Who Is Dracula's Father?

by John Sutherland

  Why won’t Dracula let Jonathan go home?

  Early in the action, Jonathan Harker asks himself a very pertinent question, as he stands outside the door of Castle Dracula, waiting forever, it seems, for it to swing open on its rusty hinges:

  I stood in silence where I was, for I did not know what to do. Of bell or knocker there was no sign; through these frowning walls and dark window openings it was not likely that my voice could penetrate. The time I waited seemed endless, and I felt doubts and fears crowding upon me. What sort of place had I come to, and among what kind of people? What sort of grim adventure was it on which I had embarked? Was this a customary incident in the life of a solicitor’s clerk sent out to explain the purchase of a London estate to a foreigner?

  An Exeter solicitor, to boot. This is turning out to be the worst holiday in Jonathan’s short life.

  Why has Dracula demanded a clerk be sent him? Originally, of course, it was to be Mr Hawkins who came over to see the client who promised his firm rich pickings. But Mr Hawkins has contracted a strategic (we may assume) attack of gout. He does not appear in the novel. I like to fantasise that he has made some inquiries and come up with some worrying answers. Dracula (see below) refers to Hawkins as ‘my friend’. That word, in that mouth, has a sinister ring to it. Hawkins dies shortly after Dracula arrives in England. Payback?

  Whatever the reason, young Harker is shipped off to Transylvania. A promotion to partnership soothes any resentment. His marriage to Mina can wait.

  The reason for Dracula’s demanding the presence of an English clerk and his reluctance thereafter to release him can be guessed at, although Stoker, for his own narrative purposes, keeps it shrouded in foggy mystery. It is not, we deduce, because Count Dracula wants to ‘vamp’ Jonathan. Male necks are not to his taste – despite Renfield’s mad hopes that he will get the immortalising kiss.

  The fact is that the Count needs Jonathan as a source of instruction as to how to behave in England. Dracula has never, apparently, met, or, perish the thought, impaled, an Englishman.* He has picked up the language from books. His command of the tongue is excellent, Jonathan tells him. The Count declines the compliment.

  ‘I thank you, my friend, for your all too-flattering estimate, but yet I fear that I am but a little way on the road I would travel. True, I know the grammar and the words, but yet I know not how to speak them.’

  He fears he will cut a poor figure in the teeming streets and drawing rooms of the world’s premier city. Worse even than that, he will be laughed at. Intolerable. His pride could not stand such a thing. He needs Jonathan not as a clerk, but a tutor:

  ‘Well, I know that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one; men know him not – and to know not is to care not for. I am content if I am like the rest, so that no man stops if he see me, or pause in his speaking if he hear my words, to say “Ha, ha! a stranger!” I have been so long master that I would be master still – or at least that none other should be master of me. You come to me not alone as agent of my friend Peter Hawkins, of Exeter, to tell me all about my new estate in London. You shall, I trust, rest here with me awhile, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation; and I would that you tell me when I make error, even of the smallest, in my speaking. I am sorry that I had to be away so long to-day; but you will, I know, forgive one who has so many important affairs in hand.’

  When finally, after six weeks’ foretaste of hell for his unwilling guest, Dracula takes off for his London adventure, he pinches Jonathan’s suit, overcoat and travelling rug. But the solicitor’s clerk has given him more than clothing. He has helped the Count English himself. Beware Piccadilly.

  * He may, as I have argued elsewhere, have three English ladies in his vaults (see pages 34–5), which would help with the language, but not with the finer points of English gentlemanly behaviour.

  Whose face does Jonathan remember?

  There is an enigmatic sentence in Jonathan’s recollection of his near-violation by the three sisters:

  They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark […] The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great wavy masses of golden hair and eyes like pale sapphires. I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear, but I could not recollect at the moment how or where. [my italics]

  The fair sister is urged by her dark comrades to have the first ‘kiss’, so-called. They repeat the word ‘kiss’ – it is not, we apprehend, a friendly peck they are thinking of.

  It is strange. In the civilised world Jonathan comes from, women do not initiate the lover’s kiss, lunging like hungry piranha at the male’s face. Leave that to the mythical harpy (who actually preferred tearing out men’s livers). ‘Ladies’ would receive the chosen one’s proffered lips demurely. Sometimes with faux reluctance, averting the head so that the female cheek receives the male mouth.

  It has been suggested that what Jonathan is ‘dreamily’ remembering here is his experience with the un-dead Countess Dolingen, in the dropped Munich prelude (published, long after the novel, as ‘Dracula’s Guest’ – see ‘What Happened in Munich?’, page 108). The suggestion has plausibility. But Stoker leaves it open enough that there is opportunity for some other, equally plausible guesses.

