore to remark upon the fact, for to do so would have been to admit to a greater sexual knowingness than was considered acceptable at the time.
Like Wilkie Collins, whose novel The Woman in White, a run-away success, served as something of a prototype for suspense fiction for many years after its publication, Bram Stoker decided upon a modified epistolary format. Dracula is not a straightforward narrative but a collection of documents that, taken together, tell the tale in its entirety: journals and letters by the principal characters, transcriptions of recordings on the newfangled phonograph, newspaper clippings, even a ship’s log. The story constructed by these fragments is a rather complex one, and dramatists and filmmakers, in adapting the novel, have usually felt free to alter the plot in drastic ways, dropping major characters or amalgamating them into one another, changing the various love interests around, and generally ignoring and upsetting Stoker’s carefully built fictional edifice. In doing so they have sacrificed layers of meaning and radically changed Stoker’s original intentions.
The novel’s first narrator is Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor who travels to the wilds of Transylvania to advise a client, the mysterious Count Dracula, on the Count’s purchase of a decrepit abbey in England and his plans to move into it. In Harker’s journal we read of his increasing unease at the sinister goings-on at the castle, and soon we discover that he is in effect being held prisoner by his frightening host. During Harker’s stay at Castle Dracula he is approached by three seductive vampire maidens, but Dracula chases them away, claiming the quaking Harker as his own.
Harker manages to escape from the castle, and the scene shifts to England, where we are introduced to Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancee, and her friend Lucy Westenra. Lucy, a fragile beauty, has three suitors: Dr. Jonathan Seward, the director of a mental hospital, or sanatorium, next door to Dracula’s English abbey; Quincey Morris, an attractive American adventurer; and Arthur Holmwood (later Lord Godalming), the most eligible of the three and the one whose proposal she decides to accept. On holiday by the sea, Lucy and Mina encounter a mysterious being whom we recognize as Dracula, now at large in England, and Lucy is attacked and bitten by him. Losing blood nightly, she begins to fade away; eventually she dies, becomes a vampire herself, and preys on small children.
Aided by a venerable doctor and wise man, Abraham Van Helsing, the principal characters go to work to undo Dracula’s evil work. Lucy’s three suitors and Van Helsing enter the undead Lucy’s tomb and truly kill her, driving a stake through her heart and decapitating her. Soon, however, Mina herself falls prey to Dracula. In a combined effort that involves ancient wisdom, modern science, good brains, and stout hearts, the group of friends finally succeeds in chasing Dracula back to his native land, killing him and hence freeing his soul from eternal torment as they have freed their friend Lucy’s.
This, very briefly summarized, is the plot. Admittedly the characters are not highly developed, but their web of mutual interactions allows Stoker to explore many sorts of relationships, sexual and otherwise, that troubled his society and himself. These nuances were discarded by later simplifying dramatists and filmmakers, who in focusing almost exclusively on Dracula and on the brilliantly realized Renfield, Dracula’s grisly apostle, have turned the story into one of mere horror spiced with occasional humor.
Stoker handled his many-layered plot capably and professionally, but it is in his use of descriptive prose that he showed, at least in this one novel out of the thirteen he produced during his lifetime, something close to genius. Here, for example, is Jonathan Harker’s first glimpse of his undead host reposing in his native earth at the Castle Dracula:
There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.... There was no lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to fill the cases, and lifting it high struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in my hand and glanced from the face.... (p. 58).
This is only one of the more dramatic examples; there are countless passages in Dracula that show the author’s unerring feeling for the strong word, the strong image, the fundamental shock.
Like his great peers, but unlike so many second-string horror writers, Stoker had a fine feeling for humor. In Dracula he uses it sparingly but to marvelous effect, making it heighten, through the rather hysterical laughter it prompts, the gruesomeness of the situation. Aside from a few crude jokes from Van Helsing (who has a punster’s propensity for remarking offhandedly that he is embarked on a “grave duty” (p. 219) and that “the stake we play for is life and death” (p. 386), almost all of Dracula’s humor is concentrated in the character of Renfield, Dr. Seward’s bizarre mental patient who, the reader comes to understand, is the vampire’s victim and unwilling acolyte. Renfield’s diet of insects inevitably provokes laughter, however grudging, and Dr. Seward’s deadpan manner of recording his patient’s oddities only compounds the effect:
When I went into the room, I told the man that a lady would like to see him; to which he simply answered: ‘Why?’
