The irony of my imagined plot is obvious for anyone who has read Dracula: change the name of Buffalo Bill to Quincey Morris, and you have the novel’s climax. As the experienced hunting guide, it is the American, Morris, who deploys the posse’s forces at critical moments. As they prepare to chase the count across Europe, Morris is the one who advises them to stock up on rifles, Winchesters in fact, the very brand that had Cody’s exclusive endorsement (the only advertisement in his 1887 London show program was for Winchester rifles).144 He arrives with the others just in time to battle Dracula at the Borgo Pass, with the dire castle in sight. When Dracula dies in the novel, it is not with a stake through his heart, but Morris’s bowie knife. Critics have long pondered Stoker’s purpose in creating Morris, the weakest and most peripheral of the three youthful male characters who battle Count Dracula. Equally puzzling is his death. Morris is the only one to die in the struggle with the vampire, and it is his death, not Dracula’s, which closes the novel’s action.145
All this is still more intriguing when we revisit Morris’s odd, recurring lapses, or duplicities. Indeed, although it goes unnoticed by the others in the novel, right up until the moment he stabs the villainous Dracula, Quincey Morris is practically malevolent. In shooting at a bat he takes to be the count, he nearly kills others in the party. Instead of pursuing the count forcefully at one critical juncture, he hides among the trees and loses him. When the count is surrounded in his house in Piccadilly, Morris is to guard the window to prevent his escape, but the count escapes anyway—through the window. Were they in league together? Lucy dies and turns into a vampire immediately after receiving a transfusion from Morris. He is the first character in the book to utter the word “vampire”—indeed he diagnoses Lucy—and he is the only one to have had exposure to vampire bats, in Argentina, where they killed his horse. Might he himself have been infected? In the original draft of his novel, Stoker had Morris traveling to Transylvania alone, and at another point he was to enter Dr. Seward’s office in the company of the count.146 What was his role meant to be in the original draft? And what are we to make of his numerous missteps in pursuit of the vampire?
One of the more provocative and thoughtful arguments of recent years, and now a consensus among critics, posits that Morris is a secret vampire. In this reading, his character expresses Stoker’s ambivalence about the American ascent to world power in the 1890s. Some see Morris as a dark allusion to the parasitic threat of American capital; others point out that if the novel Dracula is concerned with the displacement of racially decaying people by the racially vigorous, then the real danger to England in 1897 comes not from Eastern Europe but from the Americans, represented by Morris.147 In a sense, Stoker is caught in the ongoing double take of British audiences at the Wild West show, expressing adulation for Americans on the one hand (“If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed,” says one character about Quincey Morris) and the fear of their regenerative and military power on the other, a fear which finds some resolution in Morris’s death at novel’s end.148
Clearly, William Cody was the inspiration for Quincey Morris. The similarities between the fictional character and the historical Cody are extensive, and go far beyond their predilection for Winchesters. Both are hunters (something they share with Dracula himself), and both have been hunting guides to the aristocracy. Cody’s guided hunts with the Grand Duke Alexis, as well as with British aristocrats such as Sir George Gore and the Earl of Dunraven, formed a large part of his biographical publicity in England, where he was far and away the most famous hunting guide of the period.149
Morris’s origins as a Texan are likely an attempt to locate him “out West” more than anything specific. But they call to mind the 1887 joke about Irving becoming a “Texan cow-boy” to gain an audience with the queen, as well as the speculation that Jack the Ripper was a “Texas rough.” As we have already seen, the earlier version of the character in the short story “The Squaw” hailed from Cody’s home state of Nebraska.150 Finally and most important, by the time Stoker began to write Dracula in the 1890s, the ubiquity of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show would have made it practically impossible for Stoker to conjure up a western character without thinking of Buffalo Bill.
But if Morris is drawn from Cody, Count Dracula has a good deal in common with him, too. For starters, he is not just a frontiersman, but a frontier hero. As Van Helsing informs the vampire hunters, Dracula “won his name against the Turk,” across the Danube “on the very frontier of Turkeyland,” where he consistently showed himself to be “the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest” of Transylvania’s sons.151
After generations of studying American frontier ideology, historians would do well to move beyond Frederick Jackson Turner’s lumping of European frontier concepts into a single notion of “a fortified boundary line running through dense populations.” In the 1890s, complex European ideas connected race, culture, and national borders. Nations were thought to be roughly contiguous with patterns of racial settlement, and their frontiers were profoundly racial boundaries.152 In this connection, the Wild West show served as a kind of allegory for European politics. Articles about “frontier tensions,” between, for example, Germany and France, appeared alongside reviews of the show.153
Indeed, Stoker’s use of frontier rhetoric to describe Transylvania was not new. In Britain, southeastern Europe was the locus of the “Eastern Question,” the debate over how best to secure a region crisscrossed by racial frontiers, bordering Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, constantly threatening war and the empire’s hold on India. Transylvania was a linchpin of the Balkans, and in the travel books Stoker researched it had many similarities to Cody’s version of the American West. Its racially segmented, mutually hostile Gypsies, Magyars, and Saxons were analogous to Cody’s Indians, Mexicans, and white cowboys. Like the peoples of the American West, they ranged between primitivism and civilization, struggling to carve life from the wilderness amidst continuous race war.154
In Europe, Cody and probably Salsbury, too, had become aware of the mutual ideological resonance of American and Eurasian frontiers by 1891. The following year they added mounted contingents from “world frontiers” beyond North America. In 1893 they formally reconstituted the show, expanding its narrative from western history to world history, under the new name “Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” The new spectacle featured horsemen from the globe’s far-flung racial frontiers, including contingents of European cavalry, gauchos, Cossacks, and Arabs. They continued to add and subtract these “frontier” contingents according to their availability. In 1897, the same year that Dracula was published, the show featured “Czikos,” or “Magyar-gypsy horsemen” who hailed “from that part of Hungary that borders on Turkey.” 155 Who the actual performers were remains a mystery, but they represented the same “race” of people from whom Stoker drew Dracula, the horsemen of the Transylvanian frontier who marked the line between Europe and Asia.
Stoker himself compared popular renderings of the American West and southeastern Europe, liberally interchanging eastern and western clichés in his notes and in the final draft of his vampire novel. Originally, the tale included chapters titled “On the Track, Texan in Transylvania,” in which Quincey Morris scouted out enemy territory (much like Cody in Indian country) and “Vigilante Committee, Necktie Party,” to describe the moment in which the posse plots the count’s demise. Tellingly, in his notes Stoker frequently pairs the word “Transylvania” with “Texas” or “the Texan,” as if the two frontiers of East and West were somehow inseparable, or interchangeable.156 Ultimately, his Transylvania, his eastern frontier, could almost be the American West in the novel, with Gypsies as its Indians, treacherous and “almost outside all law,” Slovaks dressed in “high boots” and “big cowboy hats,” and the Western European posse heading off the frontier villain at the eastern European pass.
And the closer we look, the more familiar its
principal frontier figure becomes. Like the Americans and the British, Dracula’s kin, the Szekelys, are descended from Vikings, who in Dracula’s words, “bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them,” to stand guard for centuries along “the frontier of Turkeyland.” 157 As he recounts their seemingly endless wars, Dracula invokes the heroism of his ancestors. Only later do we discover that he is in fact talking about his own centuries-old exploits in the third person. Dracula “again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkeyland; … when he was beaten back, [he] came again, and again, and again, though he had to come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph.”158
Stoker’s fictional eastern frontiersman stands in almost perfect counterpoint to the most famous frontiersman of the 1890s, Buffalo Bill. Dracula is the centuries-old warrior hero in the East, defending western civilization’s first frontier with non-Christian peoples in Transylvania, “the land beyond the forest.” Cody is the hero of the Indian wars in the West, those epic conflicts between Christian America and savage paganism that so darkened America’s “land beyond the forests,” the Great Plains.
