OF FANGS AND PHONOGRAPHS: THE PAST AS UN-DEAD IN BRAM STOKER’SDRACULA

A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for

the Degree

Master of Arts

In

English: Literature

by

Joshua Patrick Converse

San Francisco, California

January 2016

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CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

I certify that I have read Of Fangs and Phonographs: The Past as Un-Dead in Bram

Stoker’s Dracula by Joshua Patrick Converse, and that in my opinion this work meets the

criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the

degree Master of Arts in English: Literature at San Francisco State University.

WilliamProfessor

OF FANGS AND PHONOGRAPHS: THE PAST AS UN-DEAD IN BRAM STOKER’SDRACULA

Joshua Patrick Converse San Francisco, California

2015

This thesis examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula, particularly analyzing the relationships between binaries, such as oral and alphabetic story, ancient and modem, and technology and superstition. At first the ancient and modern appear to be at odds in the novel, but deeper examination shows almost constant interdependence and relentless mutual instability between binaries. Stoker’s Dracula uses a recursive structure that reveals the past is invariably returning to haunt the present. Stoker’s generic innovations solve old problems in new ways, but always with an eye toward the past and keeping with generic convention. In this way, Stoker shows the inescapable, Un-Dead nature of the past. Stoker’s purpose is to instruct and delight: to delight by frightening the reader, and to instruct by admonishing against hubristic belief in technology and “progress” as a means of escaping the ever-returning past.

ct representation of the content of this thesis.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Professors Sara Hackenberg and William Christmas for their kind assistance, wisdom, and patience throughout the writing of this Thesis. I want to thank my volunteer readers, Rev. Dr. Robert Hellam, David Villani, Guy Swalm, and my wife Amelia Converse. I am also deeply indebted to my family for their unending support.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction.................................................................................................................................1

Chapter I: Interdependent Opposites in Dracula ................................................................... 8

Chapter II: Narrative Structure in Dracula........................................................................... 30

Chapter III: Dracula and Genre..............................................................................................47

Conclusion...............................................................................................................................59

Works Cited and Consulted................................................................................................... 61

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Of Fangs and Phonographs: The Past as Un-Dead in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Introduction: The Past is Un-Dead

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a novel that reveals a pure notion of modernity to be an

illusion, and the past to be as “Un-Dead” as Count Dracula himself. Stoker reveals this by

the use of a complex narrative structure, often employing recurring scenarios and

situations, by using techniques such as mirroring, doubling, and paralleling between

various characters and events. He shows the past is Un-Dead by both hewing to and

departing from conventions of the Gothic novel, by expanding upon the conventions of

the epistolary form, and by presenting binaries like technology and superstition, oral and

alphabetic modes of storytelling, and the past and present, and then subtly exposing them

to be profoundly interdependent and inextricable.

I believe Stoker has two essentially classical purposes in writing the novel using

these techniques and structures: his purposes are to delight and instruct. His first purpose

is entertainment through horror and titillation: he renders the familiar into something

alien, and turns the alien into something that lurks internally. He frightens his reader by

setting up what appear to be discrete categories like the walls of a sturdy house, and then

the reader watches those walls melt around him. Stoker’s second purpose in writing

Dracula as it is written is didactic. He cautions his contemporaries against modem

hubris, or undue faith that technology can altogether throw off the horrors of history. In

writing as he has, Stoker is saying we ought to be careful of imagining we have gotten

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past the age of warlords, or virulent infections, or superstitious thinking. Stoker’s

Dracula is a warning that history will never stop repeating itself— for good and for ill.

This thesis will begin by discussing the way Dracula shows apparently opposing

concepts, ideas, and characters to be inextricably linked. It will then examine the

narrative structure of Dracula and the various techniques Stoker uses within the novel to

demonstrate the illusory nature of “modernity” and the “Un-Dead” nature of the past. It

will then move to a discussion of Stoker’s treatment of genre, convention and form for

the purposes of demonstrating the way innovation and convention work to reinforce andI

trouble Dracula's relationship to the past.

To begin at the level of plot and character, Count Dracula is a Transylvanian

vampire and nobleman from the fourteenth century who is pitted against a group of

upper-and-upper- middle-class nineteenth-century Britons, a Dutch academic, and a

Texan cowboy. The vampire can use arcane magic to transform himself into a bat or a

wolf, or to control fog and weather. The vampire hunters utilize up-to-date modem

technology to hunt the Count, and simultaneously to generate and maintain a record of

the strange events that comprise the novel itself. To hunt the Count, they use technologies

such as the typewriter and the phonograph, the steamboat, the telegram, and the

Winchester rifle. Stoker is setting up apparent opposites in his novel: The human vampire

hunters are pitted against the immortal monster, modem technology against superstition,

East against West, and the alphabetic mode against oralistic.

One of the important binaries that Dracula is concerned with is oral and written

storytelling. These modes, as they will appear in this thesis, bear some explanation. Oral

storytelling is essentially the paradigm for all stories. Its origins are as ancient as human

language itself. It has certain conditions that have lent themselves especially to certain

kinds of story. These conditions include, for example, the need for an embodied

storyteller and a present audience. At the most basic level, the human ear receives a story

from a human mouth. Hearing is primary. Conversely, when it comes to written, or

“alphabetic” story, the reader will almost certainly never be present when the story is

being written, and the author will not always (actually rarely) accompany his work into

the world. The eye will be primary for a reader, rather than the ear for a listener. The

author’s hand, rather than the teller’s mouth, is at work. Written story is necessarily

disembodied.

Often oral story will feature supernatural events, gods and demigods, fairies,

devils, and ghosts. While these sorts of things find their way into written story as well,

they can be termed “oralistic” features of narrative. In Dracula, the novelistic elements of

the everyday 1890s collide with the supernatural in seemingly antagonistic ways—and

indeed without the struggle between the vampire hunters and the Count, there is no

Dracula. Both alphabetic and oralistic modes are required to tell the story Stoker writes. I

will add that neither category remains discretely with one side or the other. For example,

the Count sets a table for lonathan Harker, prepares his meals, and buses dishes, and yet

he has terrible and otherworldly powers to shapeshift and command weather. He is,

therefore, not a pure being of orality. Another example of impure characterization is the

seemingly alphabetic Abraham Van Helsing, a man of vast worldly knowledge and

education, yet he is as lost as the Count is when it comes to deciphering shorthand.

Despite his understanding of science and medicine, Van Helsing makes use of peasant

“superstitions” such as the use of garlic and the Host to ward off vampires. Van Helsing

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is not a purely alphabetic character, any more than the Count is purely oralistic. In this

way, then, Stoker is setting up apparent opposites that, when pressed, collapse into

interdependency and categorical indiscretion. In so doing, he has begun to show that the

past itself haunts the present, just as oral story haunts Stoker’s modern, alphabetic novel.

Chapter two discusses the way Stoker uses complex narrative structure,

narratological devices such as doubling, mirroring, recurring events, and inversions, to

show how historical and modern, alphabetic and oralistic storytelling, superstition and

modem technology, are inextricable and inescapable within the context of Dracula. In

fact, in order to move “forward” in the plot, it is often necessary to go “back,” sometimes

geographically and sometimes narratively as, for example, when a particular scene or

scenario is repeated in a new way.

In Dracula, characters often experience similar events. For example, the way

Lucy is preyed upon by the Count is (up to a point) comparable to the way Mina is

preyed upon. Close analysis of these sequences reveals the Count constantly leaving and

returning, and always adjusting his strategy. There is often a new twist or wrinkle, but

nevertheless the Count is always leaving and returning—geographically and

narratologicaly. This recursive structure gives insight into the way the past is ever

returning in Dracula. The ancient, “pre-modem” past returns in the form of the Count,

and ancient knowledge is unearthed by Van Helsing when he returns to Europe to

research the identity of Count Dracula. Similar things happen again and again in the

novel, suggesting that history is cyclical and “modem” life has not outstripped or escaped

the ancient world — that, in fact, history is as “Un-Dead” as the Count and when it seems

to have departed. It returns again and again.