‘She is going through the house, and wants to see everyone in it,’ I answered. ‘Oh, very well,’ he said; ‘let her come in, by all means; but just wait a minute till I tidy up the place.’ His method of tidying was peculiar: he simply swallowed all the flies and spiders in the boxes before I could stop him. It was quite evident that he feared, or was jealous of, some interference. When he had got through his disgusting task, he said cheerfully: ‘Let the lady come in,’ and sat down on the edge of his bed with his head down, but with his eyelids raised so that he could see her as she entered (p. 248).
The contrast between this maniacal behavior and the charming, erudite conversation of what we must accept as the “real” Renfield— ‘Lord Godalming, I had the honour of seconding your father at the Windham; I grieve to know, by your holding the title, that he is no more....’ (p. 260)—makes the madman’s odd condition funnier and, in a stroke of true originality, more poignant as well.
But Stoker’s descriptive gifts are not limited to the grotesque and the macabre; in Dracula he also paints prose landscapes of exquisite and fearsome beauty. The attentive reader will notice that the appearances of the vampire are preceded by sunsets, often almost painfully resplendent ones: “Before the sun dipped below the black mass of Kettleness, standing boldly athwart the western sky, its downward way was marked by myriad clouds of every sunset-colour—flame, purple, pink, green, violet, and all the tints of gold; with here and there masses not large, but of seemingly absolute blackness, in all sorts of shapes, as well outlined as colossal silhouettes” (p. 85).
Even Dracula’s manifestations out of frightening night-time fog are made mesmerizingly lovely:
Everything is grey—except the green grass, which seems like emerald amongst it; grey earthy rock; grey clouds, tinged with the sunburst at the far edge, hang over the grey sea, into which the sand-points stretch like grey fingers. The sea is tumbling in over the shallows and the sandy flats with a roar, muffled in the sea-mists drifting inland. The horizon is lost in a grey mist. All is vastness; the clouds are piled up like giant rocks, and there is a ‘brool’ over the sea that sounds like some presage of doom (p. 82).
Stoker uses a very finely tuned version of the “pathetic fallacy”—that is, the trick of making the natural world reflect the emotional world of his story—to achieve his effects, and it is this as much as anything that has given Count Dracula the indefinable attractiveness he retains in spite of all his horror: Morally and physically ugly as he is, he is so consistently associated with a very real, tangible, even violent beauty that the beauty ends up in some manner becoming part of him. Stoker’s painterly eye, his ability to see divinity even in “the wonderful smoky beauty of a sunset over London, with its lurid lights and inky shadows and all the marvellous tints that come on foul clouds even as on foul water” (p. 129) remind us that
Dracula’s creator inhabited the world not only of Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper, but also of James Whistler and Claude Monet: He was a thrill-master, but he was also an aesthete.
Bram Stoker was not primarily a writer. Writing was a sideline for him, a source of extra income and a creative outlet. Dracula was his only truly successful book and the only one that is still widely read today. However, he led an active life at the cultural and artistic vortex of London, and its story affords some interesting insights into Dracula.
Abraham Stoker (Bram was originally a nickname) was born in Ireland in 1847, only a year after the great potato blight that killed millions of Irishmen and sent many more to America in search of a better life. He came from a Protestant, Tory, solidly middle-class family; his father was a civil servant in the parliamentary section at Dublin Castle, the seat of the British government in Ireland, and it was expected that young Bram would probably follow him into government service. A sickly child, he eventually developed into a large, powerful man and a successful athlete. At Trinity College he excelled in debating, and began to fantasize about a career as an actor. His family did not consider this an option; instead, as planned, he began work at Dublin Castle as a clerk in the Registrar of Petty Sessions. He nurtured his love of the theater, however, by taking unpaid work as a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, a conservative newspaper that was Unionist and anti-Catholic.
