Dracula

This is the third time I've read Bram Stoker's Dracula, and it will be the last. I've been exploring all things Dracula and of course had to read this again, since Stoker is the one who created one of the most iconic characters in Western literature, and, by doing so, set the standard for all the vampire literature (and by extension, films) to come. But this time the book became a slog. Let's face it, while Dracula is an important novel, it's not a great one, way too long and often tedious. It has some great set pieces, but too many long passages of blather.

Stoker made his career as a manager of Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre. He wrote many books, but if it weren't for Dracula he would not be well known at all. He began working on the book about 1890, and it was published in 1897. He never visited Transylvania, and found the name Dracula in some research, not really understanding who Vlad the Impaler was. Though Dracula was not the first vampire novel, it established most of the tropes that we now associate with the genre.

The plot, which has been distorted in all of the film versions (even Francis Coppola's, which follows the plot but turns it into a romance), has attorney Jonathan Harker travel to Dracula's castle to get his signatures on papers for a real estate purchase. Dracula, longing to leave the loneliness of his castle, where he has thrived for centuries, wants to experience a faster pace in England. But he can't help but bite Harker and leave him for his three brides. Harker escapes. It should be noted that Dracula looks nothing like film representations of him:"Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck colour about him anywhere." Popular depictions of him as a romantic figure are interpretations. In the book, he is meant to be hideous--he has hair on his palms.

Back in England, Dracula arrives aboard a ship along with his boxes of earth. He has killed all the men aboard and leaves in the form of a dog: "But, strangest of all, the very instant the shore was touched, an immense dog sprang up from below, as if shot up by the concussion, and running forward, jumped from the bow on the sand." It was Stoker who invented the talent that Dracula has for transforming into animals, most prominently a bat, but also rats and mist.

Dracula lands in Whitby, a coastal town, where he feeds on Lucy Westenra, who is Mina Murray's best friend. Mina is Harker's fiance. Lucy has been proposed to by three different men on the same day: Dr. John Seward, who manages the local lunatic asylum; Quincey Morris, a cowboy from Texas, and Arthur Holmwood, a noble. She chooses Arthur, but Dracula visits her every night, and no one can figure out she's losing so much blood, Seward calls in his old professor, Dr. Van Helsing, who suspects a vampire but is too late, as Lucy dies.

The next section is pretty horrifying, as Lucy turns into a vampire and terrorizes small children, who call her the "Bloofer Lady." Van Helsing has a gruesome solution: "'I shall cut off her head and fill her mouth with garlic, and I shall drive a stake through her heart.'" Later: "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. The sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam."

If more of Dracula were like this, it would have been much better. Dracula himself only appears sporadically (the book was originally titled The Un-Dead), and there is too much in-between sightings to sustain the suspense. There are other great parts, such as when the four men (Harker, Morris, Van Helsing, and Holmwood) are on the track of the Count and are besieged by thousands of rats, or when Mina comes under his spell. But in-between are long sections of planning and everyone congratulating themselves on what wonderful and brave people they are. Stoker needed an editor.

Why Dracula has become such a major part of our culture is not because it's a great book but because of what it has come to mean. It has had many interpretations, but I think it boils down to one thing: fear. But of what? As there are no vampires roaming the countryside, not now nor then, just what was Dracula a metaphor for? I think there are two things, and they are connected: sex and foreigners.

Sex is readily apparent. The mingling of blood can be seen as a stand-in for sexual congress. When Dracula attacks Mina, it is an image that suggests fellatio: "With his left hand he held both Mrs. Harker's hands, keeping them away with her arms at full tension. His right hand gripped her by the back of the neck, forcing her face down on his bosom. Her white nightdress was smeared with blood and a thin stream trickled down the man's bare chest which was shown by his torn-open dress." By drinking his blood, it ties her to him, much as if a woman has accepted a man's semen.

Later, she will exclaim: "'Unclean, unclean! I must touch him or kiss him no more. Oh, that it should be that is I who am now his worst enemy, and whom he may have most cause to fear.'" This leads to a emphasis, throughout the book, that Dracula is a foreigner, and not only a foreigner, but one from an exotic land full of superstition. He's not French, he's from the wilds of southeastern Europe. During Stoker's time, immigration was on the rise in England (as it was in America) and a gentleman's attitude may have been to regard these immigrants as unclean and strange. Stoker may not have personally believed this, but it may have been like today's making Arabs the go-to villains.

After finding most of his coffins, the gang chases Dracula back to his homeland. He goes by boat, as Mina, now connected to him, can read his thoughts. They go overland to Transylvania, and await him as he arrives, as the sun sets. Just in time he is destroyed, though Morris is killed.

After three readings, I can attest to a few things. One, the style Stoker uses, epistolary, consisting of letters and diary entries, doesn't work. There are too many conversations jotted down verbatim, which is impossible. Stoker really doesn't differentiate between characters, so one can read along and forget who's narrating. The subplot involving Renfield, the zoophagous mental patient that Dracula controls, goes nowhere. What does shine through is the terror involved and the pictures Stoker paints, such as Harker relating how Dracula tosses a bag to his brides, which obviously contains a child, or watching him crawl down the wall head first.

Dracula is surely one of the most well-known two or three characters in English literature (Sherlock Holmes and Frankenstein's monster would be the other two). For whatever limited gifts Stoker had as a writer, he had great genius creatively, and his creation has spawned so many copies they would be impossible to count. But beyond that, his Dracula has become a part of all of our subconscious, existing in our nightmares whether we have read the book or not.