More than this, each of these figures embodies the entire frontier history of his people: Dracula as the eternal warrior from a frontier of ceaseless war (his insatiable appetite for blood mimicking the bloodthirst and stagnation of the Balkan frontier), Cody “the representative man of the frontiersman of the past,” hunter, rancher, and, most important, warrior (his having “passed through every stage of border life” embodying the regenerative and progressive powers of the American frontier). 159 Stoker’s monster is not just from the frontier. Like Buffalo Bill, he is the frontier. He retains the powers of a badly twisted nature, so that where Mary Shelley’s creature in Frankensteinthreatened to reproduce himself and destroy humanity, Dracula, like the frontier itself, threatens to transform humanity into a different set of beings altogether. 160
As much as these old soldiers share a frontier history, each also faces a profoundly uneasy future, in which the racial coherence they represent threatens to evaporate. Both arrive in London to announce that the frontier wars are over, the great racial conflicts gone, and with them have gone not only the struggles that generated them but also the Darwinian contests that made their races great. Programs for the Wild West show invoke simultaneously the frontier world that birthed the Americans and its imminent vanishment. The racial conflicts of the ancient and frontier past are now giving way to a white-dominated nation-state.
Count Dracula too longs for a golden age of racial conflict. After regaling Jonathan Harker with his family’s martial heritage, the count waxes nostalgic. “Those warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.”161 Not surprisingly, perhaps, as the great European empires quash the old ethnic wars on the frontier, Dracula, the eternal frontier warrior, seeks to quench his bloodthirst on the weak, effeminate capital of Western Europe, London.
Here the dread lord of Transylvania is a through-the-looking-glass version of Buffalo Bill. Like the American, Dracula comes to London announcing the closure of a racial frontier, and he, too, is possessed of a racial supremacy hardened in frontier battle with racial others. But he is a frontier warrior gone horribly wrong, the vanguard of Western culture turned against the home civilization and in full regression. Count Dracula is Buffalo Bill Cody, inverted.
The depth, range, and consistency of these inversions is striking, and we have room to consider only a few. “Nature’s Nobleman” was youthful, from common origins but rendered supreme through his encounters with nature. Dracula is ancient, aristocratic, and decidedly “not of nature.”162 Cody the centaur embodied a narrative of progress from nature to technology. Dracula the vampire embodies a narrative without regeneration or progress, and in fact his recurrent morphing into wolves, bats, or clouds of dust suggests his devolutionary nature. Unlike the sharpshooting Americans of the Wild West show who avail themselves of the most modern weaponry, Dracula never resorts to machine supremacy for racial renewal. His is a constant atavism, a return to the most basic and crude of beings, substances, and appetites that mocks the advances of modern civilization.
But Dracula is no mere villain to Cody’s hero. It is rather as if his evil powers represent Cody’s strengths and virtues carried to unprecedented extremes. Cody’s martial abilities, his long military career, his facility with manipulating nature and particularly animals, all have their dark counterpart in Dracula, the ages-old frontier hero who can become an animal at will.
Even Dracula’s inability to die, his undeadness, seems to be a distorted echo of Buffalo Bill’s frontier life, particularly his exploits in the Indian wars. In the accounts of his military commanders—liberally excerpted in show programs and on posters—Cody’s remarkable talents as tracker, fighter, and strategist were charged with a legendary, practically superhuman endurance. In the esteem of General Carr, “Mr. Cody seemed never to tire and was always ready to go, in the darkest night, or the worst weather, and usually volunteered.”163 The sleeplessness of Buffalo Bill and the restlessness of westerners, so prevalent in the enormous energy on display in the Wild West show, rendered the frontier a place of eternal watchfulness, where, in the words of one London columnist, “constant vigilance is the price of existence.”164
And “constant vigilance” is the essence of Dracula’s curse, for as the centuries-old border guardian, Dracula himself has become an eternal sentry, unable to sleep, to rest, to die. As he puts it, his has been the “endless duty of the frontier guard, for, as the Turks say, ‘water sleeps, and enemy is sleepless.’ ”165 Dracula was created by unceasing war, by a frontier that went one step further than Cody’s in refusing to close. So long as it remains open, so too must the eyes of its heroic border guardian. As we learn in the novel, Dracula was once a man. But his passion for victory over the hated Other, itself a characteristic of the racial frontier, led him to a Faustian bargain. In exchange for learning the dark arts which allow him finally to vanquish the Turk, he became the deathless vampire, the eternal warrior.166 Seen in this light, the career of the young American begins to look like a pale version of Dracula’s early days. We might say that to be Buffalo Bill in the war against the Turks is to become Dracula.