Stoker was prone to hero-worship. One of his first idols was Walt Whitman, whose revolutionary poetry celebrated democracy, comradeship, and love between men; his “Calamus” poems, most famously, came close to being specifically homosexual manifestos. Stoker wrote the older man emotional, revealing letters: “How sweet a thing it is for a strong healthy man with a woman’s eyes and a child’s wishes to feel that he can speak so to a man who can be if he wishes father, and brother and wife to his soul” (Belford, p. 43). Whitman responded warmly from across the Atlantic. Stoker, he later told a friend, “was a sassy youngster. What the hell did I care whether he was pertinent or impertinent? He was fresh, breezy, Irish: that was the price paid for admission—and enough: he was welcome!” (Belford, p. 45). Whitman’s friendship, his poetry, and his passionate doctrines remained centrally important to Stoker throughout his life.
Another hero acquired at this time would permanently change the course of Stoker’s career: the actor-manager Henry Irving. When Stoker first saw him on the stage, in an 1867 production of The Rivals, the actor was twenty-nine years old and just reaching the apex of his profession, a position he would hold until his death nearly forty years later. Irving was the heir of David Garrick and Edmund Keane, the progenitor of Laurence Olivier: He was, in other words, the biggest stage star of his day. Irving, Stoker later commented, was “a patrician figure as real as the persons of one’s dreams, and endowed with the same poetic grace” (Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, vol. 1, p. 3).
Once established as a drama critic, Stoker felt it a personal mission to boost Irving’s work and defend him from hostile reviews in other papers. The actor began to notice and appreciate the sympathetic, intelligent reviews he consistently received from the Evening Mail, and invited Stoker to dinner one night when he was in Dublin. They talked all night, and dined again the next evening. “Soul had looked into soul!” Stoker recalled. “From that hour began a friendship as profound, as close, as lasting as can be between two men” (Personal Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 33).
In 1878, Henry Irving procured the Lyceum, one of London’s great theaters, and offered Stoker the job of acting manager, in charge of the business end of the company. Stoker accepted with alacrity, resigning his position at Dublin Castle and taking only a brief holiday to marry Florence Balcombe, a Dublin beauty who had the distinction of having also been courted by Oscar Wilde. (Wilde, along with his eccentric parents, had long been a friend of Stoker.) Florence’s face was legendary: “People used to stand on chairs to look at her” (Belford, p. 326), the Stokers’ son, Noel, recalled.
The Stokers’ marriage was singularly cool from the very beginning, and this would not change over the course of their thirty-four years together. It was a situation that perhaps suited them both; as Noel Stoker also remarked, Florence was “an ornament not a woman of passion” (Belford, p. 326), and she seemed perfectly content to spend her evenings in the company of one of her many swains, such as the dramatist and lyricist W. S. Gilbert, while her husband was at the theater. Her granddaughter thought her “cursed with her great beauty and the need to maintain it. In my knowledge now, she was very anti-sex” (Farson, pp. 213-214). As for Stoker, his true marriage was to Henry Irving, a selfish, devouring man who soaked up the talent, time, and devotion of his acolytes, of whom Stoker was the foremost; many readers have found an echo of Irving and Stoker in the relationship between the parasitical Dracula and his hapless victims. Except for an early sweetheart who died young, Irving had no important woman in his personal life. His work was all that mattered; as George Bernard Shaw once quipped nastily, Irving “would not have left the stage for a night to spend it with Helen of Troy” (Belford, p. 101 ).
Stoker’s job, which he held until Irving’s death in 1905, was a demanding one, but he managed to pursue other interests in the little spare time he had. In 1881 he published a collection of short stories called Under the Sunset; his first novel, The Snake’s Pass, appeared in 1890. He would eventually produce fourteen books of fiction including Dracula. He also began legal studies at the advanced age of thirty-nine and was called to the bar in 1890. Here, finally, was a profession Florence found socially acceptable, and henceforth she never referred to her husband as a theatrical manager or an author, but only as a barrister.
Irving’s Lyceum specialized in classical and romantic productions, with Irving himself usually in the role of a dramatic heavyweight, frequently a rather menacing one: Shylock, Macbeth, or Mephistopheles; his forte was the malevolent and the tormented. Though Stoker never asked Irving to play the role, it is impossible to believe that he did not have a stage version, with Irving in the lead, in mind when he wrote Dracula. As many critics have noted, the role of the Count would have been a natural one for Irving, and echoes of Irving’s great roles are to be found in Dracula’s text. From one of Hamlet’s speeches (act 3, scene 2), for example:
’Tis now the very witching time of night,
When churchyards yawn, and hell itself breathes out
Contagion to this world. Now could I drink hot blood
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.
