Keywords

Introduction

Jonathan Harker, left alone after dining on his first night in Castle Dracula, decides to look for something to read. He discovers the Count’s library in which he:

…found, to my great delight, a vast number of English books, whole shelves full of them, and bound volumes of magazines and newspapers. A table in the centre was littered with English magazines and newspapers, though none of them were of very recent date. The books were of the most varied kind – history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law – all relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even such books of reference as the London Directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s Almanac, the Army and Navy Lists, and – it somehow gladdened my heart to see it – the Law List. (Stoker 2011: 22)

The Count has clearly been doing his research. The range of texts that he has compiled suggests that he possesses an extensive knowledge of the history and culture of Britain. He also knows about the current state of science and has, much to Harker’s pleasure, some understanding of the law. The Count’s library evokes a number of contexts, which relate more broadly to the novel itself, such as the importance of science and the law. The novel also evidences a love of studying texts, which is later reflected in how the vampire hunters come to assemble their journals into a chronologically organized document containing key facts about the Count that enable them to defeat him. The Count notes to Harker of his books that “These companions […] have been good friends to me” (22) and this bookishness, which appears toward the beginning of the novel, can also be read as reflecting on the bookish origins of the novel itself.

Some of Stoker’s preliminary research for the novel took place in the public library in Whitby during a vacation between July and September 1890. There he discovered key texts such as William Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) from which he took the name Dracula. Christopher Frayling records that Stoker took notes from around 40 books and articles including Charles Boner’s Transylvania (1865), Major E. C. Johnson’s On the Track of the Crescent (1885), which provides an account of the Carpathians (partially read through the Kantian sublime) and Sabine Baring-Gould’s Book of Were-wolves (1865). Frayling also lists a number of titles from a Lot, “the Library of the late Bram Stoker, Esq.,” which was auctioned at Sotheby’s in July 1913 by Stoker’s widow, Florence. This includes Gothic texts such as Hoffmann’s Weird Tales, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s The Watcher and Other Weird Stories and 30 volumes of Works by R. L. Stevenson (Frayling 1991: 317–347). Stoker’s working notes for Dracula were purchased by the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia in 1970 (notes which were originally also sold at the auction in 1913). A facsimile edition of these notes, annotated and transcribed by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller, was published in 2008. It includes not just references to the books noted above but also some revealing correspondence between Stoker and his brother Sir William Thornley Stoker (who was knighted in 1895 for his service to the medical profession) relating to the type of motor loss engendered by the infliction of increasingly severe neurological damage – a topic that Bram Stoker was considering when pondering the consequences of the Count’s violent assault on Renfield (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller 2008: 178–181).

From Stoker’s reading, and from its weird echo in the Count’s library, we can see that he was trying to master the customs and culture of parts of Romania while also, as in the Count’s reading, reflecting on science, economics, and the law. These sources enable us to identify some of the major themes in the novel, in particular the themes relating to travel, criminology, and medicine are sketched in the research.

On a subsequent visit to the library Harker records “I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide” (24). The Count’s interest in the train timetables that were collated in Bradshaw’s Guide is not confined to him. Later it is revealed that Mina Harker possesses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of train times because, as she tells the vampire hunters “At home in Exeter I always used to make up the time-tables, so as to be helpful to my husband. I found it so useful sometimes, that I always make a study of the time-tables now” (314). Jonathan’s trip to Castle Dracula means that she is also familiar with European train times. This might seem like a niche topic in Dracula but it opens up a way of thinking about travel writing and modernity, which play an important role in the novel with links between them suggested at the very beginning. The opening entry of Jonathan Harker’s journal, and so the opening lines of the novel, records that he “Left Munich at 8.35 pm on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but the train was an hour late” (5). Harker’s fastidiousness over train times reflects his status as a newly qualified solicitor who, when confronted by the seemingly supernatural horrors of Castle Dracula, will reach out for “facts – bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt” (31). His reality is governed by rules and regulations, which reflect his legal mindset. His Western model of rationality, however, provides little help in explaining what he discovers at Castle Dracula. Harker returns to his irritation with the late train after acknowledging that he is not sure where exactly Castle Dracula is because “there are no maps of this country as yet to compare with our Ordnance Survey maps” (5). Of the late departure he notes “It seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” (6). Jonathan is seemingly lost in space and time. Roger Luckhurst notes that the Ordnance Survey maps of Britain were launched by the military in the aftermath of the Scottish rebellion of 1746 and indicates that “Geographical knowledge and mapping were seen as intrinsic to British modernity”; the inability to locate Castle Dracula thus means that it exists “in a premodern space” (Luckhurst cited in Stoker 2011: 364). The paraphernalia of modernity plays a key role in a novel, which refers to phonographs, Kodak cameras, typewriters, and other contemporary forms of record keeping. The pioneering work of Friedrich Kittler on Dracula and its relationship to technology will be discussed later in this chapter. It is also important to ask at this stage, what type of character is Jonathan Harker? The answer to that question helps to explain the novel’s fascination with modernity and masculinity.