  Are these women all that is left of what was once a whole community inhabiting the castle? One’s mind shifts to one of the most memorable passages in the novel. Jonathan, exploring the vast building in which he now knows he is imprisoned, comes across a new part of it:

  From the windows I could see that the suite of rooms lay along to the south of the castle, the windows of the end room looking out both west and south. On the latter side, as well as to the former, there was a great precipice. The castle was built on the corner of a great rock, so that on three sides it was quite impregnable, and great windows were placed here where sling, or bow, or culverin could not reach, and consequently light and comfort, impossible to a position which had to be guarded, were secured. To the west was a great valley, and then, rising far away, great jagged mountain fastnesses, rising peak on peak, the sheer rock studded with mountain ash and thorn, whose roots clung in cracks and crevices and crannies of the stone. This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and the moth. My lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place which chilled my heart and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill.

  The clash of ages, antiquity and modernity, which is at the heart of the novel’s thinking, is articulated authoritatively here with a burst of Stoker’s finest descriptive prose.

  But various puzzles remain: how has Dracula become sole master and inhabitant of this castle, which once teemed with the complicated clan household of a local medieval ruler and military commanders? That we shall never know.

  The ‘fair lady’ clearly evokes Mina – who is, at this moment, in another country, practising her ‘new woman’ of
fice skills. The ‘fair one’ in Castle Dracula is, one suspects, not ‘new’: any more than la belle dame sans merci is new. She is as old as myth itself.

  The spirit of her age, summer 1893, allows Mina to flex her ‘man’s brain’ in ways her women ancestors never could. But she is also described (repeatedly by Van Helsing) as ‘angelic’: a genus traditionally fair-haired in Victorian social myth, submissive to male will, and ultra-female. One thinks of the poem (beloved in its time) ‘The Angel in the House’, by Coventry Patmore. Then, as now, a ‘real’ man would never be described as ‘angelic’.

  When we last get a sense of her, in the narrative’s epilogue, Mrs Harker is no new woman, but a model wife and mother cut from traditional cloth. An angel in Jonathan Harker’s house. Victorians saw it, most of them, as a happy ending. We, perhaps, do not.

  What seems the most likely reading to me as the fair lady’s lips come towards Jonathan is his evaporating fidelity to Mina. He suddenly wants demons, not angels. The ‘other’, when it comes to sex, is more seductive and more dangerous. It always is. Ask men through the ages.

  The Victorians, we conclude, loaded much more significance into the concept of the kiss than we do. It was the sole sexual contact permitted premarital lovers, if they were following approved social codes. The period’s ideology of osculation (so to call it) was raised to iconic status by one of its most famous paintings, Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s Bocca Baciata (‘The Kissed Mouth’). The portrait is a tribute to the ‘bee-stung lips’ of the painter’s mistress, Fanny Cornforth. The painting carries a motto, in Italian: Bocca baciata non perde ventura, anzi rinnova come fa la luna (‘The mouth that has been kissed does not lose its savour, indeed it renews itself just as the moon does’).

  As Wikipedia* usefully informs us:

  Rossetti, an accomplished translator of early Italian literature, probably knew the proverb from Boccaccio’s Decameron where it is used as the culmination of the tale of Alatiel: a beautiful Saracen princess who, despite having had sex on perhaps ten thousand occasions with eight separate lovers in the space of four years, successfully presents herself to the King of the Algarve as his virgin bride.

  Kathryn Hughes, who has most recently analysed Rossetti’s painting,† reminds us that Cornforth, before becoming his mistress, was a ‘sly prostitute’ (i.e. not a common prostitute). All of which leaves us, after much thought, floundering, as usual, in deep waters. But interesting. Sex usually is.

  AFTERTHOUGHT

  ‘Tresses’

  Having pondered Dracula’s chameleon moustache (see page 18) one can spend some time on Mina and Lucy’s tresses (a word never applied to a man, however long his locks). Lucy’s tresses, before her violation, are described as ‘sunny’ – as golden as those of the unfallen Eve. After Dracula has done his deed of darkness her hair turns brown. When she rises from her tomb, to bite the innocent, fair-haired, children of Hampstead, her hair is as black as hell.

  The colour codes speak for themselves. Yet the blonde vampire in Castle Dracula still provokes curiosity. Is she, so to speak, a virgin? Will her golden tresses darken after feasting on Jonathan? What colour is her hair when Van Helsing plunges his stake into her heart? Unanswered questions, alas.‡

  * Accessed June 2017.

  † In Victorians Undone (2017).

  ‡ I am obliged to Charlotte Hansen’s blog post ‘Hair Color and Innocence in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, available online.