Shortly after the publication of Dracula, Stoker arranged a reading of a dramatic version at the Lyceum, in order to protect the copyright but also to interest Irving in playing the role. Irving made no comment at the time; when Stoker asked him later what he thought, he replied in one dismissive word: “Dreadful!” Perhaps he thought the vampire’s role too small (in the novel, the Count is “on stage” in less than one-sixth of the text); perhaps he didn’t want Stoker rising from his subordinate position in the partnership. In any case, he never considered taking the part; in retrospect, this seems nearly as bad a mistake as his decision not to play Sherlock Holmes when Conan Doyle offered him the role. Irving’s old-style romanticism was going out of fashion, and he himself was becoming something of an anachronism; either of these roles would have gone far toward reviving his career.
On October 13, 1905, an ailing Henry Irving played Thomas à Becket; after the performance he spoke to the audience, as was his custom. It was, as Stoker’s biographer Barbara Belford commented, his last salute “to those who had given him all he ever knew—or cared to know—of love” (Belford, p. 300). An hour later he died in the lobby of his hotel. There was no bequest for Stoker, no mention of him at all in the will. Irving, who had in 1895 become the first actor to receive a knighthood, was buried in Westminster Abbey.
With Irving’s death, Bram Stoker’s life lost its focus and its purpose. In failing health himself, he was not able to find another theatrical job, and worked hard, instead, at journalism and fiction, but in spite of the success of Dracula, Stoker never made much money from his writing—although his last novel, The Lair of the White Worm ( 1911 ) did well. Stoker died in 1912, at the age of sixty-four. His great-nephew Daniel Farson, who wrote a biography of Stoker in 1975, claimed that he died from the effects of syphilis, but subsequent analysis has not confirmed this diagnosis; it seems more likely that his symptoms were due to strokes. If Stoker enjoyed love affairs with members of either sex, he did so with the utmost discretion, and in any case his preferred role was not the dashing lover but the avuncular confidant.
Florence Stoker survived her husband by twenty-five years. As executor of his estate she tried to make the most of his literary remnants, and when she discovered that the German director F. W.
Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu was largely inspired by Dracula, she accused the producers of copyright infringement and tried for years to get the print destroyed. Fortunately, she failed in this, and Nosferatu remains as a major work of German expressionism. In 1930, Universal Pictures paid Florence $40,000 for the rights to film Dracula; since that time, Count Dracula has been filmed more often than any other fictional character except for Sherlock Holmes.
Dracula is not a psychologically knowing book, but it is very much a product of its time—a time, that is, when ideas about the nature of repression and the unconscious were not yet current but were definitely in the air. It appeared at a turning point in social and intellectual history. Between 1895 and 1900 Sigmund Freud was developing many of the major ideas that would inform Freudian psychology—dream interpretation, the unconscious, and the repression of unpleasant or amoral thoughts—and in 1897, the year of Dracula’s publication, he began his program of self-analysis. His seminal text The Interpretation of Dreams was published in 1899.
It is probably no coincidence that the 1890s and early 1900s produced a spate of brilliant proto-Freudian novels. Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) was one of the most striking examples. In this gruesome tale, Freud’s concepts of the ego, the id, and the superego are given nearly perfect fictional form before these ideas were current or even formulated: The respectable Dr. Henry Jekyll—the quintessential ego perfected by a vigilant superego—becomes at night a hideous and murderous monster, Mr. Hyde, who personifies all the horrid qualities we fear are lurking, repressed, in our ids. The atavistic Mr. Hyde, like Dracula (who is unusually hairy and can take the form of a wolf or a bat), inhabits the border territory between the human and the animal, a no-man’s-land that seemed to cause particular anxiety to Stevenson’s and Stoker’s contemporaries. Another of Stevenson’s tales, The Master of Ballantrae (1889), also deals with doubles, in this case twins, who can be seen to represent ego and id.
Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray ( 1891 ) illustrates the impossibility of true repression. The beautiful young man Dorian Gray makes a Faustian pact by which, however depraved his behavior, he always retains his youthful radiance; only his portrait, which he keeps hidden away, exposes the dissipation and cruelty of his soul. H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887) juxtaposes, like Dracula, images of death and sex; H. G. Wells’s popular scientific fantasies The Time Machine ( 1895) and The Invisible Man (1897) play with contemporary nightmares of atavism and the dual nature of man; James M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) vividly fictionalizes the male mother-fixation and unwillingness to grow up.