Masculinity and Degeneration

When we first encounter Harker we find him at a particular stage in his career; he has just qualified as a solicitor, he is engaged to be married to the resourceful and maternal Mina, and he is on his first work trip abroad. He is, in short, middle-class and with a seemingly bright future. His frustration with the trains is because he sees this as a specifically non-British problem. Other places and peoples are seen by him as “pre-modern,” which is reflected in his tourist-like evaluation of his initial encounters with people from Transylvania. Even when warned at an inn about the dangers of his journey he dismisses their concerns as superstitious and engagingly colourful – “I shall never forget the last glimpse which I had of the inn-yard and its crowd of picturesque figures, all crossing themselves” (10). Harker is clearly misreading the dangers that he will be confronted by because he is incapable of identifying, let alone acknowledging, the sources of danger. He records of some peasants that:

They are very picturesque, but do not look prepossessing. On the stage they would be set down at once as some old Oriental band of brigands. They are, however, I am told, very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion. (7)

At the end of his journal Harker records that these are the same people who come to the Castle to remove the Count’s boxes of earth that he needs to sleep in and then they depart, leaving Harker to the predations of the three female vampires. The problem is that Harker’s tourist-like assessment reproduces a notion of the picturesque that benignly construes the place and its inhabitants as unprepossessing. The limitations of the Western gaze are emphasized in Harker’s journal, a journal which in its exploration of the possibility of cultural exchange has implications for how masculinity is represented in the novel.

The Count is trying to become a bit more like Jonathan as he learns not only about British history and current cultural conventions but also as a way of improving his grasp of the British accent. The Count tells Harker “You shall, I trust, rest here with me a while, so that by our talking I may learn the English intonation” (23). The Count wishes to blend into British life as a way of making his colonization all the more effective. In so doing the Count appears to aspire to be like Harker – even going so far as to post a letter while wearing Harker’s clothes. As the Count reaches out for a disguise so Harker needs to become, so the novel tacitly argues, more like the Count. This type of cross-dressing cultural exchange makes sense when it is read through the prevailing theories of degeneration (discussed below), which identified a waning, middle-class, masculine vitality as one of the principal sources of degeneration. There is a paradox here because Mina claims that “[t]he Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him” (317), but the issue is more complex than that – and our vampire hunters are not above breaking the law themselves when it suits them, as evidenced by their occasional house-breaking and bribing of customs officials. The complicating factor relates to masculinity, an investigation of which helps to explain a central paradox of the novel.

As the Count tries to become more like Harker, so Harker needs to become more like the Count if he is going to be transformed into a man of action who will be capable, at the end of the novel, of dispatching the Count. In order for this transformation to take place he needs to move beyond the middle-class affiliations, which, at the start, he is so proud of. Western civilization is seemingly not, as reflected in Harker’s repeated epistemological failures, capable of fending off the “pre-modern.” This issue lies at the heart of theories of degeneration. Edwin Lankester in Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (1880) identifies the problem:

Any new set of conditions occurring to an animal which render its food and safety very easily attained, seem to lead as a rule to Degeneration; just as an active healthy man sometimes degenerates when he becomes suddenly possessed of a fortune; or as Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world. (Lankester 1880: 33)

Degeneration is the consequence of economic success. Wealth destroys the once “active healthy man” because he no longer has to strive for a living and so is not energized by the cut and thrust of the Darwinian struggle of the labour market . This also applies to civilizations, such as Rome (Lankester also mentions ancient Greece), which, according to Lankester, due to its economic success became peaceful and so unable to defeat its enemies. Dracula also addresses these issues as it suggests that Britain, the great colonizing nation, might become invaded by the vampiric Count whom Harker, now prompted to reflect on the negative consequences of his conveyancing work, sees as:

…the being I was helping to transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. (51)

That the Count represents a colonial threat is later referred to by Van Helsing when he notes of the Count “he is known everywhere that men have been” including “old Greece” and “old Rome” (222).

