by Bram Stoker
In 1931, a year in which the horror genre blossomed in America, director Tod Browning released his version of Dracula. If not for Bela Lugosi’s eerily convincing portrayal of the Count, this otherwise mediocre film would have never attained its classic status. Speaking through his thick Hungarian accent and white fangs, Lugosi played Count Dracula with theatrical charm and cunning. That same year director James Whale’s seminal film Frankenstein was released (Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in that film); as Dracula and Frankenstein continued to contend for the title “Greatest Horror Novel of All Time,” a battle cycle between myriad cinematic incarnations now began in earnest. And a battle raged not just between the characters—that is, Dracula versus Frankenstein—but also between Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff for ghoul-playing supremacy. As the films about Dracula proliferated, Christopher Lee replaced Lugosi as the Count. Lee, who had made his Hollywood mark playing the monster in a film version of Frankenstein, reprised the role of Count Dracula more times than any other actor. Sadly, Dracula adaptations tend to fall largely into the B-movie category, and many of the sequels could be mistaken for spoofs.
Not until 1992 did Dracula become the subject of an A-list movie. Lavishly filmed by Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker’s Dracula flaunts exorbitant production values and features a sinister Gary Oldman as the Count. Imbued with an operatic flavor, Coppola’s film stylishly presents dark, textured landscapes and memorable sets—perfect backdrops to accentuate Dracula’s penchant for shape-shifting. Despite the title’s suggestion of accuracy, the film includes a few departures from Stoker’s novel: It recounts Dracula’s pious days as a soldier in the Crusades and the suicide of his lover, the event that brings the embittered Count to vampirism. These flashbacks to centuries past are married to Stoker’s plot with uncertain success, but the film unquestionably breathes life into Count Dracula, a character who has had an uneven career in celluloid.
A PAINTING AND A POEM
The publication of Dracula coincided with an exhibition at London’s New Gallery that featured a painting called The Vampire by Phillip Burne-Jones, son of Edward Burne-Jones, a preeminent figure among the Pre-Raphaelites. The portrait shows a gloating woman perched on her rigged arms over an unconscious man lying on his back across a bed. The textures of the drapes, the woman’s nightdress, the sheet, and the man’s opened nightshirt press in and gather, lending a dreamlike quality to the scene. The portrait is dark in tone, with accents of emerald and crimson. The woman, rumored to be modeled after the actress Mrs Patrick Campbell, glowers as she distends her long, white teeth. In a letter to Bram Stoker, Burne-Jones wrote, “As soon as I have a copy, I shall beg your acceptance of a photograph of my Vampire—a woman this time, so as to make the balance fair!”
Burne-Jones’s cousin Rudyard Kipling, inspired by the portrait, contributed his poem “The Vampire” to the exhibition catalog:
A fool there was and he made his prayer
(Even as you or I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair,
(We called her the woman who did not care),
But the fool he called her his lady fair—
(Even as you or I!)
Oh, the years we waste and the tears we waste,
And the work of our head and hand
Belong to the woman who did not know
(And now we know that she never could know)
And did not understand!
A fool there was and his goods he spent,
(Even as you or I!)
Honour and faith and a sure intent
(And it wasn’t the least what the lady meant),
But a fool must follow his natural bent
(Even as you or I!)
Oh, the toil we lost and the spoil we lost
And the excellent things we planned
Belong to the woman who didn’t know why
(And now we know that she never knew why)
And did not understand!
The fool was stripped to his foolish hide,
(Even as you or I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him
aside—
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died—
(Even as you or I!)
“And it isn’t the shame and it isn’t the blame
That stings like a white-hot brand—
It’s coming to know that she never knew why
(Seeing, at last, she could never know why)
And never could understand!”
COMMENTS & QUESTIONS
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. I
solated 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?
FOR FURTHER READING
OTHER NOVELS BY BRAM STOKER
The Snake’s Pass. 1890.
Crooken Sands. 1894.
The Watter’s Mou’. 1894.
The Shoulder of Shasta. 1895.
Miss Betty. 1898.
The Mystery of the Sea. 1902.
The Jewel of Seven Stars. 1902.
The Man. 1905.
Lady Athlyne. 1908.
The Gates of Life. 1908.
The Lady of the Shroud. 1909.
The Lair of the White Worm. 1911.
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982. An exploration of the depiction of Victorian womanhood in fiction, with particular emphasis on Dracula.
Belford, Barbara. Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. The definitive Stoker biography.
Carter, Margaret L., ed. Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988. A representative selection of Dracula criticism.
