The Romance of Dracula; a personal Journey of the Count on celluloid

by Butler, Charles E.

  Jonathon Harker is never physically described in any detail and we have to piece together a young man on his first major business deal to secure a place in one of the largest solicitors’ firms in England. Dr John Seward, more commonly an ineffectual, bumbling old man in most film treatments, is 29 and runs his own practice based at the Purfleet lunatic asylum.

  Recording most of the novel in his phonograph, he, like the affluent Arthur Holmwood/Lord Godalming, and Texan adventurer Quincey P Morris who constantly relates stories of far-flung derring-do, has designs on Lucy, and is the first to notice the strange behaviour in patient R M Renfield. Seward, Holmwood and Morris, it is recorded, are old friends who had served together in Korea.

  Renfield's character cries out for more of a lateral portrait but is murdered by the Count when Stoker seems to lose the necessary focus on the narrative to explain his actual connections to the vampire. This ambiguous mishap has forced film makers to link Renfield to Harker's employer, Mr Hawkins.

  Some movies claim that he is a lost traveller who stumbles upon Castle Dracula accidentally, whilst others take no chances and merge his character with that of Jonathon Harker, and he is forced into becoming the vampire's

  unwilling slave. Ultimately, the novel uses him as an atmospheric device to prepare the way for the arrival of Dracula.

  Wilhelmina Harker - nee Murray - and Lucy Westenra are characters that could easily have emerged from any romantic novel of the day. Their descriptions shine through the correspondence that they write to each other.

  Wilhelmina - abbreviated to Mina - is engaged to Jonathon Harker. She practices shorthand calligraphy and hones her typing skills in order to practically involve herself in her fiancé’s business. She memorises train timetables with unerring accuracy, hoards letters and newspaper cuttings and she and Dr Seward are used as the mouthpieces to relate the best of the novel’s highlights. When she loses her loved ones to the monster, she, uncharacteristically for ladies of the day, uses her grief as a weapon to bring the Count to book.

  Sharing blood with the creature, she becomes the central factor in his eventual downfall as his movements are telegraphed through her to the army of love-lorn adventurers who cry out for his destruction.

  Unlike many movie stand-bys, she isn't the reincarnation of Dracula's long lost love and her character is never used by the author as a device to overthrow the masculinity of the vampire's persecutors. For all of her tomboyish intervention, Mina Harker still keeps her respected and dignified place in Victorian society.

  Lucy Westenra is Mina's childhood friend and flirtatiously keeps many would-be-suitors at arm’s length until finally deciding to marry Arthur Holmwood. It is never made clear how the Count fastens on Lucy as his first victim; one supposes that he uses Jonathon's confiscated letters to Mina as a springboard to begin his infestation of London.

  Very briefly - the original manuscript ran to 529 pages! -, the book begins with Jonathon Harker on his way to the Carpathians to secure a real estate deal with a mysterious nobleman, Count Dracula. He is warned by the locals at Bistritz that he shouldn't continue because it is the Eve of St George's Day. When the clock strikes midnight, he is informed, all the evil things in the world will have full sway. Regarding the warning as "idolatrous", Harker nonetheless accepts the gift of a crucifix from an old lady:

  "For your mother's sake!"

  We have already read the Count's greeting in a letter waiting for the young solicitor at the inn:

  "My Friend,- Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well to-night. At three to-morrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. - Your friend,

  'DRACULA' "

  After a lengthy coach ride that substantiates Stoker's claims concerning his research into Transylvania and describes every conceivable backdrop of the mittel land, Harker is

  deposited at the Borgo Pass. The driver of the diligence and its distressed passengers try to talk him into putting off the rest of the trip - indefinitely - as there is no carriage to meet him. They try to persuade him to carry on to Bukovina.

  Before Harker can respond, the carriage, driven by a man with burning eyes, a tall hat and a large beard disguising long sharp white teeth, arrives. It is driven by four splendid looking coal black horses:

  "For the dead travel fast!"

  Harker is then transported on an even stranger trek, through dark forests and winding precipices. Wolves suddenly appear but are driven away by the strange driver. Harker is made aware of blue flame that spurts sporadically from the ground at irregular intervals, but they die out just as quickly.

  Reaching the Castle, Harker confesses that:

  "I must have been asleep, for certainly if I had been fully awake I must have noticed the approach to such a remarkable place. In the gloom the courtyard looked of considerable size, and as several dark ways led from it under great round arches it perhaps seemed bigger than it really is."

  He is assisted by the incredibly strong, but friendly, coach driver to alight and then the coach leaves him in the courtyard. Presently, with the grinding turn of a key, a large door opens and we meet Dracula.

