Bram Stoker's Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula

During the last years of the 19^th Century the interest for gothic as a narrative genre has its major exponent in an Irish man: Bram Stoker (1847 - 1912). In his novel "Dracula" (1895), he presents the explosion of the supernatural an magic subject in the Modern World, obviously peaceful and industrious, represented by London "Fin - de - siècle". The threat comes from the depths of the European history, made of violence and ancient slaughters. In order to defeat the danger and protect that precious bourgeois property which is the woman (Who is the favourite - but not only the exclusive - victim of Count Dracula), it won't be enough sufficient the union of a band of young and brave men, but there will be the need of the intervention of an "Alter - ego" of the vampire, the "Foreign" Van Helsing, who is like a kind of a mixture between a wizard and a scientist, an emblematic figure of that blend of reason and magic, which belongs to literature and to the "Fin - de - siècle" culture, whose positivistic philosophy was infected by spiritualistic experiments, as for the bite of Dracula. Stoker relies heavily on the conventions of Gothic Fiction, a genre that was extremely popular in the early nineteenth century. Gothic fiction traditionally includes elements such as gloomy castles, sublime landscapes and innocent maidens threatened by ineffable evil. Stoker modernizes this tradition in his novel, however, moving from the conventional setting of Dracula's ruined castle into the bustle of modern England. As Stoker portrays the collision of two disparate worlds, the count's ancient Transylvania and the protagonist's modern London, he lays bare many of the anxieties that characterized his age: the repercussions of scientific advancement, the consequences of abandoning traditional beliefs and the dangers of female sexuality. To this day, "Dracula" remains a fascinating study of popular attitudes toward sex, religion and science at the end of the nineteenth century.

Context

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin, Ireland, in . The son of a civil servant, Stoker was a sickly child. Stoker's mother, a charity worker and writer, spent a good deal of time entertaining her son with fantastic tales. Stoker went on to study math at Trinity College and graduated in , at which time he joined the Irish civil service. He also worked as a freelance journalist and drama critic, which enabled him to meet the legendary stage actor Henry Irving. The two men became lifelong friends, and Stoker managed Irving's theatre from until Irving's death in . Stoker married an aspiring actress, Florence Balcombe and the couple had one son, Noel, who was born in . Stoker moved to London in order to oversee Irving's theatre, and he fell into the city's literary circles, which included figures such as Oscar Wilde, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. Stoker's early fiction is not of particularly high quality. He wrote short stories for children and then a first novel, "The Snake's Pass" ), which was unsuccessful. Stoker's fortunes changed in with the publication of "Dracula", which still stands as his greatest literary achievement. Although the novel was not an immediate popular success, it has been in print continuously since its first publication and has inspired countless films and other literary works. Stoker continued to write until his death in , producing several adventure novels, including "The Jewel of Seven Stars" (1904) and "The Lair of the White Worm" ). Vampire legends have been a part of popular folklore in many parts of the world since ancient times. Throughout the Middle Ages and even into the modern era, reports of corpses rising from the dead with supernatural powers achieved widespread credence. The Dracula family, which Stoker's count describes with pride in the early chapters of the novel, is based on a real fifteenth - century family: its most famous member, Vlad Dracula (Or "Vlad the Impaler", as he was commonly known) enjoyed a bloody career that rivalled that of his fictional counterpart. The Prince of Wallachia, Vlad was a brilliant and notoriously savage general who impaled his enemies on long spikes. The prince also had a reputation for murdering beggars, forcing women to eat their babies and nailing the turbans of disrespectful ambassadors to their heads. While Stoker's Count Dracula is supposed to be a descendant of Vlad, and not the prince himself, Stoker clearly makes the count resemble his fearsome ancestor. This historical allusion gives Dracula a semblance of truth, and, as the Author's Note and the coda make clear, Stoker wants to suggest that the documents assembled in the novel are real.

