by Bram Stoker
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 (197
6) 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.
