Jacob Thomson Official Website

Dracula was not the first vampire novel published, but it was unquestionably the most influential. Many of the conventions that are now so familiar from books and film first appeared in Bram Stoker's most famous work. Previously, vampires fell into two basic categories. The first were the ravening monsters, hardly human at all except in physical form. This is, indeed, the classical Indo-European vampire—a resuscitated corpse, animated by a spirit of pure evil, and preying indiscriminately on the living, though with a special prediliction for family members. Such monsters are found in many Central European and Levantine traditions.

The other classical vampire, and a type exerting somewhat more influence on Stoker, was found in Le Fanu's Carmilla. Here there is less gore. Indeed, there isn't even a hint of blood drinking, for the lovely female vampire seems to consume her victims on a psychic, rather than a physical, level, as if her presence is sufficient in and of itself to engender a comsumptive disorder in her victim. Le Fanu's short novel also explored the erotic potential of the vampire, though very subtly, and in a way that his Victorian readers would accept. The British public in 1872 was presumably not ready to accept an explicitly lesbian story, though they clearly enjoyed a more oblique exploration of the same forbidden subject.

Sex, really, is an important theme in most vampire stories. In Dracula there are scenes which strike us, in today's more liberated and direct world, as perhaps more overtly erotic than in Stoker's own time. The relationship between Mina and Lucy is one example. Both are clearly heterosexual women, Lucy portrayed in a very traditional, slightly flighty, manner with her primary object that of landing a suitable husband. She wants a grand romance in the process, but her goal is clearly the security that was believed to come from a good marriage. Mina is more the modern "New Woman," and one could easily imagine her marching with the Suffragettes. Her marriage is to be a partnership of, if not exactly equals, then of as near to equals as British law of that period would countenance.

Yet, before Mina's marriage, the two women do seem to spend a great deal of time together, and there is the subtle impression that their friendship may have involved a bit more intimacy than either would overtly express.

The scene in which Harker awakens in one of the forbidden rooms in Castle Dracula, surrounded by the ethereal female vampires, is richly erotic. Indeed, the act of drinking the victim's blood is clearly a metaphor for sexual intercourse, whether the vampire is male or female. Modern authors have made this connection more explicit, of course. But Victorian England was, at least publicly, a very sexually repressed time and place. What went on behind closed doors was, naturally, not generally reported in the popular press, nor written about in popular fiction. One presumes that Jonathan and Mina must have had a normal sex life once they were married—a theory clearly buttressed by the fact that they would have a child before the end of the novel—but it was never actually touched on, and certainly not described in the same detail you would find today.

There was, of course, a thriving underground market for pornography in Victorian England. But explicit sexuality was limited to these illicit sources, and could not under any circumstances be included in a popular novel. In Stoker's time, Ann Rice's vampire novels would never have been published—or, if they were, would have probably landed both the author and the publisher in jail. So sexuality had be expressed in metaphor, allowing the reader to find his titilation between the lines.

When the Count drinks the blood of his female victims, the Victorians certainly recognized that this act was a symbolic seduction, and the exchange of blood between vampire and victim was even more clearly sexual. But this was also just about the limit of sexuality in Dracula. Everything is implied, nothing is spelled out.

Stoker himself was mainly associated with the theatre, both as a critic, and as manager for the great British actor Henry Irving. His choice of a protagonist in this novel was, and continues to be, controversial—though mostly in Romania, where the real Dracula remains a national hero. Most of Stoker's information on the "Count"—in actuality he was a Prince in a region where princes ruled countries—came mostly from German sources, which were decidedly hostile and negative. (You'd get much the same effect by studying 20th Century American history by using only Soviet and Khomeni-period Iranian sources.)

As he composed Dracula, Stoker proved a prolific collector and compiler of vampire mythology. Most of the elements had appeared before, but generally not in the same work. The Count commands elemental natural functions to a remarkable degree. Dogs dislike him, but wolves are his to command. He can alter his own physical form, seemingly without regard to variations in mass. (One of the enduring questions about the traditional vampire has been just how a 200-pound man can transform himself into a 15-ounce bat, then back to human form again. In comic books, the Mighty Atom accomplished this great size shift by reducing the space between the electrons in the atoms of his body, which meant that, while he shrank to extremely small size, his actual weight remained the same. But this obviously wouldn't work for a vampire. A 200-pound bat simply wouldn't be able to fly.

Dracula is an epistolary novel. That is, it is told in the form of letters, diaries, and news clippings, so that the viewpoint character frequently shifts. The most important viewpoint characters are Jonathan Harker, who first introduces the reader to an aged Count Dracula, and leads up to this with a fascinating travellogue, describing his trip through the Balkans; Mina Murray, who becomes Mina Harker after Jonathan's escape from Castle Dracula; and Dr. John Seward, the owner of a private lunatic assylum. Brief diary entries are also provided by Lucy Westenra, who becomes the Count's first victim after his arrival in England.

Curiously, the one character who never provides any significant input is Dracula himself. When he speaks, his words are recorded by others. There is only a single letter written by the Count, and that is of the "bread and butter" type, merely informing Harker of the arrangements that have been made for his journey to the castle, revealing nothing significant.

Dracula provides a rather simplistic outlook on good and evil. Stoker never delves into the Count's personal outlook on the events in the book. He is simply evil, with no redeeming characteristics at all. Vampirism itself seems to be viewed as an alternate form of hell, where the spirit is trapped in the Un-Dead body, and while there is forced to indulge in all manner of ghastly, distasteful activities. (That is, the vampire is forced to give in to its lusts, seeking pleasure, and generally indulging in just about anything the righteous would disapprove of. Stoker's upper-class Victorian protagonists seem to agree with the common misconception of the time—and even of some compulsively religious types today—that anything that's enjoyable is probably wrong.)

Dracula has hair growing in the palms of his hands, after all. No Victorian could possibly miss the implications of that, as it was firmly believed—even by physicians, who should have known better—to be a sure sign of one who indulges in "self abuse." In that period, excessive masturbation—which seemed to be defined as even once—was believed to result in bad eyesight or blindness, physical weakness, insanity, and, of course, those hairy palms. (Medically, at least in males, the only actual effect on health seems to be a reduction in the chances of developing prostate cancer, though that still hasn't been enough to bring the religious around to the point of recommending it. In the battle between morality and physical health, health tends to be considered secondary.)

Many aspects of Dracula can be a little jarring to modern sensibilities. The relationship between the male and female characters stands out in this respect. The men view Mina Harker as a remarkably accomplished young woman not simply because she is, but because they perceive her as capable of abstract reasoning—an ability which Victorian males did not always credit in women. Van Helsing, for example, credits her with having "almost a man-brain." (Note the "almost.)

At the time Dracula was written, about the only way for a woman to control her own affairs was to remain single. If she did, whatever property she acquired was hers to use as she saw fit. But the moment her husband slipped the wedding ring on her finger all of her property came under his control, and she couldn't spend any of her own money without his consent.

Certainly the male characters in Dracula seem to have no qualms about making decisions for Mina, rather than in consultation with her. That she frequently gets her way is mostly because Van Helsing wants to take advantage of her psychic link with the Count and, at the same time, keep an eye on her in case he should decide that her conversion to vampirism has reached a stage that calls for him to take action. (That is, he wants her handy if he decides it's time to cut off her head, fill her mouth with garlic, and drive a stake through her heart.)

Some things seem decidedly odd. The medical notions are, to say the least, quaint. (Though, in defense of Victorian medical men, except for gross anatomy, the average Boy Scout today probably knows more about medicine than either of the doctors—particularly in the area of disease etiology.) For example, when Van Helsing decides that Lucy requires a blood transfusion, his criteria for a donor is that he be a vigorous young man. He doesn't think about cross-matching the donor and recipient, since blood typing was not yet known. It would be a few more years before surviving a transfusion was anything more than a coin toss.

In The Dracula Tape (1975), the first of Fred Saberhagen's delightfully-revisionist Dracula novels, the Count argues that he wasn't really responsible for Lucy's death, and figures it probably happened because, after getting lucky with the first couple of transfusions, Van Helsing's final attempt involved an incompatible type and it was the transfusion that killed her. Saberhagen looks at things from the vampire's viewpoint, which naturally presumes that Dracula is noble and honorable, and Van Helsing and his happy mob are a pack of bloodthirsty murderers. (It's a wonderful book, and highly recommended if you can find a copy.)(Note: Saberhagen's novel was out of print at the time this was written, but is now available again. See side panel to order.)

From a literary viewpoint, Dracula is clearly a product of its time. The punctuation seems decidedly odd today, as does the paragraphing. Victorian writers frequently didn't bother to begin a new paragraph with each change of speaker when they wrote dialogue, or with simple changes in action. (Though they were better than some Regency authors, who might start a new paragraph every five or six pages.) Some modern editions of Dracula have "modernized" the paragraphing, punctuation and, in some cases, the spelling, frequently Americanizing it in the process. ("Color" for "colour," for example, or "today" in place of the older "to-day.") For this edition, we have chosen to leave these the way Stoker originally set them down, believing this to give a more authentic feel to the story.