  The next four chapters, like the beginnings of most of the films, are the best compositions in the book, atmospherically relaying one horrific event on top of another. The Count proves to be a courteous host who speaks incessantly about the old days and his family histories. One can't help but feel that he was actually present in the crusades that he describes.

  But he has strange quirks and never eats. He is only seen at night, casts no reflection and prefers to wander around his castle outside, clinging to the wall like a gigantic lizard. He listens to the baying of the wolves outside the castle walls with a maestro's ear intoning to his perplexed guest:

  "Listen to them. The children of the night - what music they make!"

  He has no servants, as he seems to take care of his guest’s comfort himself and shares correspondence with international bankers. His castle holds many treasures whose worth to Dracula stem more from a sentimental standpoint than their monetary value. His warning to Harker not to sleep in strange rooms seems relevant when Harker accidentally does just that in the library and is seduced by three strange women who,

  "go on their knees," and "giggle coquettishly".

  Into this seemingly dreamlike tableaux appears the Count, more venomous than has yet been realised, and, taking one girl by the scruff of the neck, sadistically hurls her to the ground with the words:

  "This man is mine! When I am done with him you may kiss him at your will!"

  He points to a large bag when the girl asks,

  "Are we to have nothing tonight?"

  To Harker's sheer horror, he hears the wail of a small child emanating from the bag, which the women gather up excitedly and disappear on the rays of the moonlight streaming through the windows. More horror follows as a peasant woman, looking for her missing child, is torn to pieces by wolves that seem to obey the Count's commands.

  The Count carries on the next night as though the previous evening never happened, and Harker doesn't press the point openly. He tries to escape and finds almost every door and window locked.

  Searching the castle further, he finds that the Count sleeps during the day in a coffin, gorged with blood like a bloated leech. He also has a habit of growing decidedly younger as he intakes more blood. The solicitor strikes at the monster with a shovel but only succeeds in scarring his forehead - unlike in the movies, this scar never heals.

  Dracula is witnessed leaving the castle dressed in Harker's clothes to give the impression that the lawyer has returned to England. Keeping clear of the three women, Harker decides to escape using the Count's own method of scaling the wall overlooking a large abyss.

  It is after this overlong prologue that we are transp
orted to Purfleet asylum and Dr John Seward's concern for his zoophagous patient R M Renfield. The patient is prone to hoarding and eating flies and spiders. To intake as many lives as possible,

  "For the blood is the life."

  He is also capable of unexpected outbursts, but at most times, he is level headed and courteous. Through disconnected letters, we acquaint ourselves with Mina Murray who writes to her friend Lucy Westenra and informs her of her forthcoming trip to Whitby.

  An incredible number of throwaway comedy characters with deplorable accents are also insinuated into the action. Mina keeps a clipping of the Whitby Gazette, telling of the landing of the Demeter. The log is later quoted more fully, recounting a troubled sea voyage and the apparent haunting of the vessel by a strange man or ghost.

  When the vessel hits Whitby harbour - literally - there is no one alive on board. The captain of the ship has lashed himself to the wheel, his wrists sheared through by the rope. The chords in the knots have been made by his own teeth and he carries a rosary that also binds his wrists. His throat, unlike the movie accounts, bares no marks of any kind. The only survivor seems to be a large black dog that has vanished into the city and is fingered by the press as the beast who probably savagely mutilated a local pooch.

  Unease builds as Lucy Westenra begins to sleepwalk and explains vivid dreams in unopened correspondence to Mina. A persistent lethargy makes her take to her bed. Dr Seward, stumped by the case that registers anaemia but doesn't respond to the regularly prescribed drugs, telegraphs his old college professor, Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing arrives from Amsterdam armed with strange medicinal remedies: garlic flowers crushed into the decor; knowledge of the very early use of blood transfusing and an even stranger dialect.

  As she continues losing blood, Lucy is given transfusions by all three of her suitors, but the Professor's valiant efforts cannot halt the inevitable and the girl apparently dies.

  After her burial, Van Helsing reveals more remedies in the shape of wooden crosses, holy wafers and gigantic wooden stakes when a newspaper article points to the abduction of small children on Hampstead Heath, perpetrated by a strange woman ambiguously known as the bloofer lady. A youngster's throat displays marks that look to have been made by a rat or small dog, but Van Helsing assures Seward that it was Lucy who made the incisions. With obvious scepticism, the young doctor follows his mentor into Lucy's tomb and they find that the corpse has disappeared. Seward initially blames body snatchers. Returning to the tomb the following afternoon, they discover Lucy back in her coffin.

  Arthur Holmwood and Quincey Morris tag along on the next midnight watch and, again, the corpse has vanished. Hiding behind a gravestone, they see a wraithlike image flitting through the trees that is captured by the moonlight. It is a form that resembles Lucy and she is returning to her place of rest. But Van Helsing has sealed her tomb with a special wax to bar her entry. When confronted by the men, she turns into a raging, spitting hellion and illustrates Van Helsing's Nosferatu theories more simply in two paragraphs than Stoker takes in nearly fifty pages.

