I read this novel for the first time in 1992 or 1993, for a
literature class my junior year of college on horror stories and their cinematic
adaptations. I don’t know what about the
topic gripped my imagination because I was not a fan of horror films at the
time, nor was I a fan of horror literature.
Something about reading classic horror novels like Dracula, Frankenstein,
The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde hit me in
the exact right spot, and while all my essays written for that class were
poorly done, the class itself had a huge impact on me. I’ve watched horror films ever since, and I’ve
had a particular interest in the different languages and requirements of cinema
and novels.
My wife had never read Dracula, and after seeing The
Last Voyage of the Demeter (a film that disappointed both of us) she found
herself wanting to. So we took to
reading a couple of chapters before bed each night.
I found a lot to admire in the book and a few things that
sent my eyes rolling. Let’s start with
the ugly stuff. The politics in this
book are deeply conservative and regressive. Bram Stoker is deeply invested in
gender and sexual norms. Women are the
seat of all that is good and pure, and the need to save that goodness and purity
is the driving force of the male protagonists.
When women become corrupted, they are repeatedly described as “voluptuous.” They are wanton, sexually aggressive, full of
hunger and desire. Meanwhile the men cannot
stop falling in love with each other’s manly virtues. Vampirism is explicitly heterosexual in the
novel. Dracula only feeds on women, and the
women only try to bite men. That last part
is not true—Lucy ends up feeding on children, even though her vampirism presumably
gives her the strength to overpower men.
Nevertheless, she only uses her feminine wiles to get her way,
entrancing men with her sexuality and children with promises of candy and
sweets. Even the domain of evil respects
the hierarchy of men above women, and women above children, feeding down the
line of power.
At the heart of the narrative, of course, is a foreign man coming
to English soil to corrupt their women and undermine the noble society of this
white world (there are as far as I could tell, no one in the novel who isn’t
white). The good English men (and one doctor
from the Netherlands) have to drive this foreign invader from English soil to
save their women and children, chasing him as far as it takes so that he cannot
return to topple English greatness another time. There are additionally references to physiognomy
and the natural greatness of the white man’s brain. Yuck.
There is plenty there to scoff at while reading the novel,
but I did not find that that hopelessly sunk the reading experience. Dracula is a wonderful character. He is cruel and controlling, abusive and self-centered,
powerful and intelligent. He indeed has
incredible strength and can scale walls like a fly; he possesses the ability to
control the weather, wolves, and bats; and he wields the power to turn into
mist itself. But for all these supernatural
powers, he is painfully human in his awfulness.
He may as well be Jack the Ripper or any Victorian serial killer. When he tells Jonathan Harker to write three
letters dated weeks apart to send to England, Harker sees no way out of doing
so, and remarks that he now knows the day on which he will die. And when Jonathan asks to leave, Dracula acts
hurt and says that he would never keep him against his will, only to lead him
to the front door behind which innumerable baying wolves howl, forcing Harker
to “choose” to remain. The cruelty is
ugly and thrilling. That same cruelty
seems to trigger his interest in converting Mina. While the men wreak havoc in the Carfax
Estate, Dracula hits them where they care most, striking out at the one they want
to protect. Dracula’s draw, for me, had
nothing to do with his supernatural trappings, and everything to do with how
very human he was.
Another cool thing about the novel is that Stoker’s decision
to use letters and diaries to tell the tale meant that he was forced to show
Dracula’s presence mostly by the effects he created, like watching the footprints
in the sand made by the invisible man.
Yes, the convention forced him to create silly reasons for different people
to write about their experiences (and in ridiculous detail), but the rewards of
the form were well worth it. Dracula of course
keeps no diary, so he only makes a few direct appearances. And because of that, he is incapable of belaboring
many connections and activities—he’s forced to trust the reader to make all the
necessary connections. Those connections
are not hard to make, but it’s still nice to have them observed and then moved
on from.
As an aside, it’s fun to think that “found footage” films,
like The Blair Witch Project had a progenitor a hundred years earlier. And just as films inspired by Blair Witch
needed to keep coming up with reasons and ways to have a camera recording at those
moments, Stoker had to come up with reasons to have his characters keeping
detailed recountings of their experiences.
Something that met at the midway point between eyerolls and
admiration, for me, was the relationship between the characters. This is not a story about interpersonal drama. In fact, since the characters have to be able
to read each other’s diaries, they can’t really talk smack about each other and
expect to trust each other and work together.
So Stoker’s format forces him to have all the character admire the holy
hell out of each other. It feels like
the characters are constantly being blown away by how wonderful their
companions are and continuously promising to be best friends until their dying days.
It’s hokey. But under that hokeyness is
something genuinely attractive. This isn’t
the story of a single hero against a single villain, but of a community of
people and a Great Evil. There’s something
beautiful in that. That beauty is sadly
undercut by their being a community of white hetero dudes from a colonizing
empire—so yeah, it’s a real mixed bag.
As for the writing itself, the book has moments that ready
smoothly and beautifully, and other moments that can be relatively rough to get
through. Overall, I was impressed and
found reading it aloud very enjoyable.
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