Licenta Dracula

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INTRODUCTION

When exploring the Gothic, it is difficult to isolate psychologicalfactors from social

issues.In a form which focuses soclosely on complex models of identity it is not surprising

that arange of different issues are addressed. However, arguably one of the most telling

characteristics of the Gothic from the 1790s to the 1890s concerns the progressive

internalization of evil.

It would bedangerous to generalize about this trend, but it would neverthelessbe true

to say that a new focus on psychology indicates that a predominantlysecularized version of

monstrosity began to appear.Monsters are not, as they were with Walpoles animated giants,

orLewiss demons, externally manifested sources of danger. Instead,by the mid-nineteenth

century such horrors had largely been internalized.

The roots of this can be discerned in Frankenstein in thedoubling between Victor and

his creature, but it is given freshimpetus in the mid-nineteenth century Gothic, as indicated by

theemergence of the ghost story as a popular form from the 1840sonwards. Typically in the

ghost story the monster lives with you,invading your domestic spaces, so that evil acquires

a proximity tothe self which it did not necessarily have in the earlier Gothic. Thisnew

departure is a matter of emphasis rather than a revolutionary break.The roots of this

internalization of evil are to be found inmuch of the Romantic Gothic, whilst their mature

development can be observed within the later Victorian Gothic.

On a formal level the Gothic typically transgresses models of realism by dwelling on

fantastical experiences.On a more sophisticated level it also transgresses notions of

conventional values, whether social, cultural, or sexual. However, often the transgressor

(monster, vampire, ghost, and so on) is associated with evil, which renders the moment

ambivalent because of a hesitation between the pleasures of transgression and a demonizing

language of evil.

The Gothics use of doubling is a clear indication of the internalization of evil.

Indeed in the new, predominantly secularized context of the mid- to late nineteenth-century

Gothic, evil seems a misnomer because such inner narratives can be explained in

psychological and social, rather than strictly theological, terms.A post-Romantic


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conceptualization of unease which has played a significant role in the critical analysis of the

Gothic was the Uncanny. Sigmund Freuds essay The Uncanny (1919) examined feelings

of unease as they appear within seemingly commonplace experience.

Feelings of uncanniness (the unheimlich) are initially contrasted with ideas of the

home (the heimlich) and the domestic security that it represents. However, the Oedipus

complex suggests that the home is where sexual secrets are propagated, so that the home

becomes traumatic, or uncanny, as a result. Freud initiallyregarded the double as indicating

the emergence of our adult conscience.However, this conscience, which has a positive role

in regulatingbehavior, turns into a dangerously powerful form ofcensorship that, for Freud,

stifles the development of the self sothat the double becomes the uncanny harbinger of

deathbecause it psychologically kills (or represses) the self.This trauma is manifested as a

repetition compulsion, and Freud explores how a culture repeats the past in tales of the dead in

which the past comes back to life (or is repeated).

This conclusion has relevance for a consideration of the ghost story and the images of the

double (the living and the dead) in the Gothic. Gothic so often focuses on issues of gender and

identity it meansthat sexuality and politics are frequently foregrounded.Preeminent features of

Gothic fiction include terror(both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural,

ghosts, haunted houses and Gothicarchitecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles,

madness, secrets, and hereditary curses. The characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants,

villains, bandits, maniac, persecuted maidens, madwomen, demons, fallen angels, and the

Devil himself.Gothic literature has a long history behind it, and there are many books today

still being written in that style.


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CHAPTER I

GOTHIC LITERATURE

The Gothic was considered a predominantly prose form.However, the roots of the Gothic are

to be found in earlier theatrical and poetic traditions. Radcliffe, for example, is heavily

indebted to Shakespearean tragedy and in The Italian often begins her chapters with a

quotation from his plays. However, her interrogation of Romantic concepts, such as the

sublime and the role of nature, is firmly rooted in the poetry of the period. In addition the

Gothic more generally owes some debt to the Graveyard Poetry of the 1740s and 1750s.

Edwards Youngs Night Thoughts (1750-55), Robert Blairs The Grave (1743), James

Herveys Meditations amongthe Tombs (1745-47), Thomas WartonsOn the Pleasures

ofMelancholy (1747), and Thomas Grays Elegy written in a CountryChurchyard (1751) all

made a significant contribution to developing a Gothic ambience (by dwelling on feelings of

loss), and provided an investigation into life and death that constituted a peculiarly Gothic

metaphysic. The Gothic novels link to Romantic poetry was noted by Sir Walter Scott when

he proclaimed Radcliffe the first poetess of romantic fiction1. The Romantic interest in

exploring non-rational (anti-Enlightenment) states led many of the Romantic poets to write in

the Gothic mode. This explores how a Romantic Gothic tradition of poetry developed themes

(concerning sexuality, art, and the imagination) which influenced a later poetic tradition here

represented by Christina Rossettis Goblin Market (1862). It is important to note that after the

Gothic heydayof the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Gothicdoes not

disappear but subversively infiltrates other forms ofwriting, including poetry, and the realist

Victorian novel.

1Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 103.


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1.1 Hidden Identities: Ghosts

The Gothic culture has drawn attention in terms of various aspects related to the

same.Amongst the many facets, Gothic literature is known the world over due to the particular

distinct qualities associated with this form of writing.This literature has even influenced other

different genres of writing styles. There are certain prominent traits about Gothic literature

that set it apart from the rest. In Burkes Philosophical Enquiry he developed, as we also saw

inthe discussion of Frankenstein, a theory of sublime terror which is stimulated by our more

dangerous encounters with the world.Burke attempts to explain this within a philosophical

language which is dogged by an empiricist view of the world, which is why he is so

systematic in his itemization of causes and effects. However, we can also say that Burke is

addressing psychological issues within a philosophical approach which cannot properly

account for theorigins of terror as an emotion. As discussed in the Introduction, Burke does

not have a language of psychology with which to explore unconscious or subconscious factors

because, historically speaking, this language was unavailable to him.If Burkes Philosophical

Enquiry represents an attempt to account for new types of emotional experience, then Freud

provides a more person-centered, critically nuanced account of the selfwhich helps us to

explore such changes as they appear in the Gothic tradition. This may seem like a historically

perverse claim (that the Victorian Gothic which pre-dated Freud can be historically explained

in Freudian terms), but it relates to an essentialquality of the Gothic which has been addressed

throughout: that it is an interrogative rather than intellectually or culturally passive form. As

the Romantic Gothic treated Burkean ideas with skepticism, so that skepticism generated a

new version of the self which was more complex than Burkes empiricism would allow.

Indeed it developed a version of the self which appears to be strangely Freudian before Freud.

This relationship is not a tenuous one, as evidenced by the fact that Freuds essay The

Uncanny2gains most of its conclusions from a reading of E.T. A. Hoffmanns short story The

Sand Man (1816).

2Is a Freudian concept of instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time resulting in a

feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar


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For Freud, the key terms of the uncanny relate to the home. The home is a place of family,

domesticity, and therefore safety. However, Freud famously notes that linguistically the two

terms of his argument heimlich(homely) and unheimlich(unhomely, or uncanny) merge,

leading him to conclude that unheimlich3is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich.

This is not just because of some lexical slippage between the terms; it is because for Freud the

home is a sinister place. In keepingwith his theory of the Oedipus complex (which underpins

hisreading of The Sand Man), the home becomes a dangerous placebecause it is the site

where sexual secrets are harbored and propagated.The childs feelings about their parents

influence infantilesexual development, meaning that the home is not a safe, or innocent,place

to be.Because the home can become the place which generates sexualanxieties it is therefore

no surprise that the Gothic of the late nineteenthcentury also suggests, in the ghost story, that

the home is adangerous place. Trauma, however, should not be solely seen inpsychological

terms because, as we shall see, the ghost story also referencesan anxiety about the wealth

invested in the home andmiddle-class concerns about who really owns such

places.Dickenss A Christmas Carol (1843), J. H. Riddells The UninhabitedHouse (1875),

and Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw (1898) helpto clarify these issues.Dickens wrote a

number of long ghost stories which he referredto as my little Christmas Books, indicating

that he saw them as seasonalwinters tales intended as light entertainment. However,these

Christmas Books often contain quite sinister narratives concerningloneliness, anxiety,

despair, and poverty. The best-knownof these books is A Christmas Carol, and although it was

written in1843 it nevertheless gives a good sense of the kinds of issues whichtypified the

ghost story (and by extension the Gothic) during themiddle of the nineteenth century and

onwards.Scrooges lodgings can be read in terms of the uncanny. This isapparent by how he

lives in his chambers a wealthy man living inself-imposed poverty (in which he is not

properly homed) andin the more obvious sense that his home is subject to ghostly

visitations.The invasion of Scrooges chambers by ghosts represents a direct invasion into his

life. The ghost of Jacob Marley illustrates not only what he could become (a soul tormented)

3Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in Art and Literature: Jensens Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works ,trans. James


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but also what he is (a spectral inhuman figure). The point is to make Scrooge realize that in

order to change his fate he has to change who he is, and this is effected by bringing Scrooge

back to life (or back to the present). The three ghosts which confront Scrooge all illustrate

certain points of his history, past, present, and future, and thus the ghosts have an inherent

connection to Scrooge, rather than appear as ex ternal manifestations of evil (indeed they are

there to help him).A Christmas Carol relies on the uncanny in its representation of ghosts and

in how the ghosts are used to illustrate the workings of Scrooges inner life. Whilst this effects

a psychological transformation in Scrooge, this psychological factor should not be separated

from social issues. Uncanniness might appear to be a purely psychological phenomenon but it

represents a model of anxiety whichneeds to be seen within the social context that gives rise to

it. InScrooges case the context clearly concerns anxieties over money.The tale was written in

the 1840s during a period of economicdepression known as the hungry forties. Scrooge is a

miser whocontributes to the presence of poverty because he hoards his wealth.At the end of

the tale he buys Christmas presents and this suggeststhat he is putting money back into

circulation. The conclusiontherefore contains a paradox, because it implies that Scrooge

needsto become a better capitalist, one who uses money when, arguably,it was capitalism

which caused the problem in the first place.The issue of money is important because ghost

stories often foregroundconcerns about class and wealth. However, given that theyare also

about invaded domestic spaces (which are also economicspaces) it is understandable that

many women writers producedmajor collections of ghost stories, novellas, and novels in the

period.Amelia B. Edwards published many significant ghost stories in the1860s and wrote the

important long tale Monsieur Maurice in 1873.Mary E. Braddon in the 1870s and 1880s

produced many influentialtales, as did E. Nesbit in the 1890s and onwards. Vernon Lee(real

name Violet Paget) wrote the novella A Phantom Lover (1886), addresses the conjunctions

between gender and various forms ofsocial and economic power.One prominent ghost-story

writer of the time, although one nowsomewhat neglected, is J. H. Riddell (or Charlotte

Riddell). Likeother women writers in the ghost-story tradition she examined therelationship

between class and gender (a theme that is implicit inDickenss account of money). She also

wrote several non-Gothictexts which testify to her interest in financial matters. Her best

knownnovels set in the financial sector are City and Suburb (1861),Mitre Court (1885), and

The Head of the Firm (1892). She alsoproduced a series of Gothic novellas, Fairy Water


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(1873), TheUninhabited House (1875), The Haunted River (1877), and TheDisappearance of

Mr. Jeremiah Redworth(1878), as well as thecollection of tales Weird Stories (1884), which

includes many ghoststories.The Uninhabited House initially seems to lampoon the kind

ofmaterialism that we find in Dickens as it focuses on the legal practicalitiesof letting out

River House, which is reputedly haunted.The owner of the house loses her case against her

tenants who claimthat they had not been informed about the ghost when they rentedthe

property. A clerk who is involved in the letting of the house, andwho narrates the story, stays

in the house in hope of explaining themystery. It transpires that it is haunted by the previous

owner, Mr.Elmsdale, a wealthy but unscrupulous money-lender who, for avariety of reasons,

wished to financially ruin a Mr.Harringford, whoowed him money and who subsequently

murdered him. The novellamoves beyond the largely psychological issues later suggested

byFreud in The Uncanny by implying that money is uncannybecause it appears to possess a

vitality (a life) which either enhancesor destroys the people it touches. The ghost of

Mr.Elmsdale is likea version of Scrooge. One witness recounts seeing a

manseatedcounting over bank-notes. He had a pile of them before him, and Idistinctly saw

that he wetted his fingers in order to separate them.4The ghost of Mr.Elmsdale is, like Jacob

Marleys, still attached tothe business world. When Mr.Harringford murders the

wealthyElmsdale the curse of financial success is passed on to him, as henotes From the hour

I left him lying dead in the library every devil. His wife and children die and he becomes

lame andprematurely aged. The moral appears to be simple enough moneycomes by

dishonestly makes you inhuman. Money, like the ghost, isboth present and absent because it

represents both a material realityand a moral emptiness. As in A Christmas Carol, the solution

appearsto lie in the proper redistribution of wealth, which occurs whenHarringford dies and

bequeaths his wealth to Elmsdales daughter,who then marries the narrator.This seemingly

bizarre tale of ghosts and ill-begotten wealthillustrates again the essentially middle-class

anxieties of the form.The anxiety is that a class could, under certain circumstances, gainand

lose everything within a generation5.In addition Riddellsadoption of a male narrator does not

disguise the fact that thepoverty with which he is threatened, unless he makes a

4 J. H. Riddell, The Uninhabited House, in Five Victorian Ghost Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover,1971), pp. 1118,p. 31. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.5Henry James, The Friends of the Friends, in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed., Michael Cox andR. A. Gilbert(Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1986] 2002), pp. 15071.


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financiallyadvantageous marriage, in reality captures the experience of manywomen at the

time.

Both Dickens and Riddell therefore address issues about moneyand class, and in Riddells

case gender. Their narratives indicatethat ghosts are not quite so otherworldly after all, indeed

they seemto be more heimlichthan unheimlichin the prosaic class-bound anxietiesthat they

articulate. Suggest that all such stories are focused on money and power.However, Riddells

love plot is intimately related to financial concernsbecause they govern the expectations that

characters haveabout their chances of marrying.Love, money, ghosts, and suggestions of

insanity are centralissues in Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw (1898), which can beread

as a fin de sicle version of Jane Eyre, centered upon a governesss feelings for her employer.

Jamess novella made an importantcontribution to the ghost story because it casts doubt

onwhether the ghosts are real or merely projections of the governessssomewhat

overwrought imagination.The novella begins in a kind of ghost story competition in

whichDouglas, the narrator, presents the governesss story. If love inRiddells novella is in

part conditioned by certain financial expectations,in James it is associated with a possible

delusion that controls the governess, Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been. That

cameout she couldnt tell her story without its coming out. Douglasalso goes on to note,

The story wont tell not in any literal, vulgarway. Jamess syntactically complex novella

bears stylistic testimonyto this oblique approach in which the governesss perceptionof the

ghosts of Quint and Jessel is central because their very existenceis open to question. Whilst

Dickenss and Riddells ghostsfulfill a purpose because their presence is meant to create a

better life(for Scrooge) or because they result in economic advancement (forRiddells

narrator), Jamess ghosts appear to represent the projectionsof the love-struck and anxious

governess.The governesss unrequited feelings for her employer becomedramatized in the

relations between the spectral Quint and MissJessel, who also appear to have been involved in

a doomed relationship.In addition, the governesss perception of the children,Flora and Miles,

is influenced by her anxiety that Quint and Jesselcould represent an immoral influence over

them. This means thatall the characters, real and spectral, are forced into a series of

relationshipsforged by the governess. Miles, for example, because ofsome undisclosed

problems at school, appears to the governess asa potential Quint, and so she attempts to

protect him from Quintsinfluence. However, Mrs.Grose, the pragmatic


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housekeeper,undermines the governesss claims about the presence of theghosts. In one scene

the governess points at Jessel, but Mrs.Groseresponds with Where on earth do you see

anything?Aview supported by Flora: I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. The

governess rationalizes away such claims (at least toher own, if not necessarily the readers,

satisfaction), but thismeans that the novella operates at two levels: as a tale about ghostsand as

a tale about the governesss projection of her feelings aboutpossible rejection.The narrative

develops some of the aspects of the uncanny whichrelate to doubling. The problem is that the

governess is necessarilyunable to see that the ghosts are (or at least can be read as)

projectionsof herself. The Turn of the Screw thus dramatizes the interior(emotional,

psychological) origins of the types of horror that anearlier, less secular, Gothic tradition

located externally. These three stories of ghosts are quite different in emphasis andin their

development of uncanniness. It is important to note that theghost story has often posed

problems for critics because their verystructure, in which a survivor tells or focalizes the tale,

signals inadvance that any horrors are likely to be overcome. However, inJamess complex

tale of psychological influence and spectrally (atheme he also developed in the short story

The Friends of theFriends,1896), the surviving governess arguably does not overcomethe

trauma of what happens because she is the principal agentin its generation. However, when

reading ghost stories it is alsoimportant to consider how they express class-bound issues,

becauseghost stories, with their accounts of haunted middle-class houses,are also articulating

class anxieties which obliquely touch upon theperils of home ownership.Jamess novella

explores issues about projection and doublingwhich appear in other Gothic tales. How the

other functions as ameans of awakening is, as we shall see, a central aspect of RobertLouis

Stevensons tale of doubling, The Strange Case of Dr Jekylland Mr. Hyde (1886), and is a

feature of many mid-nineteenth centuryGothic tales which touch upon sexuality.


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1.2 Gothic Doubles

Gothic double refers to an essential duality within a single character on the further

presumption that this duality centers polarity of good and evil. In fact we could say that the

single most interesting device used by Gothic writers is that of the double. The roots of the

double can be found in Coleridges Christabel. By paying close attention to how Coleridge

and Rossetti used languageit is possible to see how it enabled them to both articulate

andconceal notions of sexual awakening. Both Christabeland GoblinMarket represent images

of lesbianism and in their different waysstruggle to both show and disguise this (perhaps more

so inRossetti, but it is there in Coleridges attempt to allegories suchdesire in Bracys dream).

It is not just the issue of lesbian desirewhich is important but also the representation of fragile,

becausepermeable, models of subjectivity. Geraldine might appear as anexternal threat but she

affects an inner awakening. Laura and Lucyare sisters but iconically lovers because the

Goblins also bring abouta (premature) sexual awakening the antidote to which transfersthe

awakening from men to women.This Gothic strand links lesbianism with sexual discovery,

andsexual discovery in a wider sense is an issue in the Gothic duringthe period, as well as

being central to Freuds account of subject formation.Le FanusCarmillais a good example of

a text from theperiod which explores lesbianism, sexual awakening, and nationalidentity, all

within an account of the self and its vampire desires.Le Fanu, an Irish writer of mixed

Protestant and Catholicdescent (although a graduate of the Protestant Trinity College,Dublin),

was a well-known novelist famous for Uncle Silas (1864),Wylders Hand (1864), and Guy

Deverell(1865), as well as an influentialGothic short-story writer. Carmillawas published in

the collectionIn a Glass Darkly (1872), which contained a number ofGothic short stories,

including Green Tea, The Familiar andMr. Justice Harbottle. The prologue to

Carmillaclaims that thetale has been subject to some scientific scrutiny by Doctor Hesselius

(Le Fanus investigator into paranormal activity), who had concludedthat the case

represented some of the profoundest arcane of our dual existence.Laura, who lives with her

English father in Styria, narrates thetale. Her mother has died, and this, typically a feature of

theFemale Gothic, leaves her peculiarly vulnerable. Their world istransformed when they are

asked to look after Carmilla, a youngwoman who has been involved in a carriage accident on


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their estate.Laura seems to recollect Carmilla from a childhood dream, adream that Carmilla

also recalls and which establishes an apparentpsychic link between them. The two are drawn

to each other, whilstin the neighborhood there are a number of mysterious deaths ofyoung

women (who seem to have died from vampire bites). Lauraalso appears to become a victim of

these assaults, but then Carmilladisappears. A General Spielsdorf, who some time before had

seeminglylost his daughter to a vampire that resembled Carmilla,arrives and helps track

Carmilla to her tomb, where she is stakedand decapitated. In the Gothic tradition evil is

often defined by the threat it poses to civilization. Jekyll and Hyde, like Carmilla,

problematizesthis by raising questions about the origins of evil within civilization.The

novella can easily be caricatured as merely being aboutwarring factions within Dr Jekyll, but a

closer examination revealsthat Stevenson emphasizes that any notion of conflict needs to

beseen within the context of what constitutes civilization. The novellaopens with an account

of the weekly walk taken around London byUtterson and his distant relative Enfield. Utterson

is a lawyer andtherefore ostensibly associated with a respectable bourgeois profession,

But a closer look reveals the presence of a Gothic mood. He isdescribed as a man of rugged

countenance, that was never lightedby a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse;

backward insentiment: lean, long, dusty, dreary, and although this is qualifiedwith and yet

somehow lovable, this somehow suggests that thegrounds for the claim are unclear.6It is

then noted of Utterson andEnfield that:It was reported by those who encountered them in

theirSunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull,and would hail with obvious

relief the appearance of a friend.For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these

excursions,counted them the chief jewel of each week. The opening of the novella thus

implies that a meaningless attachmentto middle-class rituals (here the Sunday walks) empties

experienceof pleasure and significance. It is out of this emptiness thatHyde is generated. This

specifically middle-class emptiness isapparent in the isolated and lonely lives of all the main

characterswho are successful members of bourgeois professions such asmedicine and the

law. As in some theories of degeneration, the precarious nature of social bonds indicates a

crisis within notions ofcivilization. Hyde might appear to be a Darwinian throwback withhis

ape-like tricks, but there is at least, so the novellaimplies, a vitality about him which is sadly

6 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), in The Strange Case of Dr Jekylland Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1984), p. 29. All subsequentreferences in the text are to this edition


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lacking in the othercharacters, and thus Hyde becomes the double of them all.The Uncanny

with its analysis of dangerous doubles providesone critical approach to the text. Hyde, seen

within the context ofa seemingly moribund civilization, can also be interpreted as anevolving

creature. Hyde physically becomes bigger as the novelladevelops, and this coming into being

is also apparent in the languagethat Jekyll employs in his seemingly explanatory

narrative,Henry Jekylls Full Statement of the Case. Jekylls first-personaccount slips into a

third-person narrative voice Henry Jekyllstood at times aghast before the acts of Edward

Hyde which indicates a struggle for control within the narrative; later theview that Jekyll

was now my city of refuge suggests thatHyde is narrating. The final sentence claims that I

bring the life ofthat unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end , which is also ambivalentbecause we

cannot be sure if Jekyll has killed Hyde or Hyde haskilled Jekyll.Jekyll and Hyde, like

Carmilla, is ostensibly about doubledselves, but it never loses sight of the social conflict that

Jekyll andHyde represents. Jekyll and Hyde are associated with differentclasses and in this

respect dramatize the social tensions whichcharacterized London at the time. The idea of

leading a doublelife has also suggested to Elaine Showalter that the novellaincorporates a

covert narrative relating to homosexual relationsbetween Jekyll and Hyde, in which Hyde

blackmails his sociallysuperior lover7. Such images can also be discerned in WildesThe

Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which plots the developmentof a secret life within an

apparently respectable society. The complexitiesof these Gothic narratives lend themselves

too manydifferent readings and theoretical approaches. Theories of degenerationhave a

predominately European flavor to them andprovide one way of looking at how these texts

generate models ofidentity. How identity was explored in the American Gothicduring the

period helps develop a critical counterpoint to thisBritish tradition. To critically read

narratives such as these it is crucial to explorethe specific cultural contexts which generated

them. They allprovide important evocations of the horrors of slavery and indicatehow the

Gothic conditions such representations. They also play animportant part in shaping later

Gothic texts which explore similarthemes, such as Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987), which

will be discussedin the following chapter. As mentioned earlier, the Gothic inBritain develops

7 Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1990).See Dr. JekyllsCloset, pp. 10526.


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ideas of racial and national otherness in quite adifferent way than in America: a reading of

Dracula helps to illustratethis.


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CHAPTER II

TWENTIETH CENTURY

2.1 The ghost story as the end of the gothic

The ghost stories ofDickens, Henry James, and J. H. Riddell illustrate how evil

wasinternalized in the Gothic. Their writings also address social andpolitical considerations

relating to money, class, and gender. Howto gauge the political vision of the ghost story in the

early part ofthe twentieth century appears to be more difficult. Much of thecriticism on the

form is colored by a response to the writings ofM. R. James, whose highly influential ghost

stories were publishedin collected form between 1904 and 1931. Jamess writings bearan

imprint on the ghost stories of E. F. Benson, his brotherA. C. Benson, Edmund Gill Swain, A.

N. L. Munby, and RichardMalden, who had contact with James at Cambridge

University;many of them were present there when James read out his tales inhis college rooms

at Christmas. However, other writers in theperiod, such as Algernon Blackwood and May

Sinclair, producedtales in a slightly different, less heavily stylized, and key. This

sectionexplores some selected writings of M. R. James, Blackwood, E. F.Benson, and

Sinclair. How some of these writers can be linked tomodernism provides a closing context in

which a reconsiderationof the ghost storys apparent formalism can be re-evaluated.The ghost

story has posed a problem for scholars working on theGothic in its unsettling of the

relationship between the living and metaphysical, questions about identity. However, the

structure ofthe ghost story often appears less unsettling, as its conventionalityand easy-going

fireside ambience creates, at least in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, a mood

which is antitheticalto grand metaphysical debate.

David Punter in The Literature ofTerror argues that during the early part of the twentieth

century theghost story entered a highly mannered phase8which culminatedin the shockingly

bland tones of M. R. James. Indeed, forPunter, Jamess settings are often little more than

8 David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Modern Gothic (London and New York: Longman, 1996), vol. 2,p. 67. All subsequent references given in the text are to this edition


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Gothic stereotypes, and although his formulaic constructions mightpossess a certain Gothic

style, they are fundamentally devoid ofradical content: They work well, but they mean almost

nothing

(emphasis in original). For William Hughes, Jamess talesconstruct an almost idyllic late -

Victorian and Edwardian worldconsisting of the quiet College Combination Room, the

library, orthe cathedral close.9Even the Gothics fascination with extrememental states is

absent because, as Julia Briggs claims, in Jamesstales psychology is totally and defiantly

excluded.10

This version of James implies that his writings are dominated bya narrative mannerism which

excludes any troubling Gothic elements,or political or cultural conflicts.This has ledClive

Bloom toargue that Jamess tales refer to a world both slower and morestable than the

modernistic period in which he was writing. 11 Thisissue of the retrospective nature of

Jamess writing and how itrelates to modernism will be returned to. However, the idea

thatJamess tales represent stable worlds is difficult to reconcile with theprevalence of death,

abduction, and demonic hauntings which sooften characterize them. The past is a dangerous

place in his tales,but, as we shall see, this is related to a response to modernism whichrelocates

its apparent amorality within the seemingly urbane narratorialvoices.M. R. James was provost

of Kings College, Cambridge, andprovost of Eton, a classical scholar and a medievalist

historian. Thisacademic background plays a crucial role in his tales, which so oftenrevolve

around scholarly discoveries which bring the past back tolife. That this background informed

his tales is clear from the titleof his first collection of ghost stories, published in 1904, Ghost

Stories of an Antiquary. Three further collections were published,A Thin Ghost and Others

(1919), A Warning to the Curious(1925), and Wailing Well (1928), before a collected edition

was publishedin 1931. Jamess tale The Mezzotint (1904) describes how a group

ofCambridge dons observe an unfolding narrative concerning theabduction of a baby from a

9 Williams Hughes, The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1998),p.143.10 Julia Briggs, The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 135, cited at p.85 in Punter,Literature of Terror. I am conscious that this implies that theGothic is an inherently radical form,whereas it can often beused to conservative ends. However, the critical material onJames suggests that the Gothicsimply fails to appear as Gothicat any politically discernible level (whether radical or reactionary).11 Clive Bloom, M. R. James and his Fiction, in Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century,ed. Clive Bloom(London: Pluto, 1993), pp. 6471, p. 69.


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country house, which is recounted on amezzotint engraving being considered for purchase for

theirmuseum. Historical research reveals that the mezzotint wasengraved by Arthur Francis

and the tale illustrated by the mezzotintrelates to an incident involving his family. The tale

concernshow the ghost of a figure named Gawdy, who had been executed forkilling one of

Franciss gamekeepers, enacts his revenge by abductingand then murdering Franciss only

child. This chilling narrativeis at odds with how the dons respond to it. Theirs is a

cozy,cloistered world which is only temporarily upset by this narrative.Their conversation

revolves around middle-class sporting activities,and in one instance tea was taken to the

accompaniment of adiscussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves12

.Later,

over Sunday morning breakfast, Hardly a topic was leftunchallenged, from golf to l awn-

tennis. These commentsillustrate the moral vacuity of the lives of the dons who

unconsciouslyunderstand that their vacuity is, at a symbolic level,generating the horror which

is manifested in the mezzotint: as oneof them notes, it looks very much as if we were

assisting at theworking out of a tragedy somewhere . The tragedy isturned inwards because

what is really tragic, so the tale implies, istheir inability to empathize with the human drama

staged by themezzotint.M. R. James is more complex than critics have allowed, and histales

can be read as a critique of blandness, rather than as an exercisein narrative form. He was to

return to these issues in the laterThe Haunted Dolls House (1925).13

In the tale a Mr.Dillet

purchasesan antique dolls house which is a mocked-up version ofHorace Walpoles Gothic

folly, Strawberry Hill. At one oclockevery morning it stages the murder of an old man, and

his subsequentghostly return and murder of two young children. Some research reveals that

the dolls house was made by JamesMerewether, who had murdered the old man (his father-

in-law)because he intended to exclude the family from his will; the murderedchildren were

Merewethers. Dillet suffers an emotional breakdown but such is the structure of the tale (in

which the tale isheavily mediated through the narrator) that the reader is kept at adistance

from Dillets private drama, and this curiously places thereader as a passive voyeur of his

despair and forces the reader tooccupy the same amoral position as the dons in The

Mezzotint. Both tales implicitly address a horror of an emerging amoralitywhich, as we shall

12M. R. James, The Mezzotint, in The Collected Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, [1931]1970), pp. 3653,p. 40. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.I develop these arguments in M.R. Jamess Gothic Revival ina special issue ofDiegesison Horror, ed. Gina Wisker, 7(Summer 2004), 1622.13M. R. James, The Haunted Dolls House, in The Collected Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold,[1931] 1970),pp. 47289.


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see, can be linked to a somewhat conservativeview of modernism. The modernist cry

forinnovation subtly influenced the development of the ghost story.The new technical

innovations of radio and film in the period werealso to provide opportunities for the

development of the Gothic.

2.2 Gothic - postmodernism

In the twentieth century the term Gothic tends to becomereplaced with Horror, at least

where popular literature is concerned.In part such a change in nomenclature is a recognition

thatthe various associations that Gothic has with formulaic plotsinvolving aristocratic

villains amid ruined castles, set withinsublime landscapes, are not the stock-in-trade of writers

such asStephen King, James Herbert, John Saul, Dean Koontz, or ShaunHutson, amongst

many others.The post-war boom in mass-produced pulp fiction (so calledbecause of the poor

quality of paper on which they were printed inthe 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s) is not confined to

horror. The post-warera was also characterized in both text- and non-text-based mediaby other

popular modes, most notably science fiction and detectivefiction.The popularity of these

novels should not detract from the factthat, in keeping with the Gothic tradition, they still

address culturalanxieties. In America the Southern Gothic of the 1940s and 1950s,of writers

such as Carson McCullers and Flannery OConnor,reworks themes about region, murder, and

insanity which arguablyhave their roots in the Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe. 14 In

addition,Stephen Kings novels repeatedly dwell on social problems generatedwithin small

American towns where the social limitations ofsuch an environment become emblematic of

wider issues relating tosocial and moral obligations. His novel Carrie (1974), for

example,concerns the failure of family, peers, and schools to protect the vulnerable,and

consequently it takes some delight in destroying much of the small town where it is set.52A

figure of comparable standingin Britain is James Herbert, and his novel The Rats (1977) can,

atone level, be read as a tale about inner city decay. 15 Such a popularform is not without

examples of intellectual complexity. CliveBarkers work, for example, takes its place within a

horror traditionbut also explores a set of complex postmodern ideas about thenature of

14See A. Robert Lee on Southern Gothic in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts(Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1998), pp. 217-20, where he makes this link with Poe.15 James Herbert, The Rats (London: New English Library, 1974).


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representation. His collection of tales, Books of Blood,includes Son of Celluloid (1988),

which centers on an escapedprisoner, Barberio, who is suffering from cancer. He is

mortallywounded in a shoot-out with the police, and hides in a cinemabehind the screen,

where he dies of his wounds; however, the cancertakes on a life of its own as it searches for

new victims, and does soby taking on the form of various film stars such as John

Wayne,Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lorre, and Greta Garbo (thus suggestingthat an apparently

pristine Hollywood golden age was not as pureas it seemed).16

Barkers novel

Weaveworld(1988) also, as the titleimplies, looks at how worlds are artistically constructed

through thebringing together of various forms of representation.17

Barkers writings mentioned

here can be regarded as exercises inpostmodernism. Whilst modernism focused on the

fragmentednature of subjectivity (and so exploited the Gothic fascination withfractured

selves), postmodernism represents a skepticism about thegrand narratives (such as religion, for

example) which once providedsocial and moral norms. In a contemporary, postmodern ageone

can no longer believe in coherent, universal, claims to truthwhich, so the argument goes, are

replaced by moral relativism.Such a world is defined by the absence of absolute meaning, and

inliterature this becomes manifested through stylistic play in whichnarrative forms are run

together to create synthetic worlds whichforeground issues about representation above any

moral or metaphysicalconcerns. In other words, postmodernism seems to bepeculiarly suited

to the Gothic because it questions the notion thatone inhabits a coherent or otherwise

abstractly rational world. Aswe shall see, some authors who have written in the Gothic mode

andappear to incorporate elements of the postmodern, such as AngelaCarter and Toni

Morrison, are in fact skeptical about postmodernismor certain aspects of it. Carter and

Morrison are not horrorwriters in the way that King and Herbert are.Their self-conscious

literary qualities distance them from such writers, even thoughtheir texts discussed here do

refer back to an earlier Gothic tradition.To what extent there exists a postmodern Gothic is the

issueaddressed in this section. One writer whose work has beendescribed as a forerunner to

postmodernism, Shirley Jackson, helpsus to see how the issues of the older Gothic are

reworked within newmodels of horror that appear to anticipate the postmodern.

16Clive Barker, Son of Celluloid, in Clive Barkers Books ofBlood, vol. 3 (London: Sphere, 1988), pp. 135.

17 Clive Barker, Weaveworld(Glasgow: Collins, 1988). SeeAndrew Smith, Worlds That Creep Up on You:PostmodernIllusions in the Work of Clive Barker, in Creepers: BritishHorror and Fantasy in the TwentiethCentury, ed. Clive Bloom(London: Pluto, 1993), pp. 17686


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CHAPTER III

DRACULA: BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNISM

3.1 Dracula, myth and history

In spite of all that we know about Vlad Dracula, he remains somewhat of an enigma.

Not only there are still some unsolved mysteries about his life and death, but there has been

much speculation about the exact nature of the connection between VladDracul and the Count

Dracula of Bram Stokers classic novel.Most assume that Bram Stoker, inspired by accounts

he had read or heard about the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler, made a conscious decision

to base the character of Count Dracula on the historical personage VladDracul.But thisassumption is speculative.We know for certain only that Stoker borrowed the name Dracula

and a few scraps of information about Wallachian history from William Willkinsons An

Account of Wallachia and Moldavia(1820). First of all we must say that the name Dracula

has a lot to do with the Roumanian word drac(derivedfrom the Latin draco) which can

mean both dragon and devil. Vlad adopted it as sobriquet derived from the Order of the

Dragon which had been bestowed upon his father, VladDracul, in 1431. We know that

Romanian historians have traditionally resisted referring to Vlad as Dracula for two reasons:

it was used in late fifteenth century German documents, and of course it reinforces the

connection to Stokers vampire Count. Dracula is the story of the Transylvanian Count

Dracula, a vampirewho terrorizes a group of friends, led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, inhis

search for victims in London. The novel uses letters, journal entries,newspaper articles, and

other invented sources to structure itsnarrative; this technique heightens the sense of mystery

surroundingthe story's events.Apart from its impact as a horror novel and comparisons to

MaryShelley's Frankenstein, Dracula surprised literary critics, who hadgenerally disregarded

Stoker's abilities as an author. Like his earlynovels, his more recent works, including The

Walter's Mou'(1895) andThe Shoulder of Shasta (1895), were not very successful.The Dracula

character was based on Prince Vlad V of Wallachia, a fifteenth-century Romanian tyrant

better known as Vlad the Impaler.


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An infamous torturer and murderer, Vlad was known as "Dracula," becausehis father

belonged to a society called the Order Draconis. Asthis made his father a "dragon," it made

Vlad "Dracula," which means"son of the dragon." Stoker learned details of Vlad's life from a

Hungarianprofessor named Arminius Vambery, who greatly influenced thenovel's central

ideas.Dracula was also influenced by Carmilla, a horror novel by Irishauthor Sheridan Le

Fanu. Although Stoker was known for writingvivid descriptions of landscapes he had seen, the

writer had never visitedRomania, and only imagined the Transylvania in which Draculalived.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) now seems to be everywhere, but itdid not come out of

nowhere. It is one of the nineteenth century's mostlasting and influential examples of the

Gothic novel, a gesture thatblends two distinct strains of fiction. One is the old-fashioned

romance,with its fondness for the supernatural and the miraculous; theother is the realistic

novel, with its painstaking detail of actual peopleliving ordinary lives. The Gothic novel

created in the eighteenth century,only to flower in the nineteenthbrings together the

fantastic elementsof the romance with the plausible psychology of real people.Bridget M.

Marshall's "Stoker's Dracula and the Vampire's LiteraryHistory," the first contribution in the

"Contexts" section of this volume, sets Stoker's most famous achievement in the context of

that developing literary genre every conceivable variety: man-eating dragons, mermaids,

zombies,gargoyles, demons. And vampires have been a recurring feature inmany of the

world's belief systems: the Un-Dead, feasting on the bloodof the living, have shown up in

ancient Persia, Greece, Babylon, Israel,and India, as well as in virtually every country in

medieval Europe. Beforethe nineteenth century, though, despite their popularity in

orallytransmitted folktales, vampires made few appearances in serious literature.The early

English novelthe form developed in the first half of theeighteenth century, most famously

by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,and Henry Fieldingdeclared its allegiance to the

realistic depictionof everyday life. As fair as sophisticated eighteenth-century readerswere

concerned, the supernatural was fit only for the nursery. Seriousgrown-ups did not bother with

stories of giants, dragons, and devils.But the supernatural could not be excluded from serious

fiction forever.On Christmas Day, 1764, Horace Walpole published a small bookcalled The

Castle of Otranto, a tale of haunted castles, hidden dungeons maidens in distress, and

animated skeletons. He called his work"an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the

ancient and themodem. In the former all was imagination and improbability; in thelatter,


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nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copiedwith success." This attempt

"to reconcile the two kinds" of fictionresulted in what we now call the Gothic novel, a hybrid

of the old-fashionedsupernatural tale and the new realistic novel.For several decades,

Walpole's Castle of Otranto had the Gothicgenre almost entirely to itself In the 1790s, though,

British culture rediscoveredthe attraction of the fantastic. That decade gave us dozensof

examples of the Gothic, including Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho(1794) and

Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796). From ourvantage point in the twenty-first century,

though, the eighteenth century'sGothic experiments seem to be little more than warm-ups for

theVictorian masterpieces that were to follow. Some of the nineteenthcentury's monsters are

still with us: Robert Louis Stevenson's TheStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886),

Oscar Wilde's ThePicture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells'sThe Invisible Man(1897), as

well as less obviously monstrous figures like Heathcliff inEmily Bronte's Wuthering Heights

(1847).Count Dracula, though, stands at the head of the list of nineteenth centurycreatures of

the night, with only a single rival. And, as it happens,the two figures, English literature's most

famous monstrosities,were conceived at the same time, at what may be the most famous

singlegathering in English literary history. In the "wet, ungenial summer"summer of 1816,

Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover Mary WollstonecraftGodwin, and her sister Claire Clairmont

visited Lord Byron and hisfriend John Polidori in Switzerland, in the Villa Diodati on the

banks ofLake Geneva. After passing some hours with a book of German horrortales, Mary

(now Mary Shelley) recalled in 1831, "'We will each writea ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and

his proposition was acceded to"Percy, Mary, Byron, and Polidori all set to work on their

own terrifyingNarratives.Only one ofthose tales is familiar today: Mary Shelley's depictionof

the man of science who creates a living being and pays for his presumptionhas been famous

since it was published in 1818 as Frankenstein:Or, The Modern Prometheus. But another

member of the circleof friends, John Polidori, did complete his story; "The Vampire"

publishedin 1819, became the first work of vampire fiction in Englishprose. Polidori's tale,

with its portrait of the horrific Lord Ruthven, hasfew fans today, but it made the figure of the

vampire available to laterauthors. Victorian fiction made much of Polidori's vampire,

including,most famously, the anonymous Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast ofBlood in 1847

and Sheridan Le Fanu'sCarmillain 1872. Marshall'ssurvey of the Gothic genre places Stoker's

Dracula squarely in this tradition.Marshall looks forward as well as backward from 1897,


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glancing atthe long tradition of film versions of Stoker's storyfor most of us, ofcourse, the

conduit through which the literary creation became a culturalarchetype. The vampire and

Frankenstein's monster were conceivedtogether on the banks of Lake Geneva; it is fitting,

then, thatthey were even more famously brought together in 1931, the year inwhich Universal

Studios produced a pair of movies that have taught usto imagine our most notorious monsters.

Camille-Yvette Welsch's "A Look at the Critical Reception of Dracula"addresses not the

creative legacy of Dracula but the novel's criticalfate after its publication in 1897, including

both the immediate reactionsto it in the press and its longer life as a cultural archetype.

Thehistory of Dracula criticism, as noted in the headnote to this volume, iscomparatively

short; only in the 1960s and 1970s did literary critics beginpaying serious attention to it. But

in the last few decades it has beenthe subject of intense analysis. Welsch therefore helpingly

explains theway critics of various schoolspsychoanalysis. New Historicism,postcolonial

studieshas tried to make sense of Stoker's achievement.Monsters, it goes without saying, are

unsettling. A pair of essays Allan Johnson's "Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker's

Dracula examine some of the many ways in which monsters can stand in forother things that

we find unsettling. As Bolton puts it, "Dracula is importantless for any timeless literary merit

that it may possess than forthe glimpse it offers a modem reader into the anxieties that

preoccupiedthe Victorian mind." (He adds that, since we share many of thesame anxieties

today, "the book may reveal as much about our ownculture as it does that of the Victorians.")

"Every age," Bolton observes,"gets the monster it deserves," and the late Victorians

deservedCount Dracula. Dracula is threatening because he is foreign, becausehe questions

Victorian bromides about progress and science, but aboveall because of his perverse sexuality.

Bolton calls the vampire figure "adistinctly Victorian monster in part because it represents the

dangerousreturn of repressed sexual desire," and Count Dracula in particular "anembodiment

of the repressed sexuality of the Victorian era." The novelis all about "vanquishing abnormal

sexual desire, restoring a 'normal'order." Repression, vanquishingthese were much in the

air, asBolton recalls, at the end of the nineteenth century when SigmundFreud was

formulating his theories of the subconscious. Dracula'stransmutation from literature to myth

makes it appropriate that manycritics have approached it with the same tools they would use

to decodeother mythologies. In "Recreating the World: The Sacred and the Profanein Bram

Stoker's Dracula,'' Beth E. McDonald uses the insightsof one of the twentieth century's most


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influential theorists of religion,MirceaEliade (1907-86), to "illuminate the mythic patterns in

the textand demonstrat[e] why it is important that Dracula be destroyed."McDonald reads the

novel as a series of struggles between two varietiesof "sacred" power. On one hand is the

"numinous" vampirethe"wholly other," the uncanny figure with his connections to the

world ofspirits and devils; on the other is the strictly secular worldview of theEnglish

characters"their own established secular power, which they perceive as sacred." For

McDonald, Dracula is about the attempts topreserve Victorian English identity as it was

threatened with the numinous."Perpetuating the sacredness of their own cultural world

view,when that view is threatened," she writes, the characters "seek to fortifyits crumbling

foundations through the reestablishment of its secularsacredness, rather than through an actual

reunion with the divine."And yet it is impossible for them to forsake the numinous altogether;

inresorting to the host and the crucifix, they must "engage in mythic ritualsin order to establish

their relationship with the divine." Only by destroyingthe vampire can they avoid a

confrontation with "their ownapathetic faith in God."Eliade's brand of criticism, though it

once flourished in literaturedepartments, has in recent years fallen on hard times, but the

attentionto archetypes and universal myths of the sacred has not disappeared

entirely.Mythology today, though, is more often explored through thelens of the sciences,

especially evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.What once were universal archetypes

mysteriously rooted inour psyches have since been reconsidered as the product of

evolutionaryforces. In "The New Naturalism: Primal Screams in AbrahamStoker's Dracula,"

Carrol L. Fry and Carla Edwards apply some of the insights of these developing sciences to

the novel. Their account ofDracula explores the "primordial power ofthe story" and

emphasizesthe way it plays on our deepest fears. The authors argue that "Stoker'snovel seems

founded on four narratives: fear ofthe predator, territoriality,male bonding and cooperation,

and protection ofthe female." Allof these impulses can be explained in terms of evolutionary

advantages.We fear the dark and monsters under the bed, the socio-biologiststeach us, because

such fears served our ancestors well: those whofeared monsters were less likely to be eaten by

them, and they thereforelived to pass their genes on to us. It is no surprise that questions of

evolutionaryfitness were prominent in the 1890s; this was the era, as Fryand Edwards point

out, when "Darwin's findings caused spiritual indigestion"in the Victorian public.Dracula,

late Victorian contexts were not only technological andpersonal; they were also political. In


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''Dracula: Righting Old Wrongsand Displacing New Fears," Jimmie E. Cain, Jr., relates

Stoker's novelto anti-Russian sentiment, which was running high in Britain in the1890s, in the

wake of the Crimean War of the 1850s. "Russia and herSlavic client states in the Balkans,"

Cain observes, "posed political, social,military, economic, and racial threats to Victorian

middle classstability," and Dracula figures England's enemy as an Eastern Europeanwith a

Slavic ancestry.

3.2 The sacredand the profane in BramStoker'sDracula

In her book Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism (1998),Carol A. Senfcharacterizes

Victorian citizens as looking "Janus-like . . .in two opposing directions". While many people

looked forward tothe new century and to further progress, Senf writes that others

looked"nostalgically to the past, a period that they believed [my italics] containeda clear

synthesis of moral, religious, artistic, political, and socialthought". For many individuals, faith

became a secular matter ofproduction, consumption, and profit margins; and nature, once an

exampleof God's rational design for the world, seemed more of an arena"red in tooth and

claw" (Tennyson, "In Memoriam" 176) in which humanscompeted with each other for the

Darwinian glory of survival ofthe fittest. As many late-nineteenth-century individuals came to

understandhow so many other species had lived and died out during the pastmillennia, they

also had to accept their own mortality as a species; thisrealization called into question

traditional religious promises of redemptionthrough Christ, leaving many individuals in a

condition ofspiritual poverty characterized by doubt. However, the fact that menwere divided

over whether the alleged progress of the present time orthe simpler ways of the past were best

for society both morally and religiouslyseems to show that Victorian Britons were struggling

to findsome spiritual quality in their lives.During the last decades of the nineteenth century,

some Victorianssought reunion with divine mystery in study of the occult. Many turnedto

metaphysical organizations like the Hermetic Order of the GoldenDawn, a secret society

formed by William Wynn Westcott, a RosicrucianFreemason. Their mandate was to establish


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connection betweenthe divine within man and the divine within the cosmos through

thepractice of magic, ritual, and the occult sciences.18

The Society for Psychical Research,

whose search for a numinous connection with the divinetook place on a scientific level with

the study of occult phenomenain nineteenth-century culture, also evolved during this

period.Created in 1882 by a group of scholars fi-om Cambridge University,London, and other

nearby cities, the Society's purpose was to discover"whether some of the strange and

unacceptable eventstelepathy, clairvoyance, foreknowledgehad any basis in fact"

(SidgwickForewordv). As nearly as possible a systematic and scientific method ofcollection,

authentication, and analysis was followed; and in 1886 theinformation gathered by Edmund

Gumey, Frank Podmore, and FredericW. H. Myers was published in two volumes as

Phantasms of the Living.While Stoker would not have been aware of the numinous as

such,since Rudolf Otto had not yet coined the word when Stoker was livingand writing, his

family history seems to indicate that he would have understoodthe feeling. Charlotte Stoker,

Bram Stoker's Irish mother, regaledthe sickly child with tales of ghosts and of the Irish

banshee,whose keening cry, it was said, "presaged imminent death" (Roth 2) inthe family.

With this oral tradition as part of his early upbringing,Stoker would have been well versed in

the qualities of non-rational experience.However, as an adult Stoker also would have been

aware ofthe mystical side of pagan religious belief through his acquaintancewith several

people who practiced the art of magic.In her biography of Stoker, Barbara Belford notes the

unsubstantiatedrumor that Stoker was a member of the Hermetic Order of theGolden Dawn.

However, she also notes that he did have many fi-iendswho belonged to the organization and

might have leaded the secrets ofthe society fi-om them, despite their pledge of silence on the

subject.Further evidence of Stoker's awareness of the effect of an experienceof the numinous

might be found in his personal reaction to HenryIrving, whose reading of Thomas Hood's

"The Dream of EugeneAram" Stoker described in terms reminiscent of the hypnotic power

ofthe Ancient Mariner, saying "so great was the magnetism of his genius,so profound was the

sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound". At the end of the reading, Stoker reportedly

collapsed inapparent hysterics in the face of Irving's spellbinding power; and it isthis power to

hypnotize that becomes an integral part ofthe vampire'sarsenal of supernatural weapons in

18 Known members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn include William Butler Yeats, AlgernonBlackwood, and Aleister Crowley, among others.


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Stoker's novel.Published in 1897, Dracula reflects the attitudes and ideas of the late Victorian

period in regard to several important issues of the day,including the importance of

professional and social advancement, thesignificance of their own culture in the minds of

nineteenth-centuryBritons, and the concern over what the influx of foreign influencesmight do

to that culture and to the competition for place in society. Juxtaposedagainst these attitudes is

the sense that in Dracula faith hastaken second place to the professional advancement of many

of thecharacters. As the men and women ofthe novel are confronted by thenuminousness of

the vampire, the search for salvation becomes moreimportant; however, they approach their

spiritual quest more as a community,or even a committee, than as individuals. Perpetuating

thesacredness of their own cultural world view, when that view is threatened,they seek to

fortify its humbling foundations through the reestablishmentof its secular sacredness, rather

than through an actual reunionwith the divine on a higher level of spiritual awakening

thatmight be signified by a change in their world view. Transforming the epistolary style of

earlier, realistic novels, such asPamela (1740-42) and Clarissa (1747-48) by Samuel

Richardson,Stoker's work transcribes a Gothic nightmare whose multiple versionsmight raise

doubt as to the reliability of any ofthe versions, despite hisuse of realism. However, when

Jonathan Harker finally realizes whatthe women of castle Dracula and Dracula himself

represent, he feelsthe weight ofthe truth ofthe events that have transpired. Later, also,when

Mina Harker compiles all of the characters' individual storiesinto one, acceptance ofthe

situation as real must follow. Once the variousevents are put in perspective, the fears of the

individuals becomethe fears of society. If society is to be protected, the individuals mustform

a community and use their combined powers to destroy Dracula and his women. Their more

secular search and destroy mission againstthe vampires becomes a spiritual journey that

requires them to call ontheir faith, imagining themselves to be crusaders upholding the

sacrednessof British society.Instead of forming a relationship with God and remaking the

worldin a more cosmic context on an individual level, as the Ancient Marinerhas done, the

group in Dracula works in a more communal, almost corporate,fashion, forming a small

committee of dedicated men (and onewoman) banded together for the good of the larger

British community.Although Dracula is, like the Mariner, a figure of the numinous

condemnedto wander eternally, unlike the Mariner he is not allowed to tellhis story and can

take no active part in the healing of society. InStoker's novel, the human characters are in


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power, despite Dracula'sdivine status, because they control the narrative. While the Mariner

isconstrained to serve the divine by becoming a vehicle for redirectionwith it, the humans in

Dracula make a decision to serve themselvesand their larger society as protectors of the

already established culturalsystem. For them, Dracula is not a vehicle of revelation or

transformation,but a threat to the conservative, established order of British Victoriansociety

that must be destroyed. Although the group calls on God intimes of danger, by denying the

sacred, though negative, aspects of thevampire, they deny the divine a place in their

secularized world; andwhile the Mariner answers the question of the human place in the

worldby positing the unity of all things under God, the humans who destroyDracula answer

the same question by choosing to believe in the righteousnessof their own established secular

power, which they perceiveas sacred. In Dracula, the chaos of profane space is represented in

severalways; however, writing in Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Demonologyin Male

Gothic Fiction, Joseph Andriano argues that the"circle is . . . the most pervasive archetypal

symbol in Dracula" (113)with the sacred circles formed by the heroes of the novel in

oppositionto the unholy circles of the vampires represented by the "whirlpools,vortices, and

circles within circles" (114). As Harker beginshis journey, he describes Transylvania in terms

of watery chaos, asthe "center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool" (Stoker 2) of

superstition;and later Dracula characterizes it as "the whirlpool of Europeanraces" (28). In

Emily Gerard's The Land Beyond the Forest,which Stoker read while researching

Transylvania, her discussionof Romanian superstition includes a reference to the whirlpool

asa place to be avoided because it is considered the residence of awater spirit, "the water-man

who lies in wait for human victims"(200).19

Further representations ofthe circle also show up

repeatedly duringHarker's confusing journey from Borgo Pass to Dracula's castle. A"living

ring of terror" (Stoker 13) surrounds him as the wolves gatherabout the coach and menace him

while the driver is off searching forthe blue flames he and Harker have seen flickering in the

darkness.Later in the novel, the chaos ofthe vampire is juxtaposed against theorder ofthe

sacred as Professor Van Helsing and his band of men work to save Mina. When Mina has

been partially turned to a vampire byDracula and wears the circular imprint of the Sacred

Wafer on her foreheadas a sign of her profaneness. Professor Van Helsing places a"Holy

19 In Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, Christopher Frayling reproduces sections of Stoker's researchnotes from Emily Gerard's book. Stoker's working and research notes for Dracula are housed at the RosenbachMuseum in Philadelphia.


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circle" (369) of the blessed wafers about Mina to protect herfrom the female vampires.

Furthermore, at the climax of the novel, it isa "ring of men" (376), Jonathan Harker, Quincey

Morris, ArthurHolmwood, and Dr. John Seward, who do their sacred duty by riddingthe world

of Dracula.

3.3 Vampirism, Russia, and the Slavs

Preparing to write Dracula, Stoker consulted a number of relativelycontemporaneous

documents about the geography, peoples, andcustoms of Eastern Europe.20Excerpts from most

of these sources areavailable in Clive Leatherdale'sThe Origins of Dracula: The Backgroundto

Bram Stokers Gothic Masterpiece. Among the books "writtenby British official servants-

soldiers, administrators, or their wives"(97) that Stoker consulted, William Wilkinson's An

Account of thePrincipalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: with various Political

ObservationsRelating to Them of 1820 gave Stoker the material for Dracula'sracial and ethnic

identity, an identity with pronounced Russianand Slavic antecedents. Thus Stoker learned that

in their inception, the Wallachians,' and by associationthe Moldavians, the predecessors of the

modem Romanians,descended from Slavic peoples immigrating to the region from Russiaand

sharing close blood relations with the Bulgarians.Dracula's genealogy reveals marked vestiges

of Wilkinson's text.But more importantly, Dracula's heritage suggests clear Russian andSlavic

antecedents.Stoker situates the castle "in the extreme east [...] just on the bordersof three

states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina" (D 3) nearthe conjunction of the Prut and Siret

rivers (D 417). This specific locationsuggests further allusions to Russia. First, it describes a

disputedarea at the border of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia,"* a territorythat Russia

won from Turkey in 1812. After the Crimean War, Englandand France forced Russia to return

the tract to Turkey. Russia subsequentlyrecovered the territory from Turkey after the war of

1878 onlyto lose it later that same year when the Congress of Berlina greatpower

20 In the interview with Jane Stoddard, Stoker singles out two of his most useful sources: "I learned a good dealfrom E. Gerard's 'Essays on Rumanian Superstitions,' which first appeared in The Nineteenth Century, and wereafterwards published in a couple of volumes. I also learned something from Mr. Badn-Gould's 'Were-Wolves.


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conference dominated by England, France, and Germanydemanded that Russia cede the

land to newly independent Romania(M. S. Anderson). Thus Castle Dracula rests not only on a

site of manyancient "battles" (D 38) but also on a source of prolonged Russo-Turkish and

Anglo-Russian hostility. As late as 1895, Vambery notesthat by mid-century from "the Isker

in Siberia to the banks of the Prut,all became Russian," a position of strength that now allows

Russia tofocus her ambitions south, toward India (4-5).Moreover, at the location of Castle

Dracula a significant event in the

career of Peter the Great occurred. Pares describes him as "a barbarianin his habits, direct and

practical in his insistence on knowing everythingthat was to be learned, and with the kind of

genius which consistsin extraordinary quickness of thought" (198). What Peter most wantedto

learn was the military and bureaucratic practices of the West. So in 1697 he began a "journey

of education to Europe" (Pares 197), takingin the secrets of the Swedish fortress at Riga and

working incognito inthe shipyards of Amsterdam and London so as to master modem

shipbuildingtheory, all the while trying to hire the best experts in the militaryand practical

sciences each country could provide (Pares 198).Equipped with this new knowledge, he

proceeded upon his return toprosecute successful wars of expansion on his neighbors to the

north,west, and south. Fortunately for Europe, Peter was not always victorious,and one of his

most famous defeats came at the hands of the Turks atthe Prut River, in the vicinity of Castle

Dracula, in 1710 (Pares 206).This defeat at the Prut is but one parallel between Dracula and

Peter,however. Dracula's reasons for sojourning to England are also verysimilar to Peter's, but

much more sinister. According to JenniferWicke Draculas journeys were as to go to "London

to modernize the terms of hisconquest, to master the new imperial forms and to learn how to

supplementhis considerable personal powers by the most contemporary understandingof the

metropolis" (487). However, Dracula visits Englandnot, as had Peter, to export innovation and

expertise, but as an invaderwho plans to conquer and stay. Stoker, who at age twenty-five was

elected auditor of the historical societyat Trinity (Ludlam 24), was much too thoughtful a

student of historyto have been unaware of Peter's exploits in England, exploits thatresonate in

his evil Eastern count.Since the 1970s, scholars have contended that in his research

forDracula, Stoker happened upon Vlad Dracula, a Wallachian prince whose cruelty in battle

earned him the sobriquet Vlad the Impaler, andmodeled Dracula after him. Although this


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assertion is now a matter ofscholarly debate,21 Stoker may well have drawn inspiration from

anotherinfamous impaler. In his first major study ofthe novel, Dracula:The Novel and the

Legend, A Study of Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece,Clive Leatherdale suggests that Stoker

could have drawn a connectionbetween the historical Vlad Dracula and Ivan the Terrible.

Accordingto Leatherdale after reading ofVlad Dracula's penchant forimpaling his victims,

both domestic and foreign, Stoker added stakingto the list of measures for killing vampires.

Stoker's itierited antipathy to Russia combined with the links hevery possibly discovered

between Eastern vampire myths and Russiacould account for the prominent allusions to

Russia and to Slavic vampirefolklore that the author placed in or considered for what

somescholars believe to be the original opening chapter of Dracula. 22Althougheventually

excised from the novel, the chapter was publishedseparately by his wife after his death under

the title "Dracula's Guest."The chapter contains close parallels with the vampire legends

amongthe Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbians enumerated byOinas.

21 Elizabeth Miller, echoing Clive Leatherdale, categorically refutes the assumption,advanced most famously byMcNally and Florescu, that VladTepes (aka Vlad theImpaler) was Stoker's model for Count Dracula. In Dracula:Sense and Nonsense, shewrites, "To state this as fact is irresponsible. All we know for certain is that Stokerborrowedthe name 'Dracula' and a few scraps of miscellaneous information about Wallachianhistory from

William Wilkinson's An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia(1820). Out of such a mole-hill, mountains haveemerged" (180).22 Clive Leatherdale in the introduction to his definitive annotated edition of thenovel, Dracula Unearthed,contends that of "all the popular misconceptions surrounding Draeula, none seems more entrenched as the ideathat 'Dracula's Guest' is the excisedopening chapter" (14). He rests his argument on the differences in the styles,narration,and characterization of Jonathan Harker between the two works. Leatherdalebelieves that "Dracula'sGuest" was originally intended to be one in a set of threescenes taking place in Munich during Harker's trip east.Its excision from the finalpublished novel means that it "fell under the author's or editor's axe," most likelythelater, for "whole chunks of the early part of the novel were removed at a very late stage,after the manuscripthad been submitted to the London publishers" (15).


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3.4 Phantasmagoria: The modern vampire

Today the vampire is no longer the feared being that he oncewas. In the hundred years or so

post-Dracula the vampires transformationhas been like a star turning into a supernova; after

thegradual evolution of the vampire being over thousands of yearsthis final chapter in the

evolution has progressed rapidly. Thefear created by the vampire has dissipated, and the

vampire himselfhas become a parody of what he once was. The reason forthis is quite simple:

we no longer fear the vampire. It was societysfear of the vampire that allowed him to exist

through theages. But how did the fear subside after so long? And what doesthis mean for the

vampire in the twenty-first century?Although Dracula was the catalyst for the modern

vampiremyth it was almost uniquely the theatre, cinema and televisionexploitation of the

being that ultimately caused the shift towardsthe modern conception of the vampire. Whereas

in the superstitionsand myths of the Middle Ages or within folklore it was thelack of

knowledge that fuelled the existence of the vampire, thetechnological advancement and mass-

market productions ofmodernity eradicated the unknown and transformed the vampireinto a

household product. The vampire is used to promote everythingfrom breakfast cereals (Count

Chockula) to childrenstelevision (Mona the Vampire), to tourism, and is the subjectof endless

books, films and television programs. In fact, suchis the current widespread appeal of the

vampire that the majority of people today has not only heard of the vampire, but could

alsodescribe how he looks. And ninety-nine times out of a hundredyou can bet that the

description will include a cape, fangs, batsand a thirst for blood. Why is it, then, that this

imagery has beenadopted out of all the ones discussed? And how many people,although

instantly recognizing Count Dracula, have actually readthe book or are at least familiar with

the story? The answer tothese questions must be sought in the vampires progressionwithin

cinema, a development that undoubtedly ended our fear,but that also created an entirely new

vampire in the twenty-firstcentury.Dracula was a gruesome literary product that reflected

lateVictorian England; London had witnessed one of the mostsadistic serial killings in its

history through the infamous Jackthe Ripper murders. Although it is suggested that the

incidentwas a media hoax, the report from the Central News Agency ofa woman being

attacked by a well-dressed man who seized herby the throat again throws up parallels with


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Stokers creation.23At the time some even went as far as to suggest thatit is so impossible to

account . . . for these revolting actsof blood that the mind turns as it were instinctively tosome

theory of occult force, and the myths of the DarkAges rise before the imagination. Ghouls,

vampires,bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated

throughout the course of centuriestake form, and seize hold of the excited fancy.24

The result

of Dracula was a renewed scholarly and publicinterest in the vampire. Important works on the

subject, suchas Dudley Wrights The Book of Vampires (1924) and MontagueSummerss The

Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire inEurope (1929), sought to document the

vampires history in variouscultures and provided first-hand examples of the superstition It

was also during the 1920s that Dracula was adapted for the bigscreen, albeit somewhat

illegally, in the Expressionist Germanfilmmaker F. W. MurnausNosferatu: eineSymphonie

des Grauens(asymphony of horror) in 1922 starring Max Schreck: Nosferatu!Doesnt this

name sound like the very midnight call of Death?Speak it not aloud, or lifes pictures will turn

to pale shadows, andnightmares will rise up to feed on your blood, explains the

openingcaption. Although the film is considered an adaptation fromStokers novel, the

producers did not obtain copyright permissionand although the names of the characters and

places have beenaltered it clearly follows Draculas plot. As a result, the courtsordered all

copies of Nosferatuto be destroyed, although severalhad already been distributed, allowing the

film to not only survivebut also to become a vampire classic and collectors item.There are,

however, some quite striking alterations inNosferatufrom the original story, most notably the

appearance ofthe vampire Count Orlok. The first time he appears in vampireform he is

extremely sinister, has a huge form that fills the doorwayand his features are quite rat-like,

with protruding teeth,pointed ears and long, pointed fingers; here the vampire is moreakin to

the undead of folklore than the vampire of literature, inmany ways mirroring the image

evident in Varney. It is really theonly example where the traditional vampire was preferred

tothe Ruthven formula version, and may be one of the factorswhy the film proved so

popular. Count Orlok is portrayed in thesame way as Varney (lonely, desperate and

condemned), andthe viewer is encouraged to empathize with him an idea laterutilized by

Anne Rice in her Vampire Chronicles. Nosferatualsoadded its own iconography that remains

23Delegation en Perse, a French journal of antiquities.MontagueSummers in The Vampire: His Kith and Kin

(London, 1928) adds that [the bowl is] amongst the illustrations of prehistoric utensils, p. 226.24 Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London, 1987).


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associated withinvampire films: the dark and foreboding shadows, the prolongedmovements

of the vampire, the reaction shots that occur whena moment of horror occurs.Although more

like the folkloric vampire in appearance,Orlok does have some classic modern traits such as

waking at night, sleeping in a coffin and biting his victims neck. Withregards the plot, it does

follow that of Dracula in general withHutter (Harker) travelling to Transylvania, Land of

thePhantoms, to finalize the sale of some property to Count Orlok(Dracula), but in Wisborg,

Germany rather than London.Hutters employer, Knock (who takes the place of both

Harkersemployer Hawkins and Draculas minion, Renfield) suggeststhat he knows Orlok is a

Nosferatu when he tells Hutter that bytravelling to Transylvania he could make money,

although itmay cost him a bit of pain and a little blood.And so Orlok buys the house, attacks

Hutter and travels toWisborg onboard the Demeter, where he kills the crew. At this pointVan

Helsing makes a brief appearance giving a lecture on thevampire plant, the Venus Fly Trap,

but this is all we see of him.Missing too are the characters of Dr Seward, Lord

Godalming,Quincey Morris and Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker becomesEllen Hutter.

Another difference is the use of rats and the arrivalof the plague alongside the vampire, a clear

link with folkloricexamples; rats themselves are known to have introduced thebubonic plague

or Black Death in the fourteenth century. Theending of Nosferatuis also markedly different

from Dracula inthat Ellen (Mina) discovers she must entice the vampire into sunlightto

destroy him and so sacrifices her to do this. Orlok isdistracted whilst drinking Ellens blood

and misses the cockcrow,thus exploding into dust with the break of dawn, ending theplague.

This is similar to the popular myth that not only is sunlightlethal to vampires, but that the

plague and death broughtabout by them can only be stopped by destroying the vampire.Two

years later, in 1924, a theatre version of Dracula wasreleased in the form of Hamilton Deane

and John BalderstonsDracula: The Vampire Play and, although an extremely spare versionof

Dracula (set in only two locations: Dr Sewards parlourand Ca rfax Abbey), the play was a

great success and was instrumentalin persuading Universal Studios to create Dracula on the

big screen. It was this version, written by Tod Browning andreleased in 1931, and starring the

Hungarian actor Bela Lugosias Count Dracula that transf

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