While Stoker, in Dracula, does not seem to be working within a particular psychological scheme, neither does he seem unconscious of the psychological implications of his story, as Barrie does. His character Dr. Seward, after all, is medically up to the minute; he speaks of Jean-Martin Charcot, the pioneer of hypnotic suggestion under whom Freud studied during his early years, and mentions the relatively recent concept of unconscious cerebration. Stoker was a sophisticated man, no innocent, and while modern critics have tended to assume that Dracula’s women are meant by Stoker to be pure, its men brave and gallant, it is worth considering the possibility that Stoker was not unaware of the ambiguity of his own effects. Here, for example is one of the novel’s most famous scenes—rightly famous, for its graphic power is particularly intense :
The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it....
And then the writhing and quivering of the body became less, and the teeth ceased to champ, and the face to quiver. Finally it lay still. The terrible task was over (p. 231).
As nearly every modern reader remarks, Arthur and the undead Lucy here enact a terrible parody of the sex act, ending in the “little death” of orgasm. If it is so obvious to us, could it have been totally hidden to Stoker? And what about Mina’s frightful experience with Dracula?
With his left hand he held both Mrs Harker’s hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension; his right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood, and a thin stream trickled down the man’s bare breast which was shown by his torn-open dress. The attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink (p. 300).
No sexually experienced adult could fail to note that Dracula and Mina are mimicking the act of fellatio. The movements are explicitly sexual, and the act is described in detail. Later, when Mina looks back on the scene, the connection is made even more clear: “When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the—Oh my God! my God! what have I done?” (p. 306). The placement of the dash, the moment at which Mina breaks off her sentence, simply cannot be accidental. Some of the what?
The only “sex acts” in the novel are vampiric; the only time we see its characters explicitly sexualized is when they become vampires or are in the process of being seduced by vampires. Thus when Jonathan Harker is approached by the three vampire maidens at Castle Dracula he feels in his heart “a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (p. 43) and watches their approach “in an agony of delightful anticipation” (p. 43). When one girl goes on her knees—another reference to fellatio—he finds her “deliberate voluptuousness” to be “both thrilling and repulsive” (p. 43).
This is definitely not the Jonathan Harker we see throughout the rest of the book, and while he is certainly an admirable husband to Mina one doubts whether the passion he achieves with her ever reaches the level it might have done with this vampire girl; once he returns to England he seems somehow diminished, and certainly older. The playful, curious boy of the early journal entries is gone.
One might, of course, count the male characters’ gift of blood to the ailing Lucy as a sexual act, although more a conjugal than a passionate one. Arthur says afterward that he now feels as though he and Lucy were really married, and Van Helsing forbears from telling him that the other men have performed the same act, as though to do so would be to accuse Lucy of promiscuity. Seward, too, feels that he has achieved some sort of physical union with Lucy after giving her blood: “No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (p. 141).
But it is in the character of Lucy herself that we are given the most explicit contrast between vampiric sensuality and Stoker’s portrayal of the ordinary human variety. Lucy, when we first meet her, is obviously attractive to men—she receives, after all, three marriage proposals in one day—and she is coquettish, too: “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (p. 66) she asks only half-jokingly. Nevertheless, she is pure, and she is frequently dressed in white as though to emphasize this purity. Her principle attribute, constantly reiterated, is sweetness. Sitting in the Whitby churchyard Lucy is “sweetly pretty in her white lawn frock” (p. 72); asleep in her room she “looks, oh, so sweet” (p. 100); meeting Van Helsing and Dr. Seward, she is “very sweet to the Professor (as she always is)” (p. 126).
But it is a girlish sweetness rather than a womanly one, and in her pliability she displays “the obedience of a child” (p. 103) rather than the adult decision and strength characteristic of Mina. The contrast with the undead Lucy, therefore, becomes all the greater: undead, “the sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness” (p. 226); “the whole carnal and unspiritual appearance ... [was] like a devilish mockery of Lucy’s sweet purity” (p. 229).