Chapter three discusses Stoker’s use of generic conventions taken from both

Gothic and epistolary forms of the novel. Stoker understands the generic conventions of

the Gothic, and he makes use of the epistolary mode, but he also innovates in Dracula by

simultaneously adhering to those conventions and also altering them in ways that can be

called “new” or “modern.” In this way, Stoker is showing that the past is inescapable and

ever-present even in the newest books and most “modern” novels because they must

follow pre-existing conventions of genre. To fail to follow the conventions of the novel is

to risk writing something not recognizable as a novel. Stoker might say we are stuck with

the baggage of tradition, however we may innovate. For example, The Oxford Dictionary

o f Literary Terms entry for “Gothic novel (Gothic romance)” begins as follows: “a story

of terror and suspense, usually set in a gloomy old castle or monastery” (144). Dracula

certainly has a gloomy old castle in Transylvania— Stoker obeys the convention,

however, most of the novel takes place in other locations, mostly in England. While it is

true that Carfax Abbey and the graveyards in London and Whitby are certainly also in

keeping with Gothic conventions, Stoker also has horror unfolding on a ship at sea, and

comedy unfolding at the London Zoo. Dracula adheres to the crumbling castle

convention, and to many other Gothic tropes, without being enslaved by them. His moves

are conventional, in some senses, but also surprising and innovative. The Count confronts

his pursuers, not in Carfax Abbey, nor in his brooding castle high in the Carpathians, but

rather in a flat in a wealthy part of London—a setting as recognizable and “modern” as

the 1890s United Kingdom could muster, turned foul and Gothic by the presence of the

vampire. Far from the exotic East, Stoker situates Old World superstition domestically,

bathed in electric light. This is not Stoker parodying the Gothic, nor is it without literary

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sensibilities and a sense of the aesthetic—this is Stoker moving horror from an exotic

remove to domestic “reality.” This is an example of Stoker’s purpose to frighten the

reader by turning the familiar alien. Dracula is a novel that deliberately adheres to the

past by obeying convention, while also making alterations and innovations to let the

“modem” in. In this way, Dracula shows the past to be inescapable and inextricably

linked with the present. Stoker is informing the reader that even in the heart of the British

Empire, even in the nicer parts of the city, the uncanny past can render the present strange

and frightening.

So, too, with the epistolary form, Stoker again innovates and at the same time

observes convention. Instead of being comprised only of letters and journal/diary entries,

Dracula also includes ship’s logs, newspaper reports, telegrams, transcribed phonograph

entries, and so on. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela, an earlier epistolary novel, received

criticism in part because of the ambiguity inherent in hearing from primarily one voice,

although her parents also write, Pamela herself is the narrator of most of the action, and

there is room enough for some critics to be dubious about her allegedly pure motives. As

Charles Home puts it in The Technique o f the Novel, “the heroine’s honor is but a

tradesman’s commodity, holding out for the highest market price and then rushing at its

bargain” (94). Was the main character to be believed regarding the events of the novel or

was there room for doubt as to the accuracy of her report? This is an early problem of the

form, so to speak, particularly for Pamela, considering the “real moral elevation and deep

religious spirit of its author” (Horne 95). Richardson was trying to tell a moral tale, and to

some extent the epistolary form muddied the water. Stoker ingeniously turns this problem

into an ally. Dracula uses more than one voice to tell the story, and each voice tells its

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story in retrospect, and the cluster of narratives is apparently organized by an “editor” of

the manuscript—perhaps Jonathan and Mina Harker in the novel, or Stoker himself.

However, Stoker also turns the generic “weakness” of epistolary unreliability into a

strength: The Count is a ghostly specter only to be glimpsed through the fog of subjective

report. He never emerges to address the reader, and so remains a terrifying figure only

glimpsed through the eyes of the other characters. The instability of the truth works to

heighten the horror of the novel. In this way, Dracula is an expansion of the epistolary

novel—it harnesses the form’s strengths and transforms its weaknesses. Once again,

Stoker does something “modern” with an older form, working to innovate while bowing

to convention (and therefore to the past).

This thesis accounts for Dracula's structural and thematic recurrences by

analyzing instances in the novel where apparent opposites are shown to be interdependent

and inextricable, instances where Stoker hews to and innovates within generic

convention, and instances where narratological devices are deployed to point up the idea

that within Dracula, the past is Un-Dead. That is to say, the past preys upon the present,

and the two are sometimes indistinguishable. Stoker writes to inform, which is to say

admonish, and entertain (or horrify entertainingly). His admonishment consists of these

points: modernity cannot kill the past, there is no such thing as finality, and we as human

beings cannot ever truly begin anew, but can only continue a narrative already in

progress.

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Chapter One: Interdependent Opposites in Dracula

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is seemingly a novel of opposites. It appears to pit

nineteenth-century technology against Old World superstition, the technology of writing

against oral story, realism against the fantastic, rational man against inhuman

supernatural forces, and the modem against the ancient. However, the more deeply one

delves into Dracula, the more things are not what they seem—almost every illusory

dialectic is, in fact, inextricably linked and interdependent with a corresponding binary.

These binaries appear repeatedly in the recursive structure of the novel. The reason for

this structural framework in Dracula is a dual cosmological assertion: The past is

unkillable, ever-present, and it feeds on the present just as Count Dracula himself feeds

on the blood of the living— and, as Jonathan Harker did when he descended Castle

Dracula in imitation of the Count, we can learn from the Un-Dead past. The reason oral

story is constantly haunting the pages of an alphabetic work is the same reason the train

and the Winchester rifle are arrayed against the mysterious powers of the Un-Dead—

Stoker’s novel tells us that the most up-to-date modernity simply cannot kill the past. The

past is, like Dracula, a presence that permeates the novel, and this is expressed in the

appearance of every opposite value that Stoker sets up to bolster both the vampire and

those who hunt him. Consider the powers that Dr. Van Helsing, with some prolixity,

ascribes to Count Dracula in the light of my discussion of the past:

The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish

when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen

amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous,

and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is

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plenty.. He throws no shadow; he can make in the mirror no reflect. . . He has

the strength of many in his hand . . . He can transform himself to wolf, as we

gather from the ship arrival in Whitby; he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him

on the window at Whitby... He can come in mist which he create . . . He come on

moonlight rays as elemental dust . . . He become so small—we ourselves saw

Miss Lucy, ere she was at peace, slip through a hairbreadth space at the tomb

door. He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or into

anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire—solder you

call it. He can see in the dark—no small power this, in a world which is one half

shut from the light. (211)

These supernatural abilities all have a basis in vampire mythology and lore, and Stoker

has really invented very little in this explanation of Count Dracula’s powers—they are

more or less commensurable with folklore. For an example of powers ascribed to

vampires in folklore, Dudley Wright’s The Book o f Vampires as excerpted in Vampires:

Encounters with the Dead, reports “the murony of the Wallachians not only sucks blood,

but also possesses the power of assuming a variety of shapes, as, for instance, those of a

cat, dog, flea, or spider” (18). The novel is clearly concerned with the powers of the

ancient: Time, like Count Dracula, penetrates the most tightly sealed box. Time, too,

accrues in motes of dust, in the passing of day and night. Time itself is a thick mist that

prevents us from seeing the future or fully knowing the past. The past haunts the present

and preys upon the future. In short, the past is a member of the Un-Dead. I think Stoker

urges us to keep this in mind, even as we innovate, even as our technologies expand, even

as modem life comes less and less to resemble life as it was centuries before, we should

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not imagine that we are free of the past, or that we as “modem” people have nothing

either to fear or to learn from it.

Having theorized that Stoker’s project in Dracula involves revealing modernity to

be inextricable from the ancient, and alphabetic storytelling to be likewise inextricable

from oral storytelling. I want now to move to a discussion of alphabetic writing in the

novel and the oral story from which vampire folklore emerges. Tony E. Jackson’s ideas

in The Technology o f the Novel are a useful way of evaluating the novel because they link

writing and technology—oral story is by definition our most ancient form of storytelling

and almost always involves something of the supernatural, superlative, or fantastic. Of

oral story, Jackson says:

Story is as important to human life as is speech itself. It follows from this

understanding (and intuitively as well) that the paradigm of storytelling is oral

story . . . although oral story deals thematically with crucial issues of everyday

cultural life, nonetheless it nearly always does so by including some element of

the fantastic and heroic. (11)

Alphabetic writing, “often enough, will be roughly the same as realistic” (Jackson 18).