The Count poses a colonial danger but he also articulates a model of heroism, which is lacking in a modern world associated with middle-class administration (although, as we shall see, the Count’s defeat can in part be attributed to bureaucratic process). The Count makes a lengthy speech concerning his aristocratic provenance, which begins with “We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship” (30). His blood is not just aristocratic, it is also heroic; however, as he notes at the end of his speech “The 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” (31). This is a conclusion which chimes with Lankester’s view that regimes, and men, become increasingly passive when life ceases to be a struggle. That the issue is about the emasculation produced by the modern world is a view given clear articulation in Max Nordau’s Degeneration (1892) where he mocks the degenerate aesthete as one who:

…laughs until he sheds tears, or weeps copiously without adequate occasion; a commonplace line of poetry or of prose sends a shudder down his back; he falls into raptures before indifferent pictures or statues; and music especially, even the most insipid and least commendable, arouses in him the most vehement emotions. He is quite proud of being so vibrant a musical instrument. (Nordau 1968: 19)

Harker might seem more robust than this version of Nordau’s effeminate man allows, but his emotional responses at Castle Dracula are ones that emasculate him, especially in the scene with the three female vampires, which culminate in his passive waiting for the pleasures of an anticipated sexual encounter as “I felt in my heart a wicked desire that they would kiss me with those red lips” (38) in a scene in which he is notably supine, “I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart” (39). Harker also repeatedly identifies with spaces which he associates with women, when he notes that he intends to sleep in a room in which “old ladies had sat and sung and lived sweet lives whilst their gentle breasts were sad for their menfolk away in the midst of remorseless wars” (37–38). In short, he imagines himself as one of the Count’s brides awaiting the return of their hero. He also reflects on the gendered aspects of his journal writing when he notes that:

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. (37)

Here Harker sees himself as both a woman in a romance (that “love-letter”) and as a type of secretary keeping a record in shorthand. This link between writing and forms of emasculation bears a link, albeit tacit, with Nordau’s model of the effeminate, overly emotional, degenerate consumer of culture. How to reconnect Harker with a lost model of manliness is the problem posed in the opening journal. The end of the journal sees Harker contemplating suicide as the only means of escaping the symbolically sexually predatory female vampires that he is left with at Castle Dracula. His final entry records “At least God’s mercy is better than that of these monsters, and the precipice is steep and high. At its foot man may sleep – as a man” (53). Harker’s journal is a key text because as well as articulating a number of dramas about the limitations of Western knowledge, it also raises issues about sexuality, and questions about what it means to be a man in a post-heroic age. These issues are not unique to Dracula and we find them more broadly articulated within the fin de siècle Gothic.

The Gothic Context

Novels and novellas such as R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886),Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (1896) all, at different levels of engagement, represent culturally troubling models of masculinity. While Wilde situates his Gothic novel within a context associated with art and decadence, Stevenson and Wells focus on the middle-class professional as the source of conflict. As in Dracula, the middle-class professions of the law and medicine come under scrutiny as they either represent egotism, or an amoral form of logic that has lost sight of what it means to be a person. Additionally, in the fin de siècle Gothic the body repeatedly lets the subject down as its physical frailties and propensity to exhibit degenerate traits suggests that the proximity between civilization and modes of degeneration are troublingly close. As Lankester would posit a link between civilizations and their possible decline, a view which underpins Nordau’s fear of over-refinement, so the fin de siècle Gothic parallels civilization and barbarism – as demonstrated by the type of doubling in Jekyll and Hyde, but also in the echoes between the vampire and vampire hunters in Dracula. This is only part of the story of the fin de siècle Gothic. The pessimism that is inherent to theories of degeneration (and forms of body Gothic) was culturally offset by the presence of spiritualist beliefs, which not only cast off the vile body but also asserted the presence of a life after death – a counterpoint to the horror of the “dead undead” state of vampirism that we find in Stoker’s novel. Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire (1897), for example, while addressing assumptions about racial categories also argues for the spiritualist position when it claims that the dead do not really die, but have simply migrated to another realm. The postmortem existence of the spirit was clearly a consolation to many during this period, but the figure of the vampire indicates that there was also a contrary fear that the dead (or, the vampiric “dead undead”) would simply not stay dead.