Plot

"Dracula" begins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor on the way to Transylvania to give information to the mysterious Count Dracula about his new estate in London. Dracula takes the young man prisoner and Jonathan sees many strange and evil things in the castle before escaping and fleeing into the night. He later decides that he must have been mad. Meanwhile, back in England, Jonathan's fiancée, Mina, is visiting her friend Lucy. Lucy has just decided to marry the honourable Arthur Holmwood, having had to choose between him and his two friends, Dr. John Seward and Quincey Morris the Texan. Dracula, who is moving to London to feast on more humans, happens to land in the part of England where Mina and Lucy are staying. His first victim is Lucy. Dr. Seward, who, by coincidence, runs the insane asylum next door to Dracula's primary London home, tries to treat Lucy's "Illness". He calls in from Amsterdam his friend and mentor Professor Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing figures out what is wrong with Lucy, but he cannot save her. By this time, Jonathan has made it home to England and is happily married to Mina. Van Helsing brings together Mina, Jonathan, Arthur, Quincey, Seward and himself and he convinces everyone of the reality of vampires and the danger of this particular one, who was in his human life a great warrior and thinker. They have already destroyed the undead Lucy and they likewise set out to destroy Dracula. They educate themselves in the strengths and weaknesses of the vampire and they learn, through careful and clever research, what Dracula's plans are. Dracula has many lairs throughout London; they decide to sterilize them all to strand Dracula in his weakest form and then to kill him in the name of God. However, the Count has other plans and, as the men search his houses, he attacks Mina in the night, feeding her with his blood so that she will become a vampire too. The men find out about Dracula's activities and they step up their efforts. They manage to drive him out of England, but they realize that if they fail to finish the job then Mina will become a vampire anyway. They follow his trail to Transylvania, where he and his faithful gypsies manage to keep outwitting them. Finally, minutes before he reaches his castle, the entire team descends upon him while he is being transported in his box of Transylvanian earth. Jonathan and Quincey kill him, though not before Quincey himself is mortally wounded. With Mina free from her fate, the rest return to England and remain lifelong friends.

In Bram Stoker's novel we can find two type of nightmare: one comes from the fear of men about the New World rising, a world made of technologies and new discoveries; the other nightmare comes from sexuality, which was totally repressed until the 19^th century.

The consequences of Modernity

The end of the 19^th century brought drastic developments that forced English society to question the systems of belief that had governed it for centuries. Darwin's theory of evolution, for instance, called the validity of long- held sacred religious doctrines into question. Likewise, the Industrial Revolution brought profound economic and social change to the previously agrarian England. "Dracula" may be viewed as a novel about the struggle between tradition and modernity at the end of the 19^th Century. Mina Harker can be seen as a modern woman, using such modern technologies as the typewriter. She also displays some characteristics of the New Woman through her rejection of deference to male superiority and her economic independence. However, Mina still embodies a traditional gender role, as seen in her feminine and maternal nature and her occupation as an assistant schoolmistress. In general, Stoker's novel deals with the conflict between the world of the past, full of folklore, legend and religious piety, and the emerging modern world of technology, positivism and secularism. Van Helsing epitomizes this struggle because he uses, at the time, extremely modern technologies, like blood transfusions, but he is not so modern as to eschew the idea that a demonic being could be causing Lucy's illness: he spreads garlic around the sashes and doors of her room and makes her wear a garlic flower necklace. After Lucy's death, he receives an indulgence from a Catholic cleric to use the Eucharist (Held by the Church to be trans - substantiated into the body and blood of Jesus) in his fight against Dracula. In trying to bridge the rational - superstitious conflict within the story, he cites new sciences, such as hypnotism, that were only recently considered magical. He also quotes (Without attribution) the American psychologist William James, whose writings on the power of belief become the only way to deal with this conflict. Though Stoker begins his novel in a ruined castle, which is a traditional Gothic setting, he soon moves the action to the Victorian London, where the advancements of modernity are largely responsible for the ease with which the count preys upon English society. When Lucy falls victim to Dracula's spell, neither Mina nor Dr. Seward, both devotees