by Bram Stoker
1890 Stoker begins to write Dracula. Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray is published.
1892 Walt Whitman dies.
1895 Oscar Wilde is jailed for homosexual offenses. H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine is published.
1897 Dracula is published. Soon after, the story is enacted on the Lyceum stage.
1898 Miss Betty is published and then produced onstage.
1900 Oscar Wilde dies.
1901 Bram’s mother and Queen Victoria die.
1902 The Mystery of the Sea and The Jewel of Seven Stars are published. The Lyceum Theatre is closed.
1904 Irving’s company conducts its final tour of the United States.
1905 The Man is published. Henry Irving collapses and dies.
1906 Stoker has his first stroke. Samuel Beckett is born.
1910 Stoker has a second stroke.
1911 The Lair of the White Worm, Stoker’s final novel, is published.
1912 Bram Stoker dies, on April 20.
1914 A group of stories chosen by Stoker and edited by his wife appears as Dracula’s Guest.
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, killin
g 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 Sto
ker 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 ).