  Noticing the change in his intended, Arthur agrees to let Van Helsing carry out his work and Lucy succumbs to one of the best-written deaths in the annals of vampire literary history. Still unperturbed, Van Helsing goes on to explain to his young charges that the danger is not over and that the original vampire who turned Lucy must be found.

  Meanwhile, Mina returns from Budapest with new husband, Jonathon Harker, to London. He is a little the worse for wear, having been found wandering the countryside and has been taken in and cared for by a convent of nuns headed by Sister Agatha, babbling incoherently about ghosts, wolves and generally nasty things.

  His paranoia leads him to believe he has spotted the Count in Piccadilly hailing a hansom to follow a young girl and he informs Mina that the vile creature has grown younger. At the convent, Jonathon has handed Mina his diary that tells of his exploits at the castle. He tells her never to open it but she must keep it as an emblem of his love for her and romantically ties it closed with a blue ribbon.

  As the story, and Dracula's involvement in it, progress further, Mina realizes that the diary holds precious clues and reads it after gaining her husband’s approval.

  Under Van Helsing's leadership, she is appointed as secretary to the small committee of vampire hunters that is established. She searches libraries and digs out old newspaper clippings, among them the fatal log of the Demeter.

  She types up all the relevant facts from Lucy's unopened letters and usually disregarded stop press articles concerning a strange nobleman who passes himself off under the nom de plume of the Count DeVille.

  Dr Seward's phonograph recordings are also typed up on her traveller's typewriter and, along with further correspondences, all the facts of the case are bound together to create the book:

  Dracula.

  (iii) The character of Dracula

  The tall man clad in black, with large moustache and goatee, coupled with top hat and cape, is the ultimate description of the villains that grace many shows in Victorian repertory theatre. Bram Stoker simply utilised all the ideas he had seen a thousand times or more to come up with a visual image for his vampire Count.

  On a more personal level, it was no surprise that he wanted Sir Henry Irving to play the role on stage and it is the actor's physical description that shines through in Jonathon Harker's recollections.

  As an actor, Irving's best years were behind him by the mid 1890s, and he probably displayed many of the selfish mood swings and childish tantrums of Count Dracula. It is well documented how he treated Stoker like the Renfield character. The author himself would later boast how he had made his monster cater hand and foot on Jonathon Harker. One wonders just how many times Stoker had this fantasy about himself and Irving.

  In many of the movies, Dracula is a character who is feared by men and lusted after by women. In Stoker's novel, he is the embodiment of masculinity that all men - heterosexual and homosexual - would like to aspire. He is a great warrior and has cheated death itself. He ravages the women of four very masculine suitors right under their noses and, to cap it all off, he drinks blood that keeps him eternally youthful, the only literary vampire to have this power at this point.

  He takes what he needs without asking or begging because he must have it in order to survive and he has the further powers of hypnotism to sway a potential donor’s mind. In the novel, and subsequent films, the donors turn out to be

  drop dead gorgeous girls who are just on the verge of womanhood and therefore ripe for the plucking.

  Count Dracula also holds a contemptuous disregard for all men. The respectful snarls that he hurls at Van Helsing:

  "You are a wise man Van Helsing, for one who has not lived a single lifetime."

  are lifted from the Deane/Balderston play and limited to his movie counterparts in Hollywood.

  The novel shows a character as little more than a caged tiger when cornered by these cross-waving nuisances. He never gets to meet Van Helsing face to face and would probably be unimpressed with this hypothetical encounter as his own personality is broken down into egotistical boasts:

  "You think to baffle me, you - with your pale faces all in a row like sheep in a butcher's? You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest; but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it across centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine - my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!"

  The only addition to that line of dialogue could be a resounding Bwah ha ha! of laughter as the Count twiddles the end of his waxen moustache with a white-gloved thumb and forefinger. As in the better translations on the screen, Dracula takes his food by the sheer force of his personality and, in the novel, he is never described as being sexy or even physically attractive to women. Jonathon Harker had already unkindly testified to his halitosis and, furth
er in the novel, Mina Harker witnesses:

  "...beside the bed, as if he had stepped out of the mist - or rather as if the mist had turned into his figure, for it had entirely disappeared - stood a tall, thin man, all in black. I knew him at once from the description of the others. The waxen face; the high aquiline nose, on which the light fell in a thin white line; the parted red lips, with the sharp white teeth showing between;...the red scar on his forehead where Jonathon had struck him...he placed his reeking lips upon my throat!" but, "I was bewildered, and strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is part of the horrible curse that this happens when his touch is on his victims!"