But oralistic elements have certainly always been present in forms like Romance or, later,

the Gothic novel. These observations frame what seems to be happening in the novel, and

illuminate pieces of Stoker’s structure in Dracula.

Jackson uses the term “alphabetic” to describe the attributes of writing as a

technology. He points out that “writing powerfully augments features of language and

memory such as storage capacity, preservation, and accuracy” (4) Writing has given rise

to almost incalculable advances in almost every aspect of human life in those societies

where it appears, from numeracy to the codification of civil law to modern science. It

also has powerful effects on the way we understand, conceptualize, and “tell” stories.

According to Jackson, “once we have writing, we are able to ‘see’ language as an object,

much as we see other objects. Said another way, writing disembodies language” (4). For

example, in the first part of Dracula, when Jonathan Harker recounts his experience with

the three vampiric women, he writes, “I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that

they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it

should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth” (42). Harker (or Stoker) is

pointing out the disembodied nature of writing. Whether Harker manages to escape his

doom or not is very much in doubt in the moment he writes this, but he allows for the

possibility that his feelings, once written in his journal, have a life of their own and his

words can be read at some future date.

When I use the term alphabetic, I am referring specifically to what Jackson calls

“the visual representation of speech in sounds” (5). This is often conflated with speech or

mistaken for a superior version of speech, but it is not. For example, in speech, the voice

and the ear are primary, but writing generally renders vision indispensable (with the

exception of writing systems like braille and other tactile systems). Alphabetic culture,

therefore, comes more and more to be a visual culture, rather than an auditory one. If

Harker’s (and “modem” England’s) paradigm is alphabetic, then Harker will readily

understand and accept certain aspects of what is presented to him, even if it is as

irrational and unrealistic as the existence of vampires, and he will process what he learns

in modes that are in keeping with the powers and limits of the meta-technology of

writing. Jackson posits:

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Often enough, alphabetic will be roughly the same as realistic; but realism as we

usually use the term tends to obscure the technological cause (writing) that has so

much to do with the effect (realism). (18)

This notion of the alphabetic as realistic is, in some ways, a paradox. After all, novels are

fiction. We know they are fiction when we pick them up. In fact, a novel that is not a

fiction is not a novel, it is history. Nevertheless there are conventions, used especially on

the title page and in the prefaces of the early English novel to assure the reader of the

truth and accuracy of the narrative to follow. In Factual Fictions, Lennard Davis

discusses this in the context of the prefaces in Don Quixote and Defoe’s Roxana:

“Cervantes freely admits that his work is an act of his own imagination.. .Defoe,

however, insists that the foundation of his work is ‘laid in truth of fact: and so the work is

not a story but a history’” (15). Davis constructs an argument based on the readers of

those respective texts and their different expectations, but I want to point out the frame of

“truth” (i.e. Defoe’s promise of a true history in Roxana and Cervantes’ claim that he is

merely an editor and Cide Hamete Benengeli is the “true author” of Don Quixote) which

is meant to color the subsequent reading of both texts as a claim that is inherently

alphabetic, a common feature of the early novel and generally false. This claim is

conspicuous in Dracula as well. Before Jonathan Harker’s diary begins there is a short

note to the reader, perhaps from Stoker himself, which reads:

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the

reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history

almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as

simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may

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err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the

standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them. (5)

The notes in the Norton Critical Edition of Dracula suggest this is a common

convention— “a simulation of temporal immediacy” and “an appeal to the empirically

based Victorian scientific method . . ”(5). This is also a highly alphabetic convention

that also frames the novel and therefore the reader’s expectations. It promises facts. It

promises evidence in the form of written records. It places the reader in a here-and-now

world, a courtroom world where the reader will be given testimony about the scenarios

outlined in the novel. Paradoxically, no one reads Dracula expecting non-fiction (i.e. a

collection of facts). The early English novel is particularly concerned with attesting to

“truth” and “history,” while at the same time it is generally accepted and expected that

the author has more or less made up the events in his novel. For example, in Samuel

Richardson’s Pamela, an extremely popular eighteenth-century novel, the title page

promises itself to be “A Narrative which has its Foundation in TRUTH and NATURE.”

Many early novels have prefaces that attest to essentially the same. They promise to be a

piece of the historical record, and the reader knows full well they are not. I mention this

because it means that from very early on the novel is involved in a kind of masquerade.

This is counterpoint to oral storytelling. This alphabetic promise of fact is an absolute lie

and everyone knows it, and yet, it is a major convention of the English novel in the

eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. This difference between the oral paradigm of

communal myth-making and the early novelistic convention of attested historical

accuracy (though rarely historically accurate, in truth) is one of Jackson’s major points in

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setting up the difference between oral and alphabetic— and both of these paradigms seem

to be in play simultaneously in Dracula.

Jackson’s analysis of oral and alphabetic storytelling usefully illuminates how

Dracula plays with the dialectics of ancient and modem forms. The alphabetic, modern,

scientific, and matter-of-fact seems to be arrayed against the oralistic, ancient, and

“superstitious.” Upon deeper examination, however, these categories are not at all as

discrete and compartmentalized as they first appear in Stoker’s masterpiece.

Dracula is a novel obsessed with technology. Its characters use, for example, the

train, the electric light, the Remington repeating rifle, the phonograph, the telegram, and

the typewriter— all of which were cutting-edge technology in the late nineteenth-century.

More than any other technology, however, Dracula is highly concerned with the

technology of writing. Jackson describes writing as, “an invented, systematized, tool-

using process for representing spoken language in visual signs” (3). Writing in Dracula is

both implicit, (as for all novels) and particularly explicit: Jonathan Harker’s journey to

Transylvania begins the action of the novel and takes place specifically to aid the Count

in preparing legal documents so he may take ownership of his new real estate holdings in

England. The power of writing quickly becomes so important that, when the Count

realizes Harker has become suspicious of him, he removes all means of writing he can

find from the rooms where Harker is trapped. In his journal Harker writes:

This morning when I woke I thought I would provide myself with some paper and

envelopes from my bag and keep them in my pocket, so that I might write in case

I should get an opportunity; but again a surprise, again a shock! Every scrap of

paper was gone, and with it all my notes, my memoranda relating to railways and

travel, my letter of credit, in fact all that might be useful to me were I once

outside the castle. (46)

Count Dracula has done his best to ensure his prisoner, should he escape, is helpless— a

man of letters with only spoken language to aid him in a land of foreign speech. This is

because Harker is a man of his times, a typographic and “modern” man, through and

through. The Count insists that his prisoner write false, post-dated letters detailing his

progress as he returns to England—letters that Harker fears have sealed his doom. As he

reflects on the dates of the letters that the Count has dictated, Harker writes despairingly,

“I know now the span of my life. God help me!” (45). In this instance, the act of writing

itself has revealed to Harker the terminal date of his existence, at least insofar as the

Count intends. This is an instance of the alphabetic against the alphabetic, but this is also

an instance of Dracula exploiting the advantages and limitations of writing: oral

storytelling is never disembodied. There must be a speaker to accompany the words. An

advantage of writing is that it is disembodied and can carry on beyond the lifespan of the

speaker (or even original hearer/reader). Dracula is aware of this and uses it to trap

Harker by ensuring that the writing goes forward disembodied and unchanging, unable to

tell the oralistic tale of Harker’s captivity at the hands of a monster in Castle Dracula.

The importance of written account, testimony, and record-keeping in Dracula

cannot be overstated. As Elizabeth Miller and Dacre Stoker observed in The Lost Journal

o f Bram Stoker, “Dracula is the story of the production of a text” (55). The penultimate

image the reader is left with is, after all, a typed manuscript:

We were struck with the fact that in all the mass of material of which the record is

composed, there is hardly one authentic document; nothing but a mass of type-

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writing except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van

Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to

accept these as proofs of so wild a story. (327)

Though superstition is dismissed by modem Englishmen like Harker, his false but matter-

of-fact letters will be taken seriously when they arrive in England. Ironically, these letters

are generated at the behest of a monster out of folklore Can any technology', however

modem, ever fully escape service to the past? I believe Stoker is saying it cannot. No

technology, no novel, no mode of storytelling, no century exists without a tie to what has

come before.

