Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  When questioned, Quincey gives the following version of events:

  ‘… I thought it well to know if possible where the Count would go when he left the house. I did not see him; but I saw a bat rise from Renfield’s window, and flap westward. I expected to see him in some shape go back to Carfax; but he evidently sought some other lair. He will not be back to-night; for the sky is reddening in the east, and the dawn is close. We must work to-morrow!’

  Even after she has turned him down and been betrothed to another, Quincey remains the most faithful of Lucy’s suitors – to the death, literally. His death. But the description of his killing the Count, and himself dying, is, like much about Quincey P. Morris, foggy. Night is fast falling, whereupon Dracula will be invincible. Jonathan and Quincey fight their way through the knife-wielding gypsies (why, incidentally, are these men willing to die for Dracula, a corpse in a box?). Quincey receives a deadly wound, but is still able to fight his way to the Count’s body. He goes for the heart, Jonathan for the head. Dracula, as night falls, dissolves into dust. Oddly, as noted above, he has a ‘look of peace’ in his eyes.

  It all adds up crookedly. Franco Moretti in his influential monograph, Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) indicts Quincey as Dracula’s secret vampire ally:

  Lucy dies – and then turns into a vampire – immediately after receiving a blood transfusion from Morris. Nobody suspects … [when] Morris leaves the room to take a shot – missing naturally – at the big bat … or when, after Dracula bursts into the household Morris hides among the trees … loses sight of Dracula and invites the others to call off the hunt for the night.

  Add to Moretti’s charge sheet the fact that through incompetence (or guile?) it is Quincey who allows Dracula to slip through his fingers and escape from London. Quincey actually uses the word ‘vampire’ before Van Helsing or any of the others in the England-based strand of the novel. He admits to personal acquaintance with the blood-suckers. His horse was fatally bitten, he recalls, when hunting on the Argentinian pampas, by a vampire bat (was Quincey also bitten?).

  The evidence mounts up to something strange. Is there an American community of vampires? A cult, like the Mormons of Utah? Has Quincey been bitten by Dracula (where?) and ‘turned’? Is he an ally of the Count? Rather subtly, Moretti sees a turncoat: ‘So long as things go well for Dracula, Morris acts like an accomplice. As soon as there is a reversal of fortunes, he turns into his [Dracula’s] staunchest enemy.’

  I love curiosities. It is the reason for this book’s being. But Stoker, for all his virtues, is not the lightest-fingered of narrators. Subtlety is not Bram Stoker’s long suit. Had he meant us to suspect Quincey of double-dealing, he would have given us something more solid to chew on. A hint, at least. But novelists, as they write, may well keep something, a potential narrative twist, in reserve. Stoker may have thought he might want, as the novel went along, to complicate his characterisation of the Texan. In long-running TV serials (like The Wire, which had many such) they are called ‘pipes’. Plot twists held in potentia should they be needed. I suspect Stoker may have been laying pipes with Quincey and, in the event, did not use them.

  * See Louis S. Warren’s informative article (available online), ‘Buffalo Bill meets Dracula: William F. Cody, Bram Stoker and the Frontiers of Racial Decay’.

  † Stoker made further use of the cowboy stereotype with Grizzly Dick (an unhappy name) in his short story The Shoulder of Shasta (1895).

  ‡ Accessed June 2017.

  Where did Dracula’s (English-speaking?) harem come from?

  Lucy Westenra receives three proposals of marriage all at once, as she confides, bubblingly, to her bosom friend Mina:

  Here am I, who shall be twenty in September, and yet I never had a proposal till to-day, not a real proposal, and to-day I have had three. Just fancy! THREE proposals in one day! Isn’t it awful! I feel sorry, really and truly sorry, for two of the poor fellows. Oh, Mina, I am so happy that I don’t know what to do with myself. And three proposals!

  Oh, she wonders, if only the Law, and Holy Writ allowed ‘triolism’ (not Lucy’s actual word; but what she means):

  Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble? But this is heresy, and I must not say it.

  In the novel as it plays out, Lucy is a demure maiden by day – a veritable Lady of Shallot – but a sexual predator by night, with an infected whore’s charms (‘Kiss me, Arthur [and die]’). If stenographic Mina represents the ‘New Woman’ of the 1890s, Lucy represents the ewig weibliche, the femme fatale, la belle dame sans merci, Jezebel.

  Lucy’s would-be husbands are an impressively husky crew: a lunatic asylum manager (‘the mad doctor’, as Stoker bluntly calls him in his notes), an ermined peer of the realm, and a gun-toting Texan millionaire. What ‘heretical’ romps the threesome could have in Lord Holmwood’s castle.

  They are already on the first step of conjugality. Arthur and Quincey have slept together, by the lapping shores of Lake Titiaca and body to body under fur in the snows of Siberia. Seward uses his doctor’s privilege of examining Lucy’s naked body, after night-time violation by her fourth lover, the bat Dracula.

  Dracula is similarly inclined towards triolism. Unlike Lucy, he does not give a fig about ‘heresy’. The count warms his coffined nights with three beautiful vampirettes (let’s call them). In the novel they are called ‘weird sisters’ – alluding to the unlovely witches in Macbeth. It is not clear, given their colouring, that they are indeed siblings. Two have Dracula’s ‘aquiline’ nose. It has led to speculation – unfounded – that they are his daughters. They are more often referred to as the ‘brides of Dracula’. Two have raven-dark hair. The third is fair.

  The sisters are routinely pictured voluptuously on screen by film-makers from Tod Browning onwards, making no secret of their carnal appeal to the male audience – dead or undead. Browning had them dressed in something between peignoir and wedding gown. Clad for action. Hammer films dispensed with wardrobe and went totally Playboy.

  The scene in the novel in which the vampirettes are introduced has points of interest. Jonathan, despite the Count’s stern prohibition, is exploring Castle Dracula by night. Echoes of Bluebeard’s wife are recalled in the reader’s mind. Jonathan comes on a room occupied by ‘three young women, ladies by their dress and manner’ (NB ‘ladies’, not lowly wenches).

  They throw, he notes, no shadow on the floor, indicating they are fully ‘turned’. They have supped Dracula’s precious bodily fluids and he theirs. The Draculian sacrament. Jonathan’s description of the trio is given in Stoker’s high florid style:

  All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the ruby of their voluptuous lips. There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed – such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand. The fair girl shook her head coquettishly, and the other two urged her on. One said: –

  ‘Go on! You are first, and we shall follow; yours is the right to begin.’

  What ‘right’, one wonders, does she have? I have puzzled myself about this. She is the oldest sister, is the best I can come up with. Or that she is Dracula’s favourite. His wife of the week, perhaps.*

  Harker is at this moment both limp-limbed and erect with desire: ‘I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.’ He longs for the ravishing to come from these merciless belles dames. One two three. A vampiric triolistic orgy. No thought of virginal Mina, faithfully preserving herself in Whitby, banging away at her qwerty typewriter lessons.

/>   Enter, at the very coital moment, the Count. In a fury. He beats the vampirettes back with the air of a husband who has discovered his wife misconducting herself with the untrousered postman:

  ‘How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me! Beware how you meddle with him, or you’ll have to deal with me.’

  Having denied them Jonathan, he throws his harem a live, ‘half-smothered’ baby which they devour gluttonously. A mere snack in a sack. Jonathan is detumescent with disgust at how near he came to something unspeakable. It may just be a stay of execution. After he has departed for England, the Count says, the sisters can feast on Jonathan:

  ‘Back, back, to your own place! Your time is not yet come. Wait! Have patience! To-night is mine. To-morrow night is yours!’ There was a low, sweet ripple of laughter, and in a rage I threw open the door, and saw without the three terrible women licking their lips. As I appeared they all joined in a horrible laugh, and ran away.

  They live, undead, in the far background of the plot, waiting to be destroyed by Van Helsing’s merciless hammer and stake. A death so phallic one need not even mention the symbology (to borrow that useful, nonsensical term from Dan Brown).

  There is a teasing puzzle in this superheated orgiastic scene. What language are Dracula and his harem speaking in? Certainly not the local Romanian, nor the Hungarian that I have argued is the Count’s native tongue, or else Jonathan would not have the faintest idea of what is being said. Possibly German; it depends on how bare a ‘smattering’ Harker in fact has (see ‘How much German does Jonathan speak?’, page 69). But there is another, more intriguing possibility: Dracula and these women are speaking fluent idiomatic English.

  In which case we must deduce that they are English ‘ladies’. How, though, did they end up in the coffined vaults of Castle Dracula? Or Transylvania, come to that. One needs to invent a narrative to answer the question at all plausibly. They were, let us fantasise, tourists – passengers, perhaps, of Mr Thomas Cook. Their ‘aquiline’ (eagle-like), Roman noses, like the Count’s, indicate high birth. Alas, the ladies got lost in the woods (is the place not named ‘Transylvania’†?). Dracula offered them (dangerous) refuge in his castle. The inevitable happened. He keeps the trio close for other things than their nutritive blood. As every adaptor of the original tale for the screen makes clear, Dracula has sexual appetites – or, as the sexologists nowadays coyly put it, ‘interests’. The Devil (one of his putative fathers) is very interested in sex. As Thomas Aquinas, no less, wrote in De Trinitate:

  Devils do indeed collect human semen, by means of which they are able to produce bodily effects; but this cannot be done without some local movement, therefore devils can transfer the semen which they have collected and inject it into the bodies of others.

  The image of Dracula collecting male semen by mouth is not something one wants to follow too far. But perhaps that is one reason he is holding Jonathan – not for his neck but elsewhere.

  To go a little way down that route, witches testify that the devil has no scrotum or testicle but a penis whose characteristics he borrows from the goat. Along with the goat’s notoriously insatiable appetites.

  One of the problems, discussed elsewhere in this book (see page 61), is why Dracula takes the risk of coming to England. One answer lies in his vaults. He keeps no wine there, but receptacles of the English female blood he has developed a taste for. What’s his score, as narrated in the novel? Lucy, her mother (possibly), Mina, the trio in the vaults. He does not bother with Renfield (who desperately wants to be bothered with). What do his harem have in common? They are ‘ladies’.

  Lock up your daughters England! And men, keep your flies zipped.

  * See also the note on ‘Tresses’, page 138.

  † It means ‘beyond the woods’. Lovely name.

  Who washes Dracula’s pinafore?

  Dracula has been pictured on screen innumerable times, traditionally in full, immaculately pressed evening dress and cloak. Never, I would hazard, in a ‘pinny’, or soiled housemaid’s apron. Nor, in any of the filmic depictions of Dracula, has the Count been shown doing the dishes, dusting, or – God help us – rinsing his underthings after a hard night out with the werewolves. Who brushes the coffin dirt off his shoulders? Who grooms his magnificent team of horses? Who cooks the food Jonathan Harker eats with relish?

  Harker makes the point, several times, that his host has no servants. None whatsoever. Dracula himself, in disguise, is obliged to drive the carriage which brings the solicitor’s clerk to the ominous castle (the delay in his opening the front door is explained, as I suggest above, by his having to unharness the horses in the stables behind the castle).

  Dracula can, of course, transmute himself into bat, wolf, rat, dog or fog. But a housewife? Relevant here is Harker’s undignified but informative keyhole peeping:

  I heard the great door below shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thought – that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them. This gave me a fright, for if there is no one else in the castle, it must have been the Count himself who was the driver of the coach that brought me here.

  A four-horse, whip-wielding carriage driver is one thing. Housemaid and washer-up (albeit of 600-year-old gold plate) something quite else. Let us prefer not to think about it. Stoker’s notes indicate that when the Count is in England it was intended he should be helped in ‘menial offices’ by a couple of mute servants. One male, one female. They were dropped in the printed version. But the question of who is doing the washing up etc. at Castle Dracula remains to trouble the mind’s eye. As does that brief, but unsettling, image of the master making beds, and presumably washing the bed sheets.

  So who washes Dracula’s apron? Dracula.

  Why does Van Helsing swear in German?

  On 9 September Seward records in his diary visiting Lucy, with Abraham Van Helsing, in her invalid bed. Deathbed it will soon be, they both sense. It is a direful visit

  As I raised the blind, and the morning sunlight flooded the room, I heard the Professor’s low hiss of inspiration, and knowing its rarity, a deadly fear shot through my heart. As I passed over he moved back, and his exclamation of horror, ‘Gott in Himmel!’ needed no enforcement from his agonised face. He raised his hand and pointed to the bed, and his iron face was drawn and ashen white. I felt my knees begin to tremble.

  Van Helsing’s spontaneous ejaculation is strange. He’s a Dutchman. It should be ‘God in de hemel’. It doesn’t roll off the tongue, but that, linguistically, is what it should be.

  It’s a puzzle. An answer is at hand. The reason for Van Helsing’s erupting into German at moments of stress can be traced back to the literary origins of the omniscient, irrepressibly garrulous doctor in Stoker’s first thinking about the novel.

  In his early notes for Chapter 6 (written, probably, in 1890 or shortly after) Stoker notes the arrival of ‘a German professor’. He initially had the echt German name of Professor Dr Max von Windshoeffel.*

  Why, though, did Stoker later change the professor’s nationality? And why need a German (or Dutch) know-all to come to the rescue? Are there not wise men enough at Oxford? The most convincing explanation throws a revealing light on Dracula’s inspirations and Stoker’s later precautions lest those inspirations appear too obvious.

  He knew, and certainly relished, the ghost stories of his fellow Dubliner, Sheridan Le Fanu, the acknowledged Victorian master of the genre, until, some would say, M.R. James came along.† Le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla – often reckoned the greatest of its kind in the 19th century – was a seminal influence on Dra
cula. Stoker’s book can be seen as not borrowing but homage.

  A physically slighter work than Stoker’s, Carmilla explores the lesbian possibilities of vampiric relationship. Stoker, as his notes testify, first thought to set Dracula, like Carmilla, in German-speaking Styria (now Austria), until, after coming on Emily Gerard, he had the bright idea of using Transylvania. He was also probably motivated by the desire to put distance between himself and Le Fanu. Homage can quickly become plagiarism.

  It is not Carmilla which entirely explains Van Helsing’s odd teutonic outburst in Van Helsing. Carmilla was first published with other Le Fanu stories under the collective title In a Glass Darkly, supposedly all from the casebook of Dr Hesselius, a German practitioner of ‘metaphysical medicine’ – an occultist with a doctor’s bag. In the short work ‘Green Tea’ Hesselius is more fully described. The hero-narrator offers a CV of this formidably omniscient scholar:

  In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term ‘easy circumstances’. He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

  In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.