Davison, Carol Margaret, ed. Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century, 1897-1997. Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1997. A good collection of recent critical essays.
Farson, Daniel. The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975. Written by Stoker’s great-nephew; readable and personal, but less well-documented than Belford’s.
Frayling, Christopher. Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1992. A survey of vampire literature preceding Dracula.
Gelder, Ken. Reading the Vampire. London and New York: Rout-ledge, 1994. An investigation of vampire narratives in literature and film.
Hughes, William, and Andrew Smith, eds. Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis, and the Gothic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. A well-rounded collection of scholarly papers.
Leatherdale, Clive. Dracula: The Novel and the Legend: A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Revised edition. Brighton, UK: Desert Island Books, 1993. An exploration of the many critical approaches to Dracula.
Ludlam, Harry. A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker. London: W. Foulsham, 1962. An anecdotal biography based on reminiscences of those who knew Stoker.
Roth, Phyllis A. Bram Stoker. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982. Part of the Twayne English Authors series; criticism and interpretation of Stoker’s works.
Senf, Carol A. Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. An examination of Dracula within its historical context.
Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. New York: Norton, 1990. A comprehensive survey of stage and screen versions of Dracula.
—. The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror. Revised edition. New York: Faber and Faber, 2001. Discussion of the evolution of our perception of Dracula and other monsters in light of twentieth-century concerns and anxieties.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Variations, Criticism. Edited by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal. New York: W. W. Norton, 1997. Part of the Norton Critical Edition series; contains contemporary reviews and seminal critical essays.
Wolf, Leonard. The Essential Dracula. New York: Plume, 1993. A revised, paperback edition of Wolfs 1975 The Annotated Dracula.
—. A Dream of Dracula: In Search of the Living Dead. Boston: Little, Brown, 1972. A free-wheeling investigation of the vampire myth.
ADDITIONAL WORKS CITED IN THE INTRODUCTION
Roth, Phyllis A. “Suddenly Sexual Women in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Literature and Psychology 27 (1977), pp. 113-121.
Stoker, Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. 2 vols. London and New York: Macmillan, 1906.
a “Little Tommy” in the Manx language; Stoker’s affectionate nickname for the novelist Hall Caine.
b Now Bistritsa, in eastern Hungary.
c Once the capital of Transylvania; now the Romanian city Cluj.
d Abbreviation for “memorandum”: a written reminder.
e Districts bordering Transylvania. Moldavia is in modern Romania; Bukovina is divided between Romania and Ukraine.
f Extremely detailed and accurate British military maps.
g Pass through the western foothills of the Carpathian mountains, near Bistritsa.
h Stagecoach.
i An Anglican Protestant, and therefore mistrustful of Catholic ritual, relics, and symbols.
j That is, horsemeat.
k Middle or central land.
l Rulers or military governors.
m Light carriage.
n A 1774 folk ballad by Gottfried August Burger.
o Will-o’-the-wisp: a light that appears at night over marshy ground, probably from combustion of gas from decaying organic matter.
p Luggage.
q Lawyer whose work does not require appearing in court.
r In late Victorian England, one dined in the afternoon and supped in the evening.
s Sweet dessert wine.
t Royal palace at Richmond, built by Cardinal Thomas Wolsey during the reign ( 1509-1547) of King Henry VIII.
u Nobleman.
v The definitive book of British train schedules, first issued in 1839.
w City in the southwest of England, in Devon.
x Town to the east of London.
y Innermost stronghold of a medieval castle.
z Four folk remedies against vampires.
aa Wodin was the chief Norse god; Thor was his son, the god of war and thunder. The Berserkers were ferocious Viking warriors.
ab Region north of the Black and Caspian Seas.
ac Around a.d. 895 Prince Arpad led the Magyars into what is now Hungary, in the Honfoglalas, the “occupation of the homeland.”
ad The Four Nations were the Magyars, Saxons, Szekelys, and Wallachs; the “bloody sword” was the signal for a call to battle.
ae “The Crescent” refers to Tur
kish, Muslim forces. Voivode was the royal governor of the region, at that time subservient to the Hungarian crown.
af The Hapsburgs were the ruling house of Austria; the Romanoffs, the Russian royal family.
ag One of the four legal societies in London that retain exclusive control over admission to the bar.
ah Misquotation from act 1, scene 5 of Hamlet, by William Shakespeare; Hamlet says: “My tables—meet it is I set it down / That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.”
ai Trapped.
aj Commander-in-chief.