Dracula is concerned with innovation but always with an eye toward tradition. It

is the innovations of the train and the steam engine that allow the vampire hunters to

chase the elusive Count across Europe, it is the highly-advanced Winchester repeating

rifle that allows them to engage the Szgany, the Count’s gypsy servants, in the final

moments of that chase. However, it is the Host that purifies Castle Dracula; the stake that

dispatches his brides; the mystical connection between Mina and the Count that enables

them to roughly locate the vampire; and the Bowie knife/Kukri combination that

dispatches the Count. Neither modem means nor ancient means alone can end the hunt,

but both together. Stoker is saying, therefore, we can learn from the past, be enriched by

it, even become heroic in a Romantic sense, by engagement with it.

The question of reliability, truth, documentation, and reality return again and

again in Dracula, but they are all present from the very beginning of the narrative when

Stoker (as editor) writes about how “a history almost at variance with the possibilities of

later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact”(5).

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This opening has a clear relationship to the preface genre of the early novel that affirms

the “true history” of the foregoing text, but Stoker is doing much more than this.

Consider that he first tells us “needless matters have been eliminated.” Presumably, then,

we do not have a complete, unmediated record, but rather an edited record. We are told

that “there is no statement of past things wherein memory may err,” but the sentence

finishes by telling us that the record is formed by people from within their “range of

knowledge” and from their “standpoint.” We are assured of matter-of-fact veracity, but

this assurance is rooted in fallible points of view—all of this in the same sentence. This

opening is at once a bold-faced assertion that the novel is true and accurate, and also that

it is an edited document (don’t ask by whom) rooted in subjective experience by people

with limited understanding of the events happening around them. This instability in the

record is echoed at the end of the novel when Harker reflects, “we were struck with the

fact, that in all this mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one

authentic document... we could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as

proofs of so wild a story” (327). Peter Garrett, in Gothic Reflections: Narrative Force in

Nineteenth-Century Fiction observes:

The reason hardly one authentic document remains is of course that Dracula, in

his invasion of Dr. Seward’s asylum, has destroyed all the original manuscript

versions of the various journals and letters, as well as the phonograph cylinders on

which Seward kept his diary. Both the vampire and his opponents clearly place

great importance on these records. (124)

I think Garrett is correct in his observation about the importance of a reliable narrative,

but the record’s second-hand status, its edited nature, and the instability of point-of-view

and limited knowledge preclude anything like a reliable narrative in a legal or evidentiary

sense. The editorial note at the outset has spliced knowledge and doubt together

inextricably. By the final lines of the book, we are covering the same ground again, just

as Harker does in his carriage ride to Castle Dracula. With “these may stand forth as

simple facts” at the opening and “we could hardly ask anyone.. .to accept these as proofs”

at the end, Stoker has once again set up seemingly solid distinctions that melt and

comingle unsettlingly throughout the action of the book. This element of doubt can prick

the reader’s anxiety and unease, which is, I think, Stoker’s purpose. He means for the

reader to be entertained by the horror of the novel, and to do that he needs to get the

reader off of familiar ground by subtly besieging rationality, empiricism, and testimony

with these peculiar bookends to the story.

Harker, when he arrives at Castle Dracula, is a “modern” man, a man of letters

from (arguably) the center of the modem world in his moment. A man who remarks, “it

seems to me that the further East you go the more unpunctual are the trains” because in

his world the trains run more or less on time (11). He believes in the everyday and not the

supernatural. He believes in technology over superstition. Therefore, none of those in the

know will fully speak to Jonathan Harker about what the Count is, and he would not

believe them if they did (much as, at the end of the novel, the vampire hunters attests that

it “asks none” to believe them). If his trip into the East is, in some ways, a trip into the

past, as Harker imagines, then it seems so in large part because of the disparity in

technology (and perhaps modes of storytelling) between London and the East. Harker

believes what he learns from his research about Transylvania before he makes his trip: he

believes facts regarding the history and population of the place— he will believe what he

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reads but not what he hears. In this way Stoker immediately demonstrates the tension

between modem typographic information and ancient oral story (in this case, “folk-lore”

or “superstition”) regarding what Harker considers to be the “truth.” Indeed, Stoker even

points out the way slippage can occur orally when Harker tries to inquire on the topic of

Dracula:

I found that my landlord had got a letter from the Count, directing him to secure

the best place on the coach for me; but on making inquiries as to details he

seemed somewhat reticent, and pretended that he could not understand my

German. This could not be true, because up to then he had understood it perfectly;

at least he answered my questions as if he did. When I asked him if he knew

Count Dracula and could tell me anything of his castle, both he and his wife

crossed themselves, and, saying that they knew nothing at all, simply refused to

speak further. (12)

This is an early demonstration of a key characteristic of oral story: the danger the Count

poses is only suggested by what the landlord will not say. Oral story requires a teller.

This is very unlike, in fact, somewhat a reverse of, the moment where the Count

intercepts Harker’s letters. The first is a shorthand letter to Mina pleading for help, and

the other makes no mention of danger, and is written in ordinary script to his employer,

Peter Hawkins. The Count reads them and confronts Harker.

He sat down beside me and said in his smoothest voice as he opened two

letters:— “The Szgany has given me these, of which, though I know not whence

they come, I shall, of course, take care. See!” - he must have looked at it—“one is

from you, and to my friend Peter Hawkins; the other”—here he caught sight of

19

the strange symbols as he opened the envelop, and the dark look came into his

face, and his eyes blazed wickedly—“the other is a vile thing, an outrage upon

friendship and hospitality! It is not signed. Well! So it cannot matter to us.” And

he calmly held letter and envelope in the flame of the lamp till they were

consumed. Then he went on:— “The letter to Hawkins—that I shall, of course,

send on, since it is yours. Your letters are sacred to me. Your pardon, my friend,

that unknowingly I did break the seal. Will you not cover it again? (46)

Just as oral story requires an embodied speaker, the alphabetic technology of writing is

disembodied, and can therefore be turned back on itself to nefarious effect. Also note,

however, that Count Dracula is lying in this speech. He says one thing “your letters are

sacred to me”, and means quite another. Harker understands precisely the veiled threat in

Dracula’s cordiality. In this exchange between Harker and the Count, spoken words

convey a menacing truth beyond what they denote, and written words are held hostage

and made to lie—denoting deceptively because they are disembodied and will arrive to

Mina and Hawkins without important context (i.e. the Count’s true agenda). This is

horrific in part because it unmoors Harker from his usual way of understanding truth. He

cannot trust the Count. He cannot trust the Szgany. His own letters are weapons against

him. He fears even his own mind is not trustworthy. In short, Stoker has closed a trap

around Harker and the reader, again admonishing us that technology, modernity, and the

modem mind cannot reliably account for Gothic horror, or the Un-Dead past. Stoker is

also entertaining/frightening the reader with this horrifying circumstance which draws

ever more tightly around the unwitting Harker.

If the modern mind cannot reliably account for Gothic horror, or the Un-Dead

past, then what is the nature of these things as they appear in the novel? What is the

nature of Count Dracula that Harker arrives at Castle Dracula so ill-equipped to

understand him? He is a vampire, and therefore a creature out of folklore, and so I want

to touch on some of his oralistic traits. Jonathan Harker first meets the Count in the guise

of a mysterious coachman who meets his diligence at the Borgo Pass and takes him on a

winding tour of the Carpathians in search of treasure, where, at one point, this coachman

becomes translucent, backlit by strange blue flames. During this encounter he notices a

number of strange things: The “driver” is prodigiously strong. He arrives at Borgo Pass

mysteriously, an hour early, saying he “knows too much” to be deceived by the other

driver’s attempt to speed Harker away and return another day. The “driver” unnerves

both the carriage’s horses and passengers when he arrives. The “driver,” whom Harker

later works out to be the Count, speaks “excellent German” (18). When the Count’s

horses are spooked by the howling of wolves they begin to rear, but he speaks soothingly

to them and they are calmed: “He petted and soothed them, and whispered something in

their ears, as I have heard of horse-tamers doing, and with extraordinary effect, for under

his caresses they became quite manageable again, though they still trembled” (20). A

little later, the wolves close in and just before they pounce, the “driver” appears from the

darkness— “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, as though brushing aside some impalpable obstacle, the wolves

fell back and back further still” (20).

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This initial episode is instructive for a few reasons. First of all, it hints at the

power of the Count’s voice. His ability to speak well in multiple languages, to command

wolves and calm horses, suggests a powerful affinity for and facility with orality. He is a

speaker, reported on throughout the novel, rather than a writer in the novel itself. In these

passages the Count also reveals himself to be a figure of legend. He displays “magical”

abilities and sorcerous knowledge. He is disguised, shadowy and mysterious. He appears

and disappears into the night, commanding strange powers. In short, from the outset,

Count Dracula is an oralistic character, but this oralistic quality is complicated by many

of his alphabetic doings. For example, the Count reads the following books in English:

bound volumes of magazines and newspapers.. .books were of the most varied

kind—history, geography, politics, political economy, botany, geology, law— all

relating to England and English life and customs and manners. There were even

such books of reference as the London Directory, the ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ books,

Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, and—it somehow gladdened my

heart to see it— the Law List. (25)

The Count writes letters, engages solicitors, lawyers, and workmen. He cooks Harker’s

meals, buses his table, and washes his dirty dishes. For a mysterious monster out of the

ancient past, or a glorious warlord, these are remarkably every day, ordinary things to

read and to do in contemporary English life.

The vampire hunters, by contrast, are generally alphabetic characters. Not

coincidentally, they write to the reader more or less directly through diaries. They make

use of cutting-edge modern technology to pit themselves against the Count. They are, by

and large, “nineteenth century up to date with a vengeance,” in ways that the oralistic

Count merely imitates—though they may imitate his oralistic ways as well (40). The

Count and the vampire hunters seem to be on different sides of a line, and they are

undeniably in conflict, so we might draw the conclusion that orality and alphabetography

are also in conflict in DraculaNan Helsing directly addresses this struggle between oral

and alphabetic, ancient and modern, science and superstition, when he says,

I may, I suppose, take it that we are all acquainted with the facts that are in these

papers [the manuscript]. Then it were, I think good that I tell you something of the

kind of enemy with which we have to deal. How then are we to begin our strife

and destroy him? (209)

After Van Helsing’s speech, each of the vampire hunters in turn agrees to join this quest

to destroy the Count. Likewise, the Count, when he mockingly encounters Mina (after

having burned a copy of the manuscript, please note) and immediately before her

vampiric baptism has this to say:

You would help these men to hunt me and frustrate me in my designs! Whilst

they played wits against me—against me who commanded nations, and intrigued

for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born—I was

countermining them. (267)

It is clear, then, that the Count and the vampire hunters are at war, and at war not only for

their lives, but in the case of the hunters, Van Helsing makes the stakes (no pun intended)

clear,

To fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we

henceforward become foul things of the night like him—without heart or

conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best. To us for

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ever are the gates of heaven shut; for who shall open them to us again? We go on

for all time abhorred by all; a blot on the face of God’s sunshine. (209)

If the analogy of the battle between good and evil, the Count and the vampire hunters,

writing and oral storytelling is to hold, then, the consequences are also analogous. Lucy is

the prime example of this because when she dies she ceases to write, and when she rises

as one of the Un-Dead she is no longer writing for the reader—instead the children talk o f

her (as the “bloofer lady”) and the newspaper writes about her. She cannot properly

journal anymore, or use writing in a way that appears to the reader as Mina or Harker or

Seward do throughout the rest of the novel. The consequences, following the

battleground analogy, are that one cannot be both a typographic and oralistic figure—

once claimed by orality one is dead, or Un-Dead.

However, the matter is somewhat more complicated. Consider Jonathan Harker’s

escape from Castle Dracula. He has seen the Count climb down to his crypt “just as a

lizard moves along a wall” in an unnatural and grotesque fashion (39). Indeed, Harker is

so horrified by this display that he asks, “what manner of man is this, or what manner of

creature is it in the semblance of a man?” (39). However, in order to escape, Harker, too,

must climb down “lizard-fashion” to flee Castle Dracula, reasoning “where his body has

gone why may not another body go?” (49) The Count’s own unnatural methods are used

by Harker, the “modem” man. Just as the Count can use typography against his foes, his

foes can use his own oralistic methods against him. I suggest that Stoker uses the

moments where Harker climbs down the castle in imitation of the Count to press home

the point that the past has something to teach us. There are pits in the crumbling edifice

of time that are, in fact, handholds for escape and a means of striking back against terror.

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Modernity alone never yields a complete answer to the Un-Dead problem. The Un-Dead

must be addressed on their own terms.

Alphabetic Count Dracula himself uses writing, as when he writes letters to

Harker, to the innkeeper at the Golden Krone, and presumably before the novel begins to

Mr. Hawkins, though, importantly, his writing never appears to the reader of the novel. I

argue that it cannot. He must be written of, his words must be reported, but he can never

appear directly and without the prism of a typographic character’s vision because he is

cut off from the “light” as Van Helsing would have it. He is essentially a figure of orality

therefore does not, in fact cannot, write to the reader.

As Carol Senf observes in her essay, “Typewriters, Trains, and Telegrams: The

Technology of Dracula,” “Dracula’s modem opponents assemble a whole arsenal of

technological materials to use in their battle against him. The reliance on these

technological devices is consistent with the fact that Dracula’s opponents all embody

very late Victorian virtues and characteristics while he remains a creature from the past”

(90). Senf points out the clash of ancient and modem embodied in both the Count and the

nineteenth-century vampire hunters who pursue him. The technology of writing is of

great use as a weapon against the Count throughout the novel. Consider three examples:

The first is Van Helsing’s instinct upon Lucy’s death that he must search her papers and

letters for clues as to what has destroyed her. He requests permission of Arthur

Holmwood: “I want you to give me permission to read all of Miss Lucy’s papers and

letters. Believe me, it is no idle curiosity. I have a motive of which, be sure, she would

have approved”(154). While Van Helsing is only hinting at his suspicions, his perusal of

Lucy’s letters leads him to contact Mina Harker and inquire about the strange events at

25

Whitby where Dracula first made his landing. Upon meeting Mina to learn more he finds

she has typed out her diary and her husband’s as well. These are major additional pieces

of the final manuscript that provide vital intelligence regarding the Count’s abilities,

weaknesses, and likely courses of action.

My second example of the weaponization of writing in Dracula is when Mina

finds Doctor Seward updating his diary via phonograph and is even more explicit about

the importance of writing as information against the Count. Seward has been using the

phonograph to record voice entries and admits:

But do you know that although I have kept the diary for months past, it never

once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted

to look it up?’ By this time my [Mina’s] mind was made up that the diary of a

doctor who attended Lucy might have something to add to the sum of our

knowledge of that terrible Being, and I said boldly:— ‘Then Dr. Seward, you had

better let me copy it out for you on my typewriter’. (196)

The emerging importance of the typewritten manuscript as an intelligence report and

written record of their mysterious, elusive enemy becomes clearer and clearer to the

vampire hunters as the novel goes on.

The final and perhaps most important example begins when Mina attests to

Seward that others must know the terrible story of Lucy’s death. When he asks why she

says:

Because it is a part of the terrible story, a part of poor dear Lucy’s death and all

that led to it; because in the struggle which we have before us to rid the earth of

this terrible monster we must have all the knowledge and all the help which we

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can g e t . . . I know all up to a certain point; and I see already, though your diary

only took me up to 7 September, how poor Lucy was beset and how her terrible

doom was being wrought ou t . . . We need have no secrets amongst us; working

together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were

in the dark. (197)

This touches off a flurry of activity for the Harkers who begin to type out and collate the

various journals, memoranda, and papers of the group to present to those who are not

fully in the know. Mina observes, “I think if we get all our material ready and have every

item put into chronological order we shall have done much” (198). She types them on

manifold paper so she may hand out three copies at a time and when Quincey Morris and

Arthur Holmwood arrive she presents them each with a copy of the manuscript. Seward

remarks, “They will be able to show a whole connected narrative” (199). Jonathan

Harker’s diary (and later Lucy’s, Mina’s and Doctor Seward’s) along with the various

letters, newspaper clippings, memoranda, and real estate documents all coalesce to

become the manuscript which each of those who endeavor to stop Dracula must read.

When Holmwood and Morris finish reading this manuscript the reader and the vampire

hunters are literally and figuratively on the same page. The reader and the group are now

prepared to go forward in the narrative with the same facts—“stronger than if some of us

were in the dark” (197).

Even as it stages an apparent conflict between oralistic and alphabetic storytelling

in the forms of ancient monster and modern man, oral story as “superstition” and modern

typography as a weapon against it, Dracula is still a novel that points up the

interdependency of the oral and the written. The fact remains that without Dracula, the

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oralistic monster, there is no Dracula novel —the alphabetized text. And without

alphabetic writing there is no such thing as a novel at all. Obviously these are gross and

somewhat metatextual examples, but they illustrate the point: this novel has a notable

attraction/repulsion relationship between its oral and alphabetic elements that echoes

Dracula’s own nature and his relationship to his victims. Stoker creates this

attraction/repulsion to show the reader that both elements are necessary in the text, but

also in a larger sense to show that the past and ancient forms, even ancient fears, have to

be taken seriously and on their own terms by the modem-minded. To fail to do so would

leave modem Harker trapped in Castle Dracula while imitation of the Count frees him.

To fail to take the supernatural seriously would leave Count Dracula unassailable and

secure in England—insulated by disbelief.

Stoker rather ingeniously finds ways to turn the limitations of the novel and the

absence of an oral storyteller to his advantage by turning Dracula himself into a phantom.

He is glimpsed, hinted at, suspected, or heard of. Jim Steinmeyer says in Who was

Dracula? :

Bram Stoker’s monster appears on only sixty-two pages of 390 pages of the

novel; he makes only a few speeches; he almost never shares his insights or

motivation; his appearance is indistinct to the point of being confusing. Late in the

novel, he becomes virtually lost in the torrent of diary entries, speculation, and

itineraries generated by the vampire hunters. “Dracula with so very little of

Dracula” may have been Bram Stoker’s greatest achievement. It meant that the

Count had to be interpreted by the reader—characteristics need to be filled in;

thoughts and motivations need to be inferred. (295)

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The very instability created by the disembodied voice of writing works to the advantage

of Dracula as an oralistic monster: his function follows his form and, though he is present

in the novel, he is also an apparition. A simple first person narrative or third person

omniscient could not produce this highly successful effect—probably the most successful

effect in the novel.

Despite his oralistic nature, the Count time and time again makes use of the power

of technology when it is to his advantage, as with his exploitation of Harker’s letters by

the post, though he defaults to older modes (he prefers ships to the train, ancient ruins and

dark places to modem homes). In fact, almost no example of his oral nature is ever

without alphabetic counterexample. This is also true of the vampire hunters. While they

certainly make use of cutting-edge nineteenth-century technology throughout the novel,

almost point for point, they must use some semi-mystical or arcane oralistic knowledge to

combat Count Dracula. These distinctions blur because Stoker is upsetting his reader’s

understanding of distinct categories of good and evil, right and wrong, modem and

ancient, alphabetic and oral, to entertain/horrify and to instruct. His message to his reader

is that there is no escape from the past, but we can learn from it if we accept it on its own

terms. Oral story, therefore, should not be rejected out of hand as superstitious drivel, and

by the same token, modern technology meant to bring about “progress” can be employed

for sinister ends.

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Chapter 2: Narrative Structure in Dracula

Stoker reveals modernity to be inextricable from the ancient by the use of a

complex narrative structure, often employing recurring themes and situations, by using

techniques such as mirroring, doubling, and paralleling between various characters and

events.

Mirroring, as I am using it here, is a technique found often in Gothic literature and

it refers to personages like Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Dorian Gray (and the picture of

Dorian Gray), or, in Dracula, Renfield, a single character contending with light and dark

personalities within himself. In Renfield’s case, his personality appears to be split by

what is termed in the novel “madness.” Renfield characterizes it this way: “I am no

lunatic in a mad fit, but a sane man fighting for his soul” (218). Throughout the novel,

Renfield oscillates between what Doctor Seward calls “moods,” which correspond to the

proximity and activities of Count Dracula. Renfield reveals himself to be well-educated,

erudite, and perspicacious at times, or cunning, devious, and homicidal at others. At

moments Renfield seems gentle, simple, even pathetic, and then by turns he is grotesque

as he greedily consumes flies, spiders, and (on one occasion) bolts down a quarrel of

sparrows—feathers and all. All these changes, which the reader may perceive more

quickly than does his psychiatric caregiver, are attributable to the movements of the

Count. Dracula’s proximity triggers Renfield’s selfish, base desire for longevity, and later

in the novel he finds that selfishness striving against his higher compassion in matters

both human and spiritual. On the night Renfield knows the Count will come to the

asylum for Mina, Renfield begs very lucidly for Doctor Seward to release him, even if

it’s to send him to jail—this is a moment where his higher self holds sway and he is

30

making provisions against himself because he knows his darker self will invite the Count

in and therefore give the vampire power to harm Mina. Indeed, as Mina takes her leave of

Renfield, he says, “Goodbye, my dear. I pray God I may never see your sweet face again”

(207). And yet, Count Dracula seems to have the power to compel an alternate

personality or self in Renfield, as when Dracula gained entry to the asylum for the first

time: “And then a red cloud, like the colour of blood, seemed to close over my eyes, and

before I knew what I was doing, I found myself opening the sash and saying to Him:

‘Come in, Lord and Master!’” (245). Renfield claims to have acted involuntarily,

speaking words outside of his own thoughts—in other words, becoming another Renfield,

a mirror image of himself whom he could only observe.

I want to suggest now that vampirism itself is a form of mirroring—and by

extension the past itself, being “Un-Dead,” mirrors the present in Dracula and vice versa.

For example, Lucy is characterized as a sweet, virginal young woman by the men around

her and by Mina—this is in sharp contrast to the sexual monster she becomes

immediately prior to and after her death. When she is released from the curse of

vampirism, her goodness seems to be returned to her. Her changes from light to dark,

innocent to sinful, virginal to “voluptuous” are clearly the result of vampirism. Seward

notes this change in Lucy’s last moments before death:

And then insensibly there came the strange change which I had noticed in the

night. Her breathing grew stertorous, the mouth opened, and the pale gums, drawn

back, made the teeth look longer and sharper than ever. In a sort of sleep-waking

vague, unconscious way she opened her eyes, which were now dull and hard at

31

once, and said in a soft, voluptuous voice, such as I had never heard from her

lips:— ‘Arthur! Oh, my love, I am so glad you have come! Kiss me!’(146)

Van Helsing intervenes physically to keep Arthur from being drawn in. The moment

passes, and Lucy changes again:

We saw a spasm s of rage flit like a shadow over her face; the sharp teeth

champed together. Then her eyes closed, and she breathed heavily. Very shortly

after she opened her eyes in all their softness, and putting out her poor pale, thin

hand, took Van Helsing’s great brown one; drawing it to her, she kissed it. ‘My

true friend,’ she said, in faint voice, but with untellable pathos, ‘my true friend,

and his! Oh, guard him and give me peace! (146)

Vampirism created in Lucy a dark reflection. A temptress emerged from the virgin under

the mirroring power of vampirism. This scene more or less repeats itself at Lucy’s death,

and later at Count Dracula’s death when, before he crumbles to dust there is “a look of

peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there” (124). Only a

moment before had been “red eyes [that] glared with the horrible vindictive look which I

knew too well” (325). And yet, in death, Count Dracula is released from vampirism, and

presumably, the man that he was before—his brighter reflection, is released to the final

reward. This is important because in using and re-using this technique of doubling,

Stoker has revealed that history itself is “Un-Dead” in Dracula, and events recur often—

often in twos. The past is often, like the vampire, haunting the present. In effect, the

combination of Stoker’s techniques and narrative structure in Dracula shows the

“modem” and “ancient” to be reflections of one another.

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By using the term doubling, I am referring to the Gothic trope of the

“doppelganger ” Count Dracula’s double is Van Helsing, which is to say they are two

separate characters who are inversions of each other. An example of doubling in Dracula

is the “weird sisters” and Lucy’s three suitors. Count Dracula’s relationship to the three

female vampires in his castle is never explicitly stated, but I tend to believe they were his

brides. A footnote in The New Annotated Dracula says:

Who are these women? Leatherdale (Dracula Unearthed) suggests they are

‘sequential wives’ who have ‘progressed’ from being blood supplies to vampires.

Wolf (The Essential Dracula) proposes that the two dark women may be

Dracula’s sisters. (79)

One reason for believing they are his brides is that Dracula is a strangely symmetrical

book. For example, there are three suitors for Lucy just as there are three vampire

“brides” in Transylvania. After Lucy’s “death,” Doctor Seward records “he [Arthur

Holmwood] felt since then [his transfusion of blood into Lucy] as if they two really had

been married, and that she was his wife in the sight of God” (157). Three good men

donated blood to help save poor Lucy. Three evil vampire women sought to exsanguinate

poor Jonathan Harker. I believe these symmetrical inversions are significant wherever

they appear in Dracula, and therefore if Lucy had multiple “husbands,” then Dracula has

multiple “brides” by the same token.

To examine further what it means to be a bride in Dracula, we may turn to Mina

Harker, who writes: “He [Van Helsing] was surprised at my knowledge of the trains off­

hand, but he does not know that I have made up all the trains to and from Exeter, so that I

may help Jonathan in case he is in a hurry” (167). Early in the novel Mina contemplates

33

her role in a future marriage to Jonathan Harker: “When we are married I shall be able to

be useful to Jonathan, and if I can stenograph well enough I can take down what he wants

to say in this way and write it out for him on the typewriter, at which I am also practicing

very hard” (55). Count Dracula echoes this idea after baptizing Mina in his blood, by

saying “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh, blood of my

blood, kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall later on be my

companion and helper” (252). Based on this speech, and in the context of Mina’s

understanding of her duties as Harker’s wife, it is clear that Dracula preys upon women

(Lucy, Mina, the Transylvanian women) and converts them through a blood exchange to

a status of perverse marriage. Mina speaks often in the novel of owing Harker all love

and duty. When she learns he is ill in Transylvania she takes the train to the abbey where

he is convalescing to minister to him in his affliction and help him recover. She marries

him there. This picture of wholesome Victorian marriage is strangely and darkly echoed

in Dracula’s words to Mina after forcing her to drink his blood—she will help him, she

will come to him, she will be his companion. Therefore, it is as if Mina is, in some sense,

twice a bride—once as a modem Victorian woman who works to master the tools of

typography to help her husband, and once as the bride of the oralistic vampire, or at least

an intended bride to be his after her own death.

The other example of doubling I want to point out is the relationship between

Count Dracula and Doctor Van Helsing. The Count is the center of supernatural

phenomena in the novel, of course, but Van Helsing answers him with supernatural or

folk remedies against the vampire. Dracula is characterized by Van Helsing as having

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been a remarkable man in his time, an extraordinary mind; that description is, of course,

also apt for Van Helsing himself. Van Helsing says of Dracula.

He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the

Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. If it be so, then he

was no common man; for in that time, and for centuries after, he was spoken of as

the cleverest and the most cunning, as well as the bravest of the sons of the ‘land

beyond the forest.’ That mighty brain and that iron resolution went with him to

his grave, and are even now arrayed against us. (212)

We can put this description of Dracula against what Seward says of Van Helsing when

he introduces him to Arthur Holmwood, “He is a philosopher and metaphysician, and one

of the most advanced scientists of his day; and he has, I believe, an absolutely open mind.

This, with an iron nerve, a temper of the ice-brook, an indomitable resolution, self-

command and toleration exalted from virtues to blessings, and the kindliest and truest

heart that beats “(106). The descriptions of these two characters are quite similar, but this

is not the only evidence of their doubling. Their limitations are also telling. Consider, for

example, their mutual inability to read shorthand. This suggests that both Van Helsing

and Dracula are conversant in modern technology only up to a point: they have one foot

in the oralistic world. For example, at the end of the novel Dracula eschews the train for

wind-based boat travel, and Van Helsing goes overland with Mina by horse and carriage,

rather than by steamboat upriver. They can both make use of technology, up to a point,

but both are limited in comparison to some of the younger and more basically alphabetic

characters in the novel: these two are linked in this way the way no other pair in the novel

are. Dracula, however, gets by far the best lines in the novel—his turn of phrase by far

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outstrips Van Helsing’s tortured prolixity. I suggest even in their differences they are

linked, because they are inverted differences. Where Dracula has a facility with language,

speaking excellently in whatever language he is heard to speak in the novel, Van Helsing

(who is also a polyglot) often has to take the long way round to make himself understood.

What this amounts to is Dracula and Van Helsing are essentially opposite numbers,

acting against one another by alphabetic, but also by oralistic means. For example,

Dracula nearly exsanguinates Lucy—that is, he takes her blood into himself by

supernatural means for selfish reasons (nearly killing her), but Van Helsing performs a

(then highly-experimental) transfusion, effectively taking blood from Arthur Holmwood

and putting it into Lucy for unselfish reasons and through “modem” science. Both

characters are absolutely essential to the plot as only the Harkers and Lucy are

essential—the rest become somewhat muted and amalgamated as the story sweeps on.

Van Helsing and Dracula are the two most apparently equal and opposite, and yet, as are

most things in the novel, compellingly and inextricably linked. This is significant because

it shows that time breeds counterparts and inversions to the individual: As Count Dracula

is, so could Van Helsing be. As Van Helsing is, so was Count Dracula once. This idea

dovetails with the overall recursive structure of the novel, and with Dracula's

cosmological assertion of the past: what has happened before can always return again in

another form, and like the Count himself, it may be beaten back and come again and

again.

The recursive structure in Dracula suggests that history is cyclical and constantly

recurring: what happened before will happen again. I will illustrate this idea with three

examples from the novel, but once one is looking for it, one finds that the recursive

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structure is everywhere. This happens in three ways: The first is at the level of physical

movement of the characters; the Count’s advances, retreats, and returns throughout the

action of the novel (and before), for example. The second way the structure of the novel

is recursive is apparent in the changes (and returns) of the various narrators. Jonathan

Harker narrates at the beginning and end of the novel, for example. The third way is how

situations and scenarios repeat themselves (at least twice, often three times), for example,

the way Dracula preys on Lucy and Mina, or the way Lucy was courted three times by

three men.

To illustrate how Stoker’s recursive structure operates at the level of character and

movements within the novel, I want to map some of Count Dracula’s physical

movements, and then Van Helsing’s. Dracula begins in Transylvania at Castle Dracula.

When he goes to retrieve Harker at Borgo Pass, he retreads the same ground over and

over again, waiting for midnight so he can reclaim lost treasure from the past. He

continues to circle, stop, disappear into the darkness, and return to the carriage.

Afterwards, he returns to Castle Dracula with Harker. From there, he leaves the castle

(lizard-fashion) and returns on mysterious errands. These are only a few examples of the

Count’s constant advances and retreats, ever venturing out and ever returning. Dracula

even speaks of this himself, recounting his deeds of old to Jonathan Harker at Castle

Dracula,

Was it not this Dracula, indeed, who inspired that other of his race? Who in a later

age again and again brought his forces over the great river into Turkeyland; who,

when he was beaten back, came again, and again, and again, though he had to

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come alone from the bloody field where his troops were being slaughtered, since

he knew that he alone could ultimately triumph? (35)

This pattern is repeated throughout the novel. Van Helsing later confirms as much:

Nay in himself he is not one to retire and stay afar. In his life, his living life, he go

over the Turkey frontier and attack his enemy on his own ground; he be beaten

back, but did he stay? No! He come again, and again, and again. Look at his

persistence and endurance. (279)

This retreat and return is not, however, restricted to Count Dracula. Let us consider Van

Helsing’s physical movements in the novel. He begins in Amsterdam when Doctor

Seward writes to him, asking for help. Immediately, the same pattern reasserts itself. In

his first letter, Van Helsing writes to Seward, “When I have received your letter, I am

already coming to you,” and later in the same letter says, “please it so arrange that we

may see the young lady [Lucy] not too late on tomorrow, for it is likely that I may have to

return here that night. But if need be, I shall come again in three days, and stay longer if it

must” (107). The next thing we read is a letter from Seward to Arthur Holmwood, it

begins: “Van Helsing has come and gone,” and concludes with Seward’s report that Van

Helsing has said, “You must send to me the telegram every day; and if there because I

shall come again” (108). Likewise, when Van Helsing has begun to suspect that Lucy is

being preyed upon by a vampire, his first action (after the transfusion) is, predictably, to

return to Amsterdam: “He stood up ‘I must go back to Amsterdam tonight’ he said.

‘There are books and things there which I want.. .1 shall be back so soon as possible’”

(116). Indeed, Van Helsing, during the Lucy episode alone—that is, from 3 September-18

September, departs from London three times for Amsterdam and returns again each time.

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These movements within the novel are suggestive of a larger message which holds true

throughout the entire novel: Things come back.

The second way the novel is recursive is the way the narrative voices shift in the

novel. The novel opens, of course, with Jonathan Harker’s diary, and ends with Harker

writing in retrospect several years after the events of the novel. This is significant

because, again, it is a departure and a return. After Jonathan Harker’s escape from Castle

Dracula, Mina Murray’s diary picks up the narrative, recording her time at Whitby and

afterward. Harker’s diary is sealed as a mark of trust between the Harkers—Mina says

she will not read it. Harker says he will not write in it again. In time, she does read it, and

in time, he does write in it again. He begins this second writing by saying, “I thought

never to write in this diary again, but the time has come” (168). Time is central to the

argument I am making, and Harker mentions it explicitly: things he thought he had put

away have come back. He will return to inscribe new events in his journal—events that

occur because the past would not remain in the past. His re-entry into the role of narrator

is a direct result of the past returning to haunt the present, just as Harker returns to a

narrative from which he had, himself, disappeared.

Another example of the way departures and recurrences of narrative voice suggest

that the past is Un-Dead is this: after Lucy’s death, Doctor Seward imagines his diary

finished. He says, “So I can finish this diary; and God only knows if I shall ever begin

another. If I do, or if I ever open this again, it will be to deal with different people and

different themes; for here at the end, where the romance of my life is told, ere I go back

to take up the thread of my life-work, I say sadly and without hope, FINIS” (159). Of

course, Seward does begin his diary again, and it does treat of, by and large, the same

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people and themes. He opens his diary again saying, (with startling relevance to this

thesis): “Truly there is no such thing as finality. Not a week since I said ‘Finis,’ and yet

here I am starting fresh again, or rather going on with the same record” (169). If there is

no such thing as finality, then nothing ever really ends. Therefore, no distinction can be

made between the ancient and the modern worlds—today is a continuation of all the

events that came before it. They recur without finality onward into the future.

The third way the structure of Dracula is recursive is, of course, all those

repeated, inverted, or parallel scenarios and situations. Of the numerous examples in

Dracula, I have chosen three. The first is the way Lucy and Mina are both hunted by the

Count at different points in time. Their accounts are strikingly familiar, such that the

reader recognizes the bat flapping at the window and red eyes in the darkness for what

they are well before the characters themselves do. When Dracula begins to prey upon

Lucy, there is no reason Mina, Doctor Seward, or anyone else should know precisely

what they are dealing with. When the Count begins to prey upon Mina, everyone in the

story has every advantage in terms of knowing what they are dealing with. Doctor Van

Helsing has made it explicit in his speeches about the vampire, Dracula’s origins,

weaknesses, and abilities. They have all read the diaries, letters, etc. (read: history)

comprising the story so far. They know very well that Lucy was haunted by bats, eyes in

the dark, and dreams of a sinister face emerging from mist and vapor. They have

witnessed her growing pale and weak, they have witnessed the ability of the vampire to

circumvent his limitations, and yet they do not connect history to the “present” of Mina’s

situation, despite the facts in front of them. The characters do not realize that what

happened before to Lucy is happening again to Mina, despite having the advantages of

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hindsight, documentation of events (i.e. history), and personal experience. For example,

Lucy is frequently described, during her time of infirmity and immediately prior to her

death as pale, white, haggard, and drawn. At first, this paleness and exhaustion is only a

private observation made by Mina at Whitby “she [Lucy] looks so sweet as she sleeps;

but she is paler than is her wont, and there is a drawn, haggard look under her eyes which

I do not like” (91). Later, almost the exact same language is used to describe Mina when

Harker discovers her asleep at the asylum in the early stages of Dracula’s predation:

“Mina sleeps soundly and her breathing is regular. She is still too pale, but does not look

so haggard as she did this morning” (235). By those final, fatal days, that paleness, noted

early and dismissed, is a terrible mark of affliction. Lucy is said to be “ghastly pale” over

and over. Doctor Seward writes this of the moment when they discover Lucy nearly dead

beside her mother’s corpse: “By her [Mrs. Westenra’s] side lay Lucy, with face white and

still more drawn. The flowers which had been round her neck we found upon her

mother’s bosom, and her throat was bare, showing the two little wounds which we had

noticed before, but looking horribly white and mangled” (134). Toward the end of the

novel, Van Helsing describes Mina’s paleness as she nears the state of true vampirism,

“She sat still all the time—so still as one dead; and she was whiter and ever whiter till the

snow was not more pale; and no word she said” (316). This is important because paleness

is a clear sign of vampirism, dismissed as exhaustion in both Lucy and Mina, with

ultimately tragic and near-tragic results. Circumstances repeat themselves. Things come

back. It doesn’t end with paleness, either. Both women are plagued by “dreams” of a

sinister face and red eyes gleaming out of the dark, and yet, even after Mina has read

Lucy’s account of the “nightmares”—indeed, after she herself has seen the red eyes of

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the strange figure on the bench at Whitby at sunset and has, in retrospect, every reason to

know who and what it is she saw, she does not seem to make the connection with her

own “dreams.” Admittedly, this evokes horror and suspense for the reader, but it also

points up the recursive structure of the novel, and casts history as Un-Dead, ever crawling

back from the grave to prey upon the present—because the reader recognizes the

situational return, even if the characters (initially) do not. I believe Mina’s plight is

another example of Stoker’s two-fold purpose. He horrifies/entertains the reader by

showing the reader that Mina is being preyed upon before the other characters realize it

(with no small irony, since it is through the eyes of other characters). He is also telling us,

as readers, that we can make use of the past and let it teach us, and that if we do not, we

will watch it recur with tragic results.

Another example of parallel situations is the “crypt” scenes in Castle Dracula. In

the first, Jonathan Harker discovers Count Dracula resting in his coffin and attempts

(unsuccessfully) to destroy him with a shovel. In the second, Van Helsing goes to the

Castle to destroy the three brides of Dracula. This is Harker’s account:

Then I stopped and looked at the Count. There was a mocking smile on the

bloated face which seemed to drive me mad. This was the being I was helping to

transfer to London, where, perhaps, for centuries to come he might, amongst its

teeming millions, satiate his lust for blood, and create a new and ever-widening

circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless. The very thought drove me mad.

A terrible desire came upon me to rid the world of such a monster. There was no

lethal weapon at hand, but I seized a shovel which the workmen had been using to

fill the cases, and lifting it high struck, with the edge downward, at the hateful

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face. But as I did so the head turned, and the eyes fell full upon me, with all their

blaze of basilisk horror. The sight seemed to paralyse me, and the shovel turned in

my hand and glanced from the face, merely making a deep gash above the

forehead. The shovel fell from my hand across the box, and as I pulled it away the

flange of the blade caught the edge of the lid, which fell over again, and hid the

horrid thing from my sight. (90)

Harker’s reflection, in this moment, is on the future. He foresees and dreads the

vampire’s curse repeating itself in London, over and over. Harker is possessed by hatred

and loathing at the very sight of the blood-gutted Count’s “mocking smile,” and arrested

by supernatural fear in the “basilisk’s gaze” of the Count. This prevents him from doing

greater damage to Count Dracula. Compare this to Van Helsing’s experiences with

killing vampires in Castle Dracula:

She lay in her Vampire sleep, so full of life and voluptuous beauty that I shudder

as though I have come to do murder. Ah, I doubt not that in old time, when such

things were, many a man who set forth to do such a task as mine, found at the last

his heart fail him, and then his nerve. So he delay, and delay, and delay, till the

mere beauty and fascination of the wanton Un-Dead have hypnotize him; and he

remain on, and on, till sunset come, and the Vