Bram Stoker followed the lead set by Robert Louis Stevenson in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) to write horror fiction. Such stories were enjoying a renewed prestige among the French, and Stevenson proved that modern readers welcomed frightening tales, as long as they preserved a vestige of reality. An author named Minnie Mackay, who assumed the pseudonym Marie Corelli, had advanced flamboyant tales such as A Romance of Two Worlds (1887), which presented readers with a theory called “The Electric Origin of the Universe,” advanced by a character who used the occult and claimed relation to the Magi.
Some adopted the themes of her books as a weak philosophy, proving that minds like those of Queen Victoria and Oscar Wilde could be captivated by what most critics deemed nonsense. Stoker’s Dracula sold well enough to support him, its acceptability due mainly to his adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s use of documentary devices, including letters, news reports, and journals, to present his tale. It sold even better in America than in England, but due to copyright problems, Stoker received little to nothing from foreign sales.
His scenes in Romania, a country Stoker never actually visited, were powerful and memorable in their horrifying detail. By basing his monster on a historical figure, Vlad the Impaler, a fierce, loathsome, and inhumanly cruel combatant of medieval times, Stoker further imbued his tale with authenticity and the figure of Count Dracula with validity.
The novel introduces Jonathan Harker, a London solicitor who agrees to meet the vampire Count Dracula in his Transylvanian castle for the assumed purpose of drafting documents. He describes the Count, in part, as possessing “a very strong, aquiline” face, with “peculiarly arched nostrils” and “lofty domed forehead” with little hair around the temples, but growing “profusely” elsewhere, including “massive” eyebrows that almost “met over the nose.” The mouth, under a thick mustache, “was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”
Legend has it that Stoker based the creepy description on the appearance of his employer, Sir Henry Irving. Readers will recognize themselves in Harker’s comment that he is naively “deceived” by his own fears. Those fears are aroused by the stories the Count tells of his own family history, peppered with warriors who laid waste to entire cultures. When Harker compares his own tales to those of the Arabian Nights, Stoker makes clear the power of the imagination to extend life or extinguish it.
Harker describes unspeakable horrors, including the sacrifice of infants to the Count’s bloodlust and the visitation of three brides of Dracula who resemble succubae. Audiences excused the seduction by the brides of the morally upright Harker due to the magic spells cast by their feminine enchantments. Stoker includes effective descriptive passages, such as one in which Harker describes seeing the Count scaling walls in the form of a bat.
Harker’s fiancée, Mina Murray, awaits him in Whitby, England, where the Count goes to pursue her entrapment. Harker eventually escapes to spend six weeks in a Budapest hospital where his “brain fever” eventually subsides, allowing him to return home.
During Harker’s absence, Mina’s diary entries describe experiences shared with her friend Lucy Westenra, described as a “New Woman,” who will do her own proposing of marriage to one of her several suitors, which include Mr. Holmwood, Quincey Morris, and Dr. John Seward. However, the Count will soon upset the plans of the two friends. Mina follows Lucy outside one night and sees “undoubtedly something, long and black, bending over the half-reclining white figure” of Lucy. When she calls to her friend, “something raised a head, and from where I was, I could see a white face and red, gleaming eyes.”
Later, Mina discovers what appears to be “a good sized bird” at Lucy’s side, hinting at the bat form Dracula can assume. Dr. John Seward attempts to care for Lucy as she shows symptoms of some mysterious “disease” following her encounter with Dracula, and he summons Van Helsing, a Dutch physician with expertise in vampirism, for consultation.
In addition, Stoker introduces Renfield, a lunatic who imitates various animals while housed in Seward’s private asylum. Renfield falls under Dracula’s spell, fantasizing he is the Count’s servant, destined to help supply him victims. Stoker reflects negatively on religious fundamentalism as he writes, “a strong man with homicidal and religious mania at once might be dangerous. The combination is a dreadful one.”
Thus, Stoker juxtaposes two figures considered mad according to convention, although Van Helsing, the “mad scientist,” is acceptable because he can defend against the greater madness of vampirism, whereas Renfield’s madness, dedicated to the service of the occult, is not.
As with Harker, Mina and Lucy succumb to occult sexual overtures due to the strength of dark powers. A victim of Dracula’s bite-kiss, Lucy becomes a vampire, dying from her affliction and then suffering a living death as she rises from her grave to search for victims who may supply her with the blood she craves. She is “rescued” from “eternal damnation” by Van Helsing and the others, thanks to the magical effects of a stake driven through her heart that releases her from vampirism.
Other weapons against vampires included the Christian cross and garlic, which ward off their powers, and exposing them to deadly sunlight. Enraged by his failure to retain Lucy, the Count pursues Mina, but she is spared, thanks to the efforts of Harker, Lucy’s lovers, and Van Helsing.
Mina and Harker marry and then help pursue the Count to Transylvania. Although in love with Harker, Mina still feels the effects of Dracula. As the group travels to his castle, she lapses in and out of various trances, telling the men of one vision, “‘Something is going out. I can feel it pass me like a cold wind. I can hear, far off, confused sounds, as of men talking in strange tongues, fierce falling water, and the howling of wolves.’”
In a gruesome scene, Van Helsing helps release the three brides of Dracula by decapitating their beautiful bodies in the Count’s castle. In the meantime, Harker and Morris overtake gypsies transporting the box with the Count’s “undead” body toward the castle, fight them in order to remove the coffin lid before the sun goes down, and dispatch Dracula with some well-placed knife stabs in the setting sun. Morris dies from a mortal knife wound, but Mina and Jonathan are freed from the Count’s curse to enjoy happy lives.
The book concludes with a note from Harker, seven years following the trial by fire on his son’s seventh birthday, the anniversary of Morris’s death. As the child sits on Van Helsing’s lap, the doctor comments, “We want no proofs. We ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care. Later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake.”
The novel remained popular long past its era, absorbed into mythology and reappearing in popular culture into the 21st century. Its focus on religion, sexual powers, hypnotic tendencies, political and social allegory, and powers of the female offer literary critics of all interests much to analyze. The Count’s supernatural figure resonates with audiences who have viewed him as a type of antihero, admiring his cunning and transformative abilities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Florescu, Radu. The Complete Dracula. Acton, Mass.: Copley Publishing Group, 1993.
Categories: Horror Novels, Literature, Novel Analysis, Vampire Narratives
Horror Novels and Novelists
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