These bodies are “othered” to the degree that they are demonstrably horrific manifestations of what might lurk within and which might come out under certain prescribed conditions, as in Jekyll and Hyde. However, these bodies also reveal the presence of something seemingly rotten, which exists within the otherwise healthy body – an idea that we find in theories of degeneration and within Dracula.

The paradox is that Harker needs to become more like the Count in order to defeat him. In other words he needs to tap his inner vampire, his lost vitality, if he is to be transformed into a man of action. That Stoker wants to argue that the human world parallels that of the vampire world is both structurally and thematically developed in the novel.

Vampires and Humans

Harker’s opening journal is followed by a number of letters exchanged between Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra. Lucy refers to the three marriage proposals (from Quincey Morris, John Seward, and Arthur Holmwood) that she receives in one day, which echoes the conclusion of Harker’s journal when he meets the three female vampires. The reader is thus introduced to non-vampiric figures whose world, and its apparent sexual options, echo the vampire world of Castle Dracula. Lucy’s letter is clearly shaped by a sexual narrative, which evokes the ostensibly promiscuous world of the three female vampires when she laments “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” (58). Her relegation of the proposal which she accepts to the postscript indicates that Lucy is dwelling on lost opportunities. Lucy also makes an appearance in Harker’s account of the female vampires. He notes of one of them that she:

…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. (38)

In the novel Lucy goes from blonde to brunette when she becomes the vampiric bloofar lady (a cockney rendering of the “beautiful lady”) who predates on young children. Harker’s surrogate encounter suggest that all the men have a personal interest in Lucy (indeed three of them have proposed to her), which signals the importance of sexuality in the lives of the vampire hunters. The structural echoes also resonate with the thematic focus on sexuality and vampirism, which tends to be associated specifically with Lucy. The symbolic nature of the blood transfusions with the infected Lucy makes these connections clear.

At one level the blood transfusions make the vampire hunters symbolically vampiric as they work to replace Lucy’s infected blood with blood of their own. That this is symbolically a sexual encounter is indicated by this mingling of fluids between the men that have desired Lucy and herself (who has also, as her letter suggested, desired more than one of them). There are also rights of access to Lucy’s body, which is reflected in how Arthur, her fiancé, is the first to give blood. Van Helsing notes that Arthur’s blood is particularly manly because “You are a man, and it is a man we want” (114). Van Helsing also says to Seward that “He is so young and strong and of blood so pure that we need not defibrinate it” (115). Later, Seward is told by Van Helsing that while his blood is also required, he needs to be discreet about his donation, especially with Arthur because if he found out about this transfusion “It would at once frighten him and enjealous him, too” because “He is her lover, her fiancé” (121). It is not clear why Arthur would be jealous over a procedure designed to save Lucy, but Van Helsing’s caution indicates that he sees this as a personal, rather than a strictly medical, intervention. Seward’s account of his experience of the blood transfusion also suggests a symbolically depleting erotic experience; he records “No man knows till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own life-blood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves” (120), which is followed by a seemingly post-coital “weakness” (121). A later transfusion with the now fading Lucy involves Quincey Morris, who brings an American frontier know-how into the novel, which underlines his masculine credentials. Van Helsing explains the situation to Quincey “A brave man’s blood is the best thing on this earth when a woman is in trouble. You’re a man, and no mistake” (139). However, ultimately, the vampire blood is too strong and after all the Count has noted how “in our veins flows the blood of many brave races” (30).

This battle over blood is highly symbolically sexualized but it is noteworthy that Lucy’s vampiric transformation does not turn her into the predatory sexual femme fatale that would enable her to act on her implicit desire for promiscuity, suggested in her letter to Mina. However, her vampiric role as the bloofar lady turns her into an anti-mother who suckles from children, rather than vice versa. This level of maternal transgression also indicates hostility toward the burdens of motherhood in so far as they impede the pleasures of adult sexuality. The key scene is when the vampire hunters confront Lucy with a child as she attempts to return to her tomb. She throws the child onto the ground:

The child gave a sharp cry , and lay there moaning. There was a cold-bloodedness in the act which wrung a groan from Arthur; when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile, he fell back and hid his face in his hands.