of modern advancements, are equipped even to guess at the cause of Lucy's predicament. Only Van Helsing, whose facility with modern medical techniques is tempered with open - mindedness about ancient legends and non - Western folk remedies, comes close to understanding Lucy's affliction. We notice the stamp of modernity almost immediately when the focus of the novel shifts to England: Dr. Seward records his diary on a phonograph, Mina Murray practices typewriting on a newfangled machine, and so on. Jonathan Harker's character displays the problems of dwelling in a strictly rational modern world. Visiting Count Dracula in Eastern Europe, Jonathan scoffs at the peasants who tell him to delay his visit until after Saint George's feast day. As a solicitor, Jonathan is concerned "With facts - bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt". All of Jonathan's rationality weakens him to what he witnesses at Castle Dracula. For example, the first time Jonathan witnesses Dracula crawling down the face of the castle headfirst, he is in complete disbelief. Not believing what he sees, he attempts to explain what he saw as a trick of the moonlight. The characters of "Dracula" use modern technology and rationalism in order to defeat the Count. For example, during their pursuit of the vampire, they use railroads and steamships, not to mention the telegraph (And a telephone is even used on their behalf at one point), to keep a step ahead of him (In contrast, Dracula escapes in a sailing ship). Van Helsing uses hypnotism to pinpoint Dracula's location. Mina even employs criminology to anticipate Dracula's actions and cites both Cesare Lombroso and Max Nordau, who at that time were considered experts in this field. A number of scholars have noted the theme of a "Barbarian" prince attempting to usurp British society as being an example of the invasion literature which was popular at the time. Indeed, the whole of England seems willing to walk into a future of progress and advancement. While the peasants of Transylvania busily bless one another against the evil eye at their roadside shrines, Mr. Swales, the poor Englishman whom Lucy and Mina meet in the Whitby cemetery, has no patience for such unfounded superstitions as ghosts and monsters. No character in the novel advocates a rejection of science in favour of either religion or superstition, neither Van Helsing. The threat Dracula poses to London hinges, in large part, on the advance of modernity. Advances in science have caused the English to dismiss the reality of the very superstitions, such as Dracula, that seek to undo their society. Van Helsing bridges this divide: equipped with the unique knowledge of both the East and the West, he represents the best hope of understanding the incomprehensible and ridding the world of evil. In Chapter XVII, when Van Helsing warns Seward that "To rid the earth of this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we can get", he literally means ALL the knowledge. Van Helsing works not only to understand modern Western methods, but to incorporate the ancient and foreign schools of thought that the modern West dismisses. "It is the fault of our science", he says, "that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain". Here, Van Helsing points to the dire consequences of subscribing only to contemporary currents of thought: without an understanding of history, the world is left terribly vulnerable when history inevitably repeats itself. A doctor, philosopher, and metaphysician, Van Helsing arrives on the scene versed not only in the modern methods of Western medicine, but with an unparalleled knowledge of superstitions and folk remedies. He straddles two distinct worlds, the old and the new: the first marked by fearful respect for tradition, the second by ever - progressing modernity. Unlike his former pupil, Dr. Seward, whose obsession with modern techniques blinds him to the real nature of Lucy's sickness, Van Helsing not only diagnoses the young girl's affliction correctly, but offers her the only opportunity for a cure. Van Helsing receives the admiration of the other characters and succeeds in defeating Dracula by dint of a combination of encyclopaedic knowledge and open - mindedness. Late in the novel, as Dr. Seward comes to embrace Van Helsing's open - mindedness, he writes: "In an age when the existence of ptomaine is a mystery we should not wonder at anything!". For the characters (And presumably for the author) science opens the possibility of shockingly unfamiliar phenomena. If the novel sounds a cautionary note, it merely warns against the presumption that established science as yet offers a complete world - view. Within Stoker's fictional universe, (Correct) superstitious beliefs have an empirical basis and promise to yield to scientific inquiry. So, the solution to the nightmare who comes from the fear of the battle between the Old and the New World, battle in which the modern discoveries could delete the ancient traditions forever, is the union of the antique knowledge and the recent acquaintances, in order to preserve and modernize the whole culture, like Abraham Van Helsing does.

The threat of female sexual expression

In Victorian England, women's sexual behaviour was dictated by society's extremely rigid expectations. A Victorian woman effectively had only two options: she was either a virgin, which is a model of purity and innocence, or else she was a wife and a mother. If she was neither of these, she was considered a whore, and thus of no consequence to society. By the time Dracula lands in England and begins to work his evil magic on Lucy Westenra, we understand that the impending battle between good and evil will hinge upon female sexuality. Both Lucy and Mina are less like real people than two - dimensional embodiments of virtues that have, over the ages, been coded as female. Both women are chaste, pure, innocent of the world's evils and devoted to their men. But Dracula threatens to turn the two women into their opposites, into women noted for their voluptuousness and unapologetically open sexual desire. Dracula succeeds in transforming Lucy and, once she becomes a raving vampire vixen, Van Helsing's men see no other option than to destroy her in order to return her to a purer and more socially respectable state. After Lucy's transformation, the men keep a careful eye on Mina, worried they will lose yet another model of Victorian womanhood to the dark side. The men are so intensely invested in the women's sexual behaviour because they are afraid of associating with the socially scorned. In fact, the men fear for nothing less than their own safety. Late in the novel, Dracula mocks Van Helsing's crew saying: "Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine". Here, the count voices a male fantasy that has existed since Adam and Eve were turned out of Eden, specifically that women's ungovernable desires which leave men poised for a costly fall from grace. Stoker explicitly links vampirism and sexuality from the early chapters of the novel, when the three vampire beauties visit Harker in Dracula's castle: the three beautiful vampires Harker encounters in Dracula's castle are both his dream and his nightmare and they embody both the dream and the nightmare of the Victorian male imagination in general. The sisters represent what the Victorian ideal stipulates women should not be, namely voluptuous and sexually aggressive, thus making their beauty both a promise of sexual fulfilment and a curse. These women offer Harker more sexual gratification in two paragraphs than his fiancée Mina does during the course of the entire novel. However, this sexual proficiency threatens to undermine the foundations of a male - dominated society by compromising men's ability to reason and maintain control. For this reason, the sexually aggressive women in the novel must be destroyed. Because the prejudices of his time barred him from writing frankly about intercourse, Stoker suggests graphic sexual acts through the predatory habits of his vampires. The means by which Dracula feeds, for instance, echo the mechanics of sex: he waits to be beckoned into his victim's bedroom, then he pierces her body in a way that makes her bleed. Another sexual symbol is the stake driven through Lucy's hearth. Arthur Holmwood buries a stake deep in Lucy's heart in order to kill the demon she has become and to return her to the state of purity and innocence he so values. The language with which Stoker describes this violent act is unmistakably sexual and the stake is an unambiguous symbol for the penis. In this way, it is fitting that the blow comes from Lucy's fiancé: Lucy is being punished not only for being a vampire, but also for being available to the vampire's seduction, who can attack only willing victims. When Holmwood slays the demonic Lucy, he returns her to the role of a legitimate and monogamous lover, and this fact reinvests his fiancée with her initial Victorian virtue. Also the blood recalls the idea of sex: the description of Dracula and his minions feeding on blood suggest the exchange of bodily fluids associated with sexual intercourse; Lucy is "Drained" to the point of nearly passing out after the count penetrates her. The vampires' drinking of blood echoes the Christian rite of Communion, but in a perverted sense. Rather than gain eternal spiritual life by consuming wine that has been blessed to symbolize Christ's blood, Dracula drinks actual human blood in order to extend his physical and soulless life. The importance of blood in Christian mythology elevates the battle between Van Helsing's warriors and the count to the significance of a holy war or crusade. In the mind of the typical Victorian male, the meeting between the woman and the vampire has the same effect as a real sexual encounter: it transforms the woman from a repository of purity and innocence into an uncontrollably lascivious creature who inspires "Wicked and burning desire" in men. We witness such a transformation in Lucy Westenra, who becomes a dangerous figure of sexual predation, bent on destroying men with her wanton lust. Because of her immoral mission, the men realize that Lucy must be destroyed. In this sense, Stoker's novel highlights one of the nightmares of the modern men: they have fear of women who go beyond the sexual boundaries Victorian society has proscribed for them. If women are not totally innocent virgins (Like Lucy before Dracula gets hold of her) or married (Like Mina), they are whores who threaten to demolish men's reason and, by extension, their power. The fact that such temptresses are destroyed without exception in "Dracula" testifies to the level of anxiety Victorian men felt regarding women's sexuality.

Mina and Lucy

Mina Murray is the ultimate Victorian woman. Van Helsing's praise of Mina testifies to the fact that she is indeed the embodiment of the virtues of the age. She is "One of God's women, fashioned by His own hand to show us men and other women that there is a heaven where we can enter, and that its light can be here on earth. So true, so sweet, so noble.". Mina stands as the model of domestic propriety, an assistant schoolmistress who dutifully studies newfangled machines like the typewriter so as to be useful to her husband. Unlike Lucy, she is not most notable for her physical beauty, which spares Mina her friend's fate of being transformed into a voluptuous she - devil. Mina's sexuality remains enigmatic throughout the whole of Dracula. Though she marries, she never gives voice to anything resembling a sexual desire or impulse, which enables her to retain her purity. Indeed, the entire second half of the novel concerns the issue of Mina's purity. Stoker creates suspense about whether Mina, like Lucy, will be lost. Given that Dracula means to use women to access the men of England, Mina's loss could have terrifying repercussions. We might expect that Mina, who sympathizes with the boldly progressive "New Women" of England, would be doomed to suffer Lucy's fate as punishment for her progressiveness. But Stoker instead fashions Mina into a goddess of conservative male fantasy. Though resourceful and intelligent enough to conduct the research that leads Van Helsing's crew to the count, Mina is far from a "New Woman" herself. Rather, she is a dutiful wife and mother and her successes are always in the service of men. Mina's moral perfection remains as stainless, in the end, as her forehead. In many ways, Lucy is much like her dear friend Mina. She is a paragon of virtue and innocence, qualities that draw not one but three suitors to her. However, Lucy differs from her friend in one crucial aspect: she is sexualized. Lucy's physical beauty captivates each of her suitors and she displays a comfort or playfulness about her desirability that Mina never feels. In an early letter to Mina, Lucy laments: "Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?". Although she chastises herself for this "Heresy", her statement indicates that she has desires that cannot be met. Stoker amplifies this faint whispering of Lucy's insatiability to a monstrous volume when he describes the un - dead Lucy as a wanton creature of ravenous sexual appetite. In this demonic state, Lucy stands as a dangerous threat to men and their tenuous self - control, and so she must be destroyed. Lucy's death returns her to a more harmless state, fixing a look of purity on her face that assures men that the world and its women are exactly as they should be.