Like his application of frontier tropes to Transylvania, Stoker’s many inversions of the frontier myth were in keeping with older gothic traditions. In the words of one scholar, “the mingled apprehension and aspiration” of the New England Puritans became the starting point for both the progressive frontier myth of later generations and its gothic horrors.167 Put another way, regressive gothic literature inverts progressive New World expectations: the Christian errand into the wilderness becomes the traveler’s ordeal, the city on a hill becomes the castle ruin (also on a hill) into which the traveler stumbles in the hour of dark need, and the climactic moment of the frontier saga, the removal of wilderness savages by the bearers of light, becomes in its gothic counterpart the transformation of the pilgrim into a monster. 168 In the end, Stoker conceived a vampire world which drew comprehensively on contemporary frontier myth to create a fully realized inversion, a gothic nightmare that stands in close counterpoint to Cody’s frontier dream.
It would have been difficult for Stoker to restrain himself from the racial implications of that inversion. Cody himself had stood against the degenerative power of the frontier since his early days as a scout, as a white man in an occupation dominated by Indians and mixed-blood men, on a frontier that had, in the parlance of the day, “corrupted” Spanish conquistadors into conquered Mexicans, and which threatened to work its dark magic on Americans, too. As we have seen, his abilities as a scout were considerable, but officers praised him as much as they did partly because he so closely approximated their fantasies of a white man who mastered the frontier but avoided its interracial temptations
. Implicitly, Cody continued to remind his audience of his strengths in this regard, by surrounding himself with white frontiersmen, Indians, and mixed-blood families, such as John Y. Nelson, his Lakota wife, and their children, and the Lakota and mixed-blood family of “Bronco Bill” Irving. To see Cody amidst the sexy, polyglot crowd of the Wild West camp was to recognize how “superior” his will must be in rising above frontier sensuality.
Regardless of how much attention Stoker paid to Cody’s Great Plains mythology, he would have been familiar with the idea of a racially degenerate frontier. An Anglo-Irish writer who favored home rule, he knew the rhetoric of colonial and frontier degeneracy from a lifetime of “bog trotter” epithets and arguments over British power. America was a hopeful destination for the multitudes of Irish who fled the famine and for many who stayed at home, too. But at the same time, since the beginning of the American experiment, various writers had speculated that Americans were racially degraded by historic and often familial ties to Indians and Africans, relations which were themselves symptomatic of licentious backcountry freedom and America’s remoteness from European sources of whiteness.169 Mexicans, a constant reminder of the frontier’s potential for “unfit amalgamation” of Europeans and Indians, were the largest minority presence in the U.S. Southwest in the 1870s (and a major component of Cody’s show, too). In the 1890s, the threat of frontier miscegenation yet preoccupied apologists for the American conquest of the Southwest and California, and ultimately it played a large part in restraining U.S. expansion across the Pacific, particularly in the Philippines.170
Thus, it is not surprising to find that racial ambiguities swirl around both the novel’s frontiersmen. The doomed Lucy compares Quincey Morris to Othello, a curious reference for an infatuated white girl to apply to her ostensibly white suitor.171 And where Morris suggests Stoker’s suspicions about New World frontiersmen, it is Count Dracula who embodies his deepest fears about Americans and the fate of the Anglo-Saxon race. Just as Cody resembled Cetshwayo and Jung Bahadur in the barbs of his critics, just as his face suggested “traces of Indian blood” to some observers, so Dracula is revealed as the embodiment of racial ambivalence, the descendant not only of Vikings, but of their enemies, the Huns of Attila, “whose blood is in these veins,” as the count tells Jonathan Harker. 172 Scion of Asiatic and Teutonic lineages, not just berserker but Hun-berserker, Count Dracula is a racial hybrid, defying the categories that the frontier line itself purports to demarcate, subverting the civilization which is maintained by blood purity and in defense of which the frontier line is drawn.
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