She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:-

Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come! (197)

The child is cast off in order to embrace the man and Lucy’s subsequent dispatching by Arthur represents a troubling moment of symbolic violent sexual correction in which “Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake” (201). Seward’s journal records that whilst the blood “spurted up around” the stake Arthur’s “face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage, so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault” (201). That this staking has a sexual element to it is clear in Seward’s account of how “The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions” (201). The scene has been widely critically read as resembling a gang rape in which Arthur is cheered on by his male friends who have all, via the blood transfusions, symbolically touched Lucy in an intimate way. If Lucy is violently expelled from the novel because of her tacit desire for promiscuity and violation of the role of mothering, then Mina stands as the counterpoint to this.

As we have seen, Mina seeks to make herself useful to Harker’s career by memorizing train timetables and otherwise providing administrative support to her husband and later to the other vampire hunters. Her maternal qualities are emphasized throughout as she offers emotional comfort to them as they grieve over the death of Lucy and struggle with the demands of tracking down the Count. The tearful Arthur rests his head on Mina’s shoulder, who notes that “We women have something of the mother in us that makes us rise above smaller matters […] I stroked his hair as though he were my own child” (214). Mina also plays a crucial administrative role in helping to place their various journal entries into chronological order so that their narratives can be mined for helpful clues about the Count. Their subsequent meeting to discuss this document is one in which, as Mina notes, the group assembled and “unconsciously formed a sort of board or committee” (220). As critics have noted this is a type of business meeting at which an assessment is made of their document and a plan of action developed, which celebrates the bureaucratic skills by which the middle-classes administratively ruled (Day 2000). The transformation of pen-pushers into men of action, such as Harker’s journey in the novel, is only part of the story as the vampire hunters possess what Van Helsing refers to as the “power of combination” (222). Their team work rests upon a division of labour, which ultilizes their respective talents. Mina is incorporated into this team as a type of honorary man, before she is infected by the Count and needs their support. Van Helsing says of her “She has a man’s brain – a brain that a man should have were he much gifted – and woman’s heart” (218). However, when infected she represents a more abstract model of maternalism that the vampire hunters seek to defend as an important social value. At the end of the novel, all seems well as the group of vampire hunters, reflecting on their encounter with Dracula seven years previously, congregate around Jonathan and Mina’s child. The vampire hunters get it all wrong with Lucy because they tacitly wish to see her as vampiric, but Mina’s maternalism is easier to defend and unites them in a common cause that is not compromised by personal feelings. Mina’s “man-brain” points toward the gendered narratives of the novel, which ultimately require her to become vulnerable so that Harker’s masculinity can be restored, revitalized in her defense. Brains and their vulnerabilities, however, also constitute a neurological issue that Bram Stoker had raised with his brother Thornley when plotting Renfield’s demise. More broadly the medical context of thinking about the brain and the mind provides another important context for the novel.

Medicine and Theories of Mind

A key institution in the novel is Seward’s asylum, the presence of which indicates how the novel reflects on the relationship between rationality and irrationality (a struggle initially addressed in an unresolved way in Harker’s journal), and explores new ways of thinking about psychology which sits within a broader valuation of medical science . After the death of Lucy, Van Helsing questions Seward on the cause of her death, with the latter simply noting that it was attributable to blood loss. Van Helsing responds with “you reason well, and your wit is bold; but you are too prejudiced. You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear” (178). This is the beginning of a lengthy speech in which Van Helsing illustrates how unconventional ideas about life and death require greater medical acknowledgment if medicine is to progress. The speech culminates in identifying Lucy as a vampire, as a hitherto unacknowledged creature from, paradoxically, an unnatural natural world. This type of unconventional thinking also, so Van Helsing suggests, needs to be applied to conceptions of the mind and its conscious and unconscious dimensions. Renfield in his “sane” moments celebrates the personal and professional achievements of the vampire hunters and notes Van Helsing’s important contribution to research on “the continuous evolution of brain-matter” (227). It is an observation that acknowledges Van Helsing’s scientific credentials but also points toward a paradox, because this also makes Van Helsing a bit like the Count.

Van Helsing, the master of several disciplines, holds doctorates in medicine, the law, and philosophy. Van Helsing says of the Count that “he was in life a most wonderful man. Soldier, statesman and alchemist – which latter was the highest development of the science-knowledge of his time” (280). The in-life Count is praised because “He had a mighty brain, a learning beyond compare,” which is also, more troublingly, combined with, “a heart that knew no fear and no remorse” (280). The problem is that these intellectual skills mean that he is beginning to understand their world, just as they have come to know his. For Van Helsing the Count, mentally speaking “is, only a child; but he is growing, and some things that were childish at the first are now of man’s stature” (280). He has made these advancements into their modern human world because of his scientific attributes, which mean that “He is experimenting, and doing it well” (280). The Count knows that Renfield provides the vampire hunters with a link to his world, but also provides a way of accessing their world which enables him to creep “into knowledge experimentally” (281). The point is to destroy the Count before his brain develops an adult understanding of their world. Renfield provides a case study for Seward who realizes that he is unconsciously working out an explanation for Renfield’s ambitious attempt of eating himself up a food chain. Seward’s journal of July 8th records “There is a method in his madness, and the rudimentary idea in my mind is growing. It will be a whole idea soon , and then, oh, unconscious cerebration, you will have to give the wall to your conscious brother” (67).Unconscious cerebration was, as Luckhurst notes, a term developed in a lecture from 1871 by the physician William Benjamin Carpenter (1813–1885), which suggested that the unconscious might play an important factor in our thinking (Luckhurst cited in Stoker 2011: 374–375). The unconscious is a troubling place in Dracula as it becomes the site through which the Count seemingly invades the lives of others, such as the sleep-walking Lucy at Whitby who is compelled to meet him at night. The Count has a hypnotic presence in the lives of others as he seems to command them to obey him. However, the question is whether this also meets a certain willingness in the easily vampirized Lucy. More broadly the sexual freedoms suggested by vampirism are symbolically manifested in the blood transfusions, discussed earlier. Minds can be controlled through hypnotism, which indicates that there is a connective line between, for example, the infected Mina and the Count, although one which can be reversed. Mina is placed in a hypnotic trance by Van Helsing, which enables her to travel to the Count while he is asleep so that they can gather clues concerning his whereabouts during his escape back to Transylvania. Mina recounts the noise of an anchor being weighed, which provides an important clue about the timings of ship movements and likely ports. Van Helsing also sees this as an opportunity for him too to become a reader of minds when he says of the Count with this hypnotically gleaned information “Our old fox is wily; oh; so wily, and we must follow with wile. I too am wily and I think his mind in a little while” (291). However, Van Helsing is also concerned that the hypnotic intrusion into the mind of the Count can go both ways because “In the trance […] the Count sent her his spirit to read her mind […] He learn that we are here” (315), as the Count has also been following their movements toward Transylvania.

Noteworthy in this account of hypnotism is that it reworks the idea of reciprocal exchanges that we have witnessed elsewhere, as in Harker needing to be more like the Count as the Count tries to become a bit more like Harker. Also, the vampire hunters are tacitly attracted to the freedoms that vampirism allows. Exchanging positions like this also points toward a major context, which the novel engages with relating to colonialism.

Colonial Contexts

Stephen Arata was an early critic of the colonial narrative as it is developed in the novel and coined the term “reverse colonialism” as a way of thinking about how Britain, the great colonizing nation of the era, becomes subject to a colonial invasion in the novel (Arata 1990). The Count’s ambitions are indeed imperial as he seeks to repopulate Britain with a dependent colony of vampires who would acknowledge him as their uncontested leader. This approach to the novel has proved a productive way of addressing the type of fear that we witnessed in Lankester’s account of degeneration that “Rome degenerated when possessed of the riches of the ancient world” (Lankester 1880: 33). Empires become overthrown and the example given by Lankester is symptomatic of a wider fear about the projected instability of Britain’s empire toward the end of the nineteenth century. As noted earlier, the Count poses a threat to colonialism, but his precise journey, from Eastern Europe into London, echoes anti-Semitic concerns about the migration of Jewish communities during this period due to pogroms in Europe. There was, for example, widespread violence toward Jewish communities in Russia between 1881 and 1884 after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in March 1881 (committed by a revolutionary organization but widely, and falsely, attributed to Jewish influence), which prompted migration. There is a body of scholarship that addresses this anti-Semitic context and the Count’s blood can be seen in racial terms with his presence in London reflecting a popular anti-Semitism at the time which we find in popular fiction (Zanger 1991; Halberstam 1993; Davison 2004). George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) is a precursor text to Dracula in which the hypnotic Svengali (clearly an influence on the Count’s representation) is repeatedly referred to in explicitly anti-Semitic terms.