  Is Dracula’s blood warm?

  Is he, put another way, literally cold-blooded? In one of the most vivid scenes in the novel Jonathan, facing another disturbed night, looks out of the window of the castle and sees a head emerging from the window below him:

  my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall.

  What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of man?

  Lizards need sunlight to generate their energy. If there is one thing Count Dracula does not need it is sunlight.

  During the day, in London, he wears a panama (no film version has dared picture that sartorial detail). Dracula’s face, all reports testify, is unnaturally pale – a hue associated with cold skin. He exudes, in manner, a corpse-like frigidity, except immediately after devouring when he resembles a fat filthy leech. Warm blood, cold blood? What runs through his veins? Buffy the Vampire Slayer and associated websites torment themselves with this blood puzzle incessantly. It makes a big difference in the love scenes and ‘Yuk!’ factor. The fact that, as Jonathan notes on their first meeting, the Count’s hand is ‘as cold as ice’ provokes merely a minor shudder.

  In the final scene, Quincey’s bowie knife goes for the heart. Does Dracula have one? Or is the stolen blood in his body still and cooling fast. These anatomical speculations, which the novel does little to clarify, lead on to the larger question, does a vampire’s blood circulate, as ours does?

  Blood, after all, is what the vampiric kind live on. But does their own blood get pumped around the body to its extremities? Put another way, how, anatomically, does the undead corpus (corpse) handle its unlife-blood?

  As I say, tormenting questions. Turn, for enlightenment, to the ‘Federal Vampire and Zombie Agency’, the bible of straight-faced speculation on such issues.* These are the authoritative answers to the above questions:

  Blood:

  Vampire blood is called ichor (pr. ik-er), and appears more brown or black due to an increase in iron and bile levels, allowing it to carry more oxygen and clot faster while slowing the growth of harmful microbes.

  Heart:

  Vampire blood is pumped via the contraction of skeletal muscle rather than the heart, which eventually atrophies from disuse. At rest, these contractions are mostly involuntary and take place in the limbs, emanating from the furthest extremities inward, like a wave. BPM for each contraction tends to be much lower than the average human heartbeat.

  Adrenaline:

  This ‘emergency hormone’, produced by the adrenal glands, is released in consistently large amounts in vampire blood during ‘fight-or-flight’ situations. This quickly raises a vampire’s sluggish metabolism by increasing blood flow, dilating air passages and accelerating the production of clotting factors. Along with changes in muscle, bone and connective tissue, this ability to release adrenaline only adds to a vampire’s extraordinary power.

  Now we know.

  * https://www.fvza.org/science2.html

  Why are Dracula’s palms hirsute?

  Harker gives us a number of eyewitness sketches of his sinister host. It is not easy, since Dracula’s appearance is fluid as quicksilver and radically metamorphic. As Stoker records in his surviving notes, it has proved impossible to create a picture of the Count. The image dissolves on the canvas.

  One detail in his pseudo-human manifestations does, however, catch the eye as something fixed:

  Hitherto I [Jonathan] had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse – broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder.

  He is being fondled, he senses, by something inhuman. Evolution has bred out in the human race the growth of hair on the palm and soles of the feet, other than for a few unfortunates suffering from what is called Hypertr
ichosis.*

  The primary explanation for Dracula having inhumanly hairy palms is that in his early thinking Bram Stoker was in two minds as to whether the Count should be a werewolf (lycanthrope), a vampire, or something in between. As a relic of this uncertainty Dracula has the telltale unibrow associated with the werewolf. ‘His eyebrows’, we are told, are ‘very massive, almost meeting over the nose’.

  Stoker picked up all the lore a novelist could need about werewolves from his friend, the scholar Sabine Baring-Gould. (Baring-Gould was an Exeter resident and it has been surmised that Stoker put Harker’s office in the shadow of Exeter Cathedral as a tribute.) In his classic Book of Werewolves (1865) Baring-Gould describes the humanoid werewolf’s palms exactly as Stoker describes Dracula’s palms: ‘the werewolf has broad hands, short fingers and has some hairs in the hollow of his hand.’

  Like the devil’s cloven foot, the inhumanly hairy paw witnesses to the werewolf within. Reach for your silver bullets, Quincey.

  A clear fragment of this werewolf conception remains in the early lupine episode, as Dracula is driving Harker at breakneck speed to his castle. The moon breaks, glisteningly, through the clouds to shine as light as day; suddenly the coach is surrounded by a ring of wolves, slavering for human meat.

  The driver (it is Dracula, we shall later discover) leaves his seat to confront the beasts:

  How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves fell back and back further still. Just then a heavy cloud passed across the face of the moon, so that we were again in darkness.