Bram Stoker’s interest in the macabre seems to have been with him from his youth. While at Trinity College, Dublin, he became a member of the University’s Philosophical Society, and the first paper he presented was “Sensationalism in Fiction and Society.” After graduation, he worked as a theater critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. The paper was owned by Sheridan Le Fanu, who ended up being a far larger influence on Stoker’s creative life a few years later. It was Le Fanu’s story Carmilla, about a female vampire preying on a lonely woman, which seems to lay the groundwork for the vampire fiction after it, most directly Stoker’s famous novel.
Le Fanu’s story is told as the casebook of Dr. Hesselius, the first occult doctor in literature. The protagonist, Laura, is a young woman who at first thinks the vampiric attacks are nightmares, and later begins to draw connection between them and the highly sexualized relationship she shares with her friend Carmilla. Laura and her family are aided by a vampire expert, Baron Vordenburg, who is a direct inspiration for Stoker’s Van Helsing. Laura and Carmilla’s extremely intense friendship was also an influence on Lucy and Mina’s relationship.
Stoker combined elements of this story with two other popular vampire stories—Varney the Vampire, which presented Varney as a sympathetic character, and more immediately, John Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which featured George Gordon, Lord Byron Lord Ruthven, a refined, aristocratic ghoul who literally and metaphorically drains everyone he meets. Stoker also drew on the theatricality of the actor Henry Irving, who became Stoker’s close friend (Stoker actually tailored the character of Dracula in hopes that his friend would play him in a stage adaptation) and wrote the book in a gothic style that put it in the same school as Mary Shelley and Emily Bronte.
Having said all of this, however, Dracula’s mood and tone are completely unique. It draws on its own tensions, and uses each limited point of view to terrifying effect as the reader pieces Dracula’s story and intent together. The clash Stoker creates between the innocence of Jonathan and Mina and the utter ruthlessness of Dracula, lodges in the reader’s mind long after the book is finished. Possibly because it employs truly horrific supernatural elements, it is able to be far more haunting than other gothic romances of the time.
Dracula was released in 1897 and was immediately successful with critics, but it never really became a bestseller during Stoker’s lifetime. It wasn’t until F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was released in 1922 that the book began to do well. Murnau had never secured any rights to the story, so Stoker’s widow took legal action after the film’s release, and the ensuing publicity reignited interest in the book. The story of Dracula has now been adapted over 200 times—second only to Sherlock Holmes—and every piece of vampire-influenced pop culture finds itself reckoning with its forefather, however clumsily.
Stoker himself went on to write more books (one of which, Lair of the White Worm, was adapted into a hilarious Hugh Grant vehicle) but none of them really grabbed the public’s attention like Dracula. At the time of its writing, the book’s vampirism could be seen as a metaphor for colonialism, syphilis, and closeted homosexuality, and has since been used to talk about feminism, heroin addiction, AIDs, and true love. Stoker’s story, with the terrifyingly charismatic figure at the center, became a screen for each new generation to project its fears upon.
This article was originally published November 8, 2014.
I would love to see a Dracula read along/re-read here on Tor
Sun Stealer @1, I will second that motion! That would be a load of fun.
Agreed
I would absolutely love a “Dracula” re-read. This is one of my favorite novels.
Other birthdays include the writer and former Analog editor Ben Bova, Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go) and Jeffrey Ford.
Interesting program on the BBC recently linking vampires, and the gothic literary genre, with Marxism.
Marx describes capitalism as a vampire preying on labour. Not especially influential on Stoker but certainly on William Morris and his followers.
Dr Angelicus @6 that’s a fascinating idea. I imagine there are all sorts of parallels that could have been drawn in terms of alienation of labour and vampires sucking blood / controlling others’ efforts, as well as the distinct separation of a monstrous elite and the upper class depiction of many vampires.
Terry Eagleton book’s Myths of Power includes a great Marxist interp of Wuthering Heights.
Ok, that’s what happens when I rearrange the sentence via copy ‘n paste and don’t reread before posting . . . so . . .
Terry Eagleton’s book Myths of Power includes a great Marxist interp of Wuthering Heights.
Oh and speaking of Wuthering Heights . . .
I read Dracula for a grad class, had a nightmare, and after class ended did not reread it so I don’t remember many details, but am I right in remembering that there was some sort of narrative frame–via letters or something?–like Wuthering Heights has a narrative frame?
I’d say he created TWO classics. The Jewel of the Seven Stars is almost as much an ur-text for mummies as Dracula is for vampires, and it would be well worth a reread too. (The Lady of the Shroud is meh, and Lair of the White Worm is bizarre but has some great stuff buried in it.)
And lay off Buffy vs Dracula! I love that episode.
The class thing is interesting. It’s been pointed out that, out of seven major good guys in Dracula, the three who provide the narrative voice (the Harkers and Jack Seward) are all English and middle class: upper class Lucy and Arthur, and foreigners Quincy and Van Helsing, get far less to say; while the working classes of all nations are an undifferentiated mass of easily bribed beer-swillers – and the villain is, guess what, a foreign aristocrat.
This may be the origin of the pattern seen in Hammer gothic films inthe Sixties – even completely original ones – which have a habit of pitting virtuous teachers and doctors against evil aristos, with the working classes mostly passive and (unless played by Michael Ripper, or st a pinch Patrick Troughton) uncharacterised.
Dr Cox @9 the whole story is told through letters, journals, ships logs, etc. I don’t know how much this was a common convention of the time, but it seems intended to add an air of authenticity.
Makhno @10 I wonder if that presentation of so many protagonists as middle class English is less about Hammer following Dracula and more about both Stoker and Hammer following the norms of their time. Those kind of characters were, heck still are, hugely dominant in British media. In my experience, significant representation of the working class is a notable exception rather than a norm.
Definitely agree that Dracula would be a great candidate for a re-read. I’ve got a slightly different perspective than @10 and @11 on the presentation of class, however. First, I wouldn’t agree that all the working class characters are negative: the Transylvanian peasants try very hard to protect Jonathan (and I wonder if there is more than a hint of parody of the expected “exoticism” in his early diary entries, with their intense focus on national dress and food and “quaint” customs rather than trying to actually understand the nonverbal messages being shoved in his face) and the Russian sea captain comes off as a heroic character. Even the zookeeper isn’t necessarily negative: he does accept a bribe, but it isn’t to do anything dangerous–it’s to give a newspaper report that ends up being important evidence.
If anything, I see quite a strong undercurrent of critique of the mores of the middle class of the time, particularly of the “Don’t ask questions” and “Don’t disobey your superiors” variety. Perhaps most particularly from Jonathan, who is really at the absolute borderline between middle and working classes as an orphan apprentice. I find his endless rationalizations of why he doesn’t try to leave the castle perhaps the most chilling parts of the novel–and a lot of them take the form of “I can’t betray my employer who has been so good to me” or “I can’t upset the Count, he’s a count and I am a don’t-really-believe-I’m-a-solicitor-even-though-I-just-passed-the-bar”. Likewise, the whole unfolding narrative of the distribution of the boxes reads more to me as an implicit critique of the risks of the “Don’t ask questions, just do as you’re told and you’ll get paid” mentality than an assumption that the working classes are inherently stupid, as opposed to socialized into incuriosity.
Gibbondemon @@@@@ 11
… the whole story is told through letters, journals, ships logs, etc. I don’t know how much this was a common convention of the time
Epistolary novels go back hundreds of years, actually. I gather they were perhaps less common in the 19th Century than in the 18th, though.
What’s perhaps especially interesting about Dracula is the combination of a wide variety of different sources (in addition to letters and journal entries, there are newspaper articles, telegrams, ship’s logs, etc., as you note) and the cutting-edge technology involved in some of them. For example, Dr. Seward’s “diary entries” are supposed to be wax-cylinder audio recordings, transcribed to text form by Mina Harker using a typewriter.
Dr. Angelicus @6
Marx describes capitalism as a vampire preying on labour.
Yes, one gets the impression that Marx was rather fond of Gothic literature, since vampires are a pretty common metaphor in his writing. Someone even wrote an article on the subject with the rather wonderful title “The Political Economy of the Dead: Marx’s Vampires” [PDF link], which sounds like something Max Gladstone might write about.
(Though there is apparently one passage in Capital where Marx referred to “the werewolf-like hunger for surplus labour”, so it’s not all vampires, all the time.)
And the “financiers and businessmen are like vampires sucking the blood of the poor” trope actually predates both Marx and vampire novels; Voltaire used it in 1764: