In 2022, the 125th year of its maleficently explainable existence in dozens of adaptations, the quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula stays, like its central character, finely preserved, and like Shelley’s Prometheus, unbound.
By Pramod K Nayar
An Englishman witnesses an unnatural phenomenon:
I saw around us a ring of wolves, with white teeth and lolling red tongues, with long, sinewy limbs and shaggy hair … How he came there, I know not, but I heard his voice raised in a tone of imperious command, and looking towards the sound, saw him stand in the roadway. As he swept his long arms… the wolves fell back and back further still.
Later, this animal-tamer pronounces in a tone reeking with aesthetic pleasure: ‘listen to them! Children of the night, what music they make!’ to refer to the howling of wolves. In 2022, the 125th year of its maleficently explainable existence in dozens of adaptations, the quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula stays, like its central character, finely preserved, and like Shelley’s Prometheus, unbound.
Dracula is written in the form of letters and in a melodramatic style. Reams of paper have been spent tracing the origins of Stoker’s inspiration for the novel, from the real-life king Vlad III (lovingly called Vlad the Impaler) to East European myths. But origin stories are often, well, rank when dragged out of the earth.
But beyond the horror of vampirism and its vigorously undead, Dracula is a serious political novel.
Man/Beast/Thing
Jonathan Harker, through whose eyes we first encounter Count Dracula, is puzzled by what the Count is. Dracula has prodigious strength and peculiar forms of locomotion — a lizard-like crawl. Mirrors do not reflect him. He controls animals. He is physically repulsive, as monsters traditionally are:
Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine; but seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse—broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, l could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, l could not conceal.
He is welcoming and frightening as a host: ‘Once again…welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring’.
Dracula is a Thing, between animal and human. Stoker hints that it is the animality inside him to which the animals respond. He can mimic lizards and transform himself into a pack of rats or a dog. Shape-shifting is central to his ‘nature’, and like several other monsters, frightens us because of this polymorphism. He is both master and servant: in his castle, he cooks and serves Harker, makes his bed, and drives the coach. This too is shape-shifting across classes and professions, and renders Dracula a socially uncategorisable Thing. Then there is the supernatural ability to mesmerise humans and the troubling absence of mortality. These features qualify Dracula as some-thing that breaks the classificatory system, his very malodorous ontology defeats a category.
Man or beast, human or nonhuman, Dracula breaks classificatory paradigms, and is therefore a Thing
At one point he is described as a throwback when Van Helsing says: ‘Well for us, it is, as yet, a child-brain … However, he means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow’ before he becomes ‘the father or furtherer of a new order of beings’. ‘Child-brain’ connotes atavism and a blurred evolutionary line. Stoker is perhaps echoing racialised biological theories of Africans as possessing primitive brains, and so were treated as mere Things. Africans were also, stereotypically, believed to possess magic and, therefore, were beyond European comprehension. The East European Dracula (the land beyond the forest, ‘trans-sylvania’) was being equated with races of subhuman intelligence.
A New Empire’s First Bite
Dracula’s aims are very clear: relocating to London. Harker’s company, on his behalf, had scoured London for a suitable piece of property and zeroed in on one at Purfleet, a property that strangely resembles the Count’s home in Transylvania:
At Purfleet, on a by-road, I came across just such a place as seemed to be required …. It is surrounded by a high wall, of ancient structure, built of heavy stones … The closed gates are of heavy old oak and iron, all eaten with rust. It contains in all some twenty acres, quite surrounded by the solid stone wall … There are many trees on it, which make it in places gloomy, and there is a deep, dark-looking pond or small lake, evidently fed by some springs, as the water is clear and flows away in a fair-sized stream. The house is very large and of all periods back, I should say, to mediæval times, for one part is of stone immensely thick, with only a few windows high up and heavily barred with iron… There are but few houses close at hand, one being a very large house only recently added to and formed into a private lunatic asylum. It is not, however, visible from the grounds.
Later, Harker is horrified that he has helped the vampire migrate:
This was the being I was helping to transfer to London where, perhaps for centuries to come, he might, among its teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.
This is the making of a vampire-empire. Dracula’s trans-European move is a part of 19th century globalisation. For example, Peter Hawkins, Harker’s boss, is keen on facilitating Dracula’s acquisition of property. Stoker points to the active collusion, for profit, of the English market with foreigners. It is this transnational network that brings England to the verge of disaster when Stoker implies that the Count will feast on a decaying England.
The contamination of English women by Dracula is often read as symbolic of the corruption of England by a foreigner
The victims, Renfield and Lucy, epitomise the degeneration of England at the hands and teeth of the foreigner so that, after Lucy’s death, in London, ‘many a long day loneliness will sit over our roofs with brooding wings’, as Dr Seward puts it. The transformation of Renfield and Lucy serves as a symbol for racial mixing, and, therefore, of deracination of English character. The degeneration-of-England theme embodies an anxiety about the multiculturalisation of England, where different races would enter England, and multiply.
The clue to this multiculturalisation-as-invasion lies in Van Helsing’s lines: Count Dracula merely ‘follow[s] the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar’.
The critic Stephen Arata speaks of Dracula as an instance of ‘reverse colonization’ where British culture sees ‘its own imperial practices mirrored back in monstrous forms’. That is, Stoker references Europe’s own history of invasion and colonisation, which has now come back to bite.
Dracula and Cultural Identity
The Count represents Europe’s internal but monstrous Other. The clue to his Otherness occurs on the first page of the novel when Harker records:
I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the west and entering the East.
Dracula country, then, is ‘East’ of Europe itself.
Dracula represents, argued the critic Burton Hatlen, all the ‘dark, foreign (ie, non-English) races; all “dark”, foreign (ie, non-bourgeois) classes’. With his powers, Dracula is the exact opposite of the famous European rational mind. European science itself is called into question, for as Van Helsing says, ‘it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explain not, then it says there is nothing to explain’.
Dracula represents Europe’s internal, monstrous Other
As an embodiment of cultural identity, Dracula is the feared Other to the standard white European. Van Helsing says at one point:
He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk … The Draculas were, says Armenius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by the coevals to have had dealings with the Evil One.
Dracula underscores the complicated, often violent, histories of Europe’s races and kingdoms:
there is hardly a foot of soil in all this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots, or invaders … Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race?
Dracula calls the region ‘the whirlpool of European races’. His land is described as antiquarian and radically different from ‘civilised’ England:
[The] Slovaks, who were more barbarian than the rest, with their big cow-boy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, and enormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over with brass nails. They wore high boots, with their trousers tucked into them, and had long black hair and heavy black moustaches. 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.
The comparison with Oriental brigands is indicative of the Slovaks serving as the unacceptable Other of the rest of Europe.
Triumph in his Eyes
But Dracula also sees himself as defending his own culture, as the critic Attila Viragh argues: “Dracula can be viewed as a subaltern struggling against cultural loss. As the sole heir of a disappearing civilization, he is losing his own historical record even as he attempts to learn the dominant, imperial language and culture of the British Empire.”
Sexual politics too pervades the novel: Harker’s attempted seduction by three vampire women, Holmwood driving a stake through Lucy’s heart and Mina sucking blood from Dracula’s chest wound. The Englishwoman is at the centre of both cultural and sexual politics: the vampire seeks out women to ‘contaminate’. Mina declares she is now ‘unclean’, signifying the threat to English womanhood the foreigner Dracula represents, leading Nina Auerbach to write in Our Vampires, Ourselves: “Even before Arthur celebrates their wedding night with hammer and stake, thumping away unfalteringly while her “body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions”, Dracula had baptized Lucy into wifely fidelity.”
The sexual politics conjoins with another: Dracula espouses a different mode of reproduction itself, for his race.
Dracula initiates a new mode of reproduction, one that would serve his race — of vampires
Dracula would complain in the animation film Hotel Transylvania that he has never said ‘blah blah blah’, but whatever Stoker made him say in the novel has remained with us.
All we can think of when we finish the novel — because we know he will be back — is:
The last I saw of Count Dracula was his kissing his hand to me; with a red light of triumph in his eyes…
(The author is Professor of English and UNESCO Chair in Vulnerability Studies at the University of Hyderabad, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society)