Some feminist scholars have found Stoker’s attitude to be incurably sexist. Phyllis A. Roth, for example, has written: “I would emphasize that for both the Victorians and twentieth century readers, much of the novel’s great appeal derives from its hostility toward female sexuality.” This seems an overly simplistic way of looking at this not entirely simple tale. In what way, for example, can the novel be said to be more hostile toward female than toward male sexuality? Is not the least wooden, the most genuinely passionate human character Mina, rather than the various conventional and interchangeable young men? Van Helsing describes her as “one of God’s women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth” (Roth, p. 243).
Mina has, as Van Helsing describes it, a man’s brain and a woman’s heart; by contrast, Lucy, who is all femininity (at least within the limited and conventional terms in which Dracula defines femininity), is seen to be a moral as well as a physical lightweight, something less than a whole person, and therefore unable to defend herself against the monster. Lucy is capable only of extremes—sweetness or cruelty, purity or wantonness—while Mina is a more balanced human being, hence less vulnerable. If there is a moral to Dracula, it might be that simple goodness is not adequate to fight evil. One must bring brains and moral strength into the arena as well.
Therefore, in an important sense Dracula can be seen as a feminist rather than an anti-feminist novel, in spite of the demonization of sexuality in general terms and the offhand, almost obligatory denigration of the “New Woman” (p. 100). It is Mina who laughs at the New Woman, and yet she herself could hardly be more of a New Woman if she tried: a self-supporting career woman, capable, accomplished, an equal (and to tell the truth, more than equal) partner to her mate. She, the New Woman—also, by the way, married and sexually experienced—is able to defeat the vampire, while the pure, sweet, and still virginal Lucy is not.
Poised as it is on the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dracula displays the period’s uneasy balance between the relative importance accorded to science and religion. Dracula, in the time-honored fashion of fictional monsters, is explicitly connected with hell, and represents an inversion of traditional Christianity. “Dracul,” indeed, is the word for “devil” in the Count’s native Wallachian, and one of his incarnations is a crawling lizard-like creature; the fact that Harker first meets him on the feast day of St. George, the dragon-slayer, sets up the theme of dragon-slaying, the fight between religion and coarse instinct, as does the peasant woman’s gift to Harker of a crucifix, which, as a Protestant and a man of science, he regards with suspicion and bemusement.
Dracula is presented as a sort of anti-Christ, Renfield as his St. Paul; both speak in language that consciously echoes or paraphrases the Gospels. Dracula’s speech during his mock-marriage ceremony with Mina is meant to be particularly shocking and still succeeds, even in our own irreligious age: “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper” (p. 306). As anti-Christ, Dracula also offers his followers what Christianity claims to offer: the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
The novel’s vampire fighters are all nominal Christians, and indeed almost their last word before Quincey Morris expires and the unholy stain disappears from Mina’s forehead is “a deep and earnest ‘Amen’ ” (p. 399), but simple faith has clearly not been sufficient to slay this dragon: Modern science, intellectual effort, and the bonds of friendship have all been needed to back it up.
As the twentieth century progressed, the religious elements of the vampire myth became less interesting to the public, and the vampire figure began to take on different attributes. The strangest and most perverse has been the transformation of the vampire from a figure of terror to a romantic outsider, a sexy, Byronic hero. Barnabas Collins of the kitschy television show Dark Shadows ( 1966-1971 ) was perhaps the first sympathetic vampire, but the type was perfected in Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire (1976) and its sequels, which developed a new archetype, the self-conscious and confessional vampire. Performers and directors, most notably Frank Langella, who played Dracula on Broadway in 1977, have added a decidedly sensual element to what was originally intended to be a purely terrifying monster.
Stoker’s monster was not born without precedent; there was already a vampire tradition not only in folklore but in literature as well. John Polidori’s The Vampyre had been a brisk seller in 1819, as had James Malcolm Ryder’s Varney the Vampyre: or, the Feast of Blood (serialized 1845-1847). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s more recent Carmilla (1872) described a female vampire with lesbian leanings. Famous works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey had also contained vampire imagery. Dracula owes something to each of these; and something of Dracula has gone into the many works of vampire fiction that have followed it. And while the figure of the vampire has continued to evolve, sometimes in surprising ways, it is Bram Stoker’s Dracula that has come closest to crystallizing it, and Dracula’s images that have had the most persistent power to haunt our memories.
Brooke Allen holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She is a book critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, and The New Leader. A collection of her essays, Twentieth-Century Attitudes, was published in 2003.