A further way of thinking about the danger posed to Britain’s borders is to consider a colonial threat from a seemingly unlikely source – Quincey Morris. Franco Moretti in Signs Taken for Wonders (1983) made what initially appears to be a counterintuitive claim about Morris:

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 staunchest enemy. Morris enters into competition with Dracula; he would like to replace him in the conquest of the Old World. He does not succeed in the novel but he will succeed, in ‘real’ history, a few years afterwards. (95)

Moretti concludes that this explains why Morris, a marksman, misses the Count with his gun and why he, seemingly accidentally, loses sight of the Count during a crucial pursuit. That Stoker may well have thought about America in these colonial terms is suggested in Renfield’s speech to the vampire hunters in which he makes reference to the Monroe doctrine and the recent admission of Texas (Morris’ home state) to the Union:

Mr Morris, you should be proud of your great state. Its reception into the Union was a precedent which may have far-reaching effects hereafter, when the Pole and the Tropics may hold allegiance to the Stars and Stripes. The power of Treaty may yet prove a vast engine of enlargement, when the Monroe doctrine takes its true place as a political fable. (227)

Historically, as Moretti notes, the significant colonial threats to Britain in the 1890s do not come from Eastern Europe, but from America. As Seward writes of Morris in his diary “If America can go on breeding men like that, she will be a power in the world indeed” (162); from this Moretti concludes “The American, Morris, must die” (Moretti 1983: 95, emphasis in original). There is broad contextual evidence that supports this reading. Stoker had traveled in America while touring with the Lyceum Theatre and had published a pamphlet, A Glimpse of America (1886), in which he dwelt on the similarities between the British and the Americans. Stoker had also written a lecture on Abraham Lincoln which he delivered in America in 1886 and 1887 and continued to deliver in Britain until 1893. The lecture celebrated Lincoln as a leader who sought to unite an otherwise divided nation after the civil war. That Stoker’s attitude toward America shifted is illustrated by his short story “The Squaw” (1893), in which an American, Elias P. Hutcheson, a precursor to Morris who has battled against Indians on the frontier, is represented as a perpetrator of violence against Indians (he is the killer of a squaw), which becomes transposed into Europe where he is symbolically executed in an Iron Maiden due to his love of violence. The election of William McKinley as US president in 1897 also inaugurated an era of American aggression in the Philippines and Cuba and in Stoker’s later writing, such as The Mystery of the Sea (1902), and briefly in The Lady of the Shroud (1909), Americans are explicitly associated with aggressive colonial attitudes. At the end of the novel Morris is made symbolically present in the naming of Jonathan and Mina’s child but the closing scene which centres on “our little band of men” (351) represents the triumph of European identities.

Stoker’s Irish background and its relation to a British colonial context is also significant. Stoker was a member of the Protestant ascendancy class, but he was a supporter of a version of Home Rule, which would acknowledge the ultimate authority of the British Parliament. In this model Ireland would gain economic regeneration by being part of the wider British Imperial project. Critics have noted that Ireland made a significant contribution to the development of the Empire in terms of administrative, economic, and military involvement (Howe 2000). Stoker thus saw that Ireland had much to gain from these associations. Stoker’s writings more generally can be seen as part of an Irish Gothic tradition, which includes Charles Maturin, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Oscar Wilde among others. Stoker’s focus on territorial invasions and issues about land ownership (a central theme of his first, and only Irish set, novel, The Snake’s Pass [1890]) can be read within this context. But his liberal tendencies are also apparent in his sympathetic portrayal of Van Helsing’s Catholicism.

Technologies

This chapter began with a contemplation of train timetables and how Harker’s journey into the East seemingly transports him into a premodern world. The novel’s investment in the machinery of modernity is another key factor in the novel and has been given some analysis by Friedrich Kittler, whose essay “Dracula’s Legacy” (1982) has ramifications for how we read the production of texts in Dracula (see also Wicke 1992). While the Count is defeated in part by the revitalized Jonathan Harker he is also brought down, as noted earlier, by the seemingly mundane processes of bureaucracy. It is Mina who works to assemble their various narratives into chronological order and produces her own reflections on the document, which she is able to mine for signs of vampirism and degeneration. This triumph of bureaucratic process has been related by Kittler to the types of technology, which pervade the novel. For Kittler, Dracula “is no vampire novel, but a written account of our bureaucratization” (1997a: 73). The trains that do not run on time represent just one way in which machines are seemingly thwarted by premodern worlds, but writing takes on significance as it becomes increasingly impersonal and associated with emerging technological forms.

Dr Seward’s phonograph represents one such technological development but Kittler’s principal focus is on the typewriter and the possibilities for anonymous, because professional, writing with which it became associated. This type of writing seemingly removes the subject from the process of writing as it replaces the handwritten script with typeface. In “Gramophone, Film, Typewriter” Kittler notes that with the typewriter “[i]n contrast to the flow of hand-writing, here discrete elements separated by spaces are placed side by side” (Kittler 1997b: 45). Handwriting becomes replaced with a mechanical form of recording so that the individual is seemingly removed from their texts, as handwritten accounts (such as Harker’s journal for example) are turned into a more dispassionate textual form. Gill Partington’s overview of Kittler notes his awareness of the role of gender in this because the word “typewriter” originally meant not just the machine but also the female typist (Partington 2006: 61). In this way the typist becomes machine-like as they transpose the texts written by others (presumably men) into type-faced texts. This is suggested in Mina’s dispassionate reading of the often emotionally charged texts produced by the male vampire hunters. She recounts “Whilst they are resting, I shall go over all carefully, and perhaps I may arrive at some conclusion. I shall try to […] think without prejudice on the facts before me” (325). In the novel, Mina is, of course, more than just an adjunct to the typewriter, but the ambition to turn personal accounts into communal ones is facilitated by working their documents into a version of events that functions like a final document, which is then discussed at the business-like meeting that Mina had noted earlier. The vampire hunters’ records are variously kept in longhand, shorthand, in letters, diaries, and phonographic tubes, and this demonstrates ways in which they move beyond the non-record keeping, premodern Count. For Kittler these documents go through Mina’s typewriter and “[w]hen they leave it, they are in perfect chronological order as a group of signs made up of 26 uniform letters,” which produces “[a] collation of data that guarantees general legibility as well as minimal access time” (Kittler 1997a: 73). The finished document becomes easily accessible, coherent, and contains within it all that they need to know in order to defeat the Count.

In Dracula, modernity might be dogged by the presence of the feudal Count, but ultimately the triumph of a modern, technocratic society is what the novel seemingly celebrates. At one level Harker needs to become revitalized and turned into a man of action, but the bureaucratic imagination also lives on through a way of thinking about the Count as constituting a problem that can be objectively resolved.

Conclusion and Legacy

To a degree Dracula was not the big popular hit of 1897, being somewhat outshone by Richard Marsh’s The Beetle of that year – a novel that also explores gender and racial complexities. Dracula, has however, critically endured because its complex engagements with gender, colonialism, theories of degeneration, and explorations of technology have provided key insights into the preoccupations of the period. The ambivalences that permeate the text (with symbolically vampiric vampire hunters being just one notable example) also speak to underlying, or tacit, preoccupations within a culture that is strangely attracted by that which ostensibly repulses it. The type of divided subjectivities and cultural impulses that we find in the novel anticipate the forms of psychological and textual complexity which will later characterize the modernist text and the recycling of images from Dracula bears testimony to just how far Stoker’s novel helped to shape the literary imagination at the time. In T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922) there is a moment when:

A woman drew her long black hair out tight

And fiddled whisper music on those strings

And bats with baby faces in the violet light

Whistled, and beat their wings

And crawled head downward down a blackened wall

And upside down in air were towers

Tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours

And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells. (Eliot 2001: Vll. 377–384)

The lines refer to Harker’s view of the Count when he crawls headfirst down one of the towers at Castle Dracula. The “bats with baby faces” evoke the novel’s theme of mothering, which was discussed earlier but here transposed onto an image of a demon brood of vampires, reflecting the Count’s imperial ambitions. In another seminal modernist text from 1922, James Joyce’s Ulysses, a jocular reference is made to Dracula when it is noted that “He comes, pale vampire, through storm his eyes, his bat sails bloodying the sea, mouth to her mouth’s kiss. Here. Put a pin in that chap, will you?” (Joyce 1993: 47). These are only two examples of how Dracula came to inhabit later cultural forms (in this instance demonstrating how a popular cultural Gothic text informed elite modernist considerations). Ultimately, despite the best efforts of Harker and Morris, Stoker’s vampire is not quite killed off and haunts our culture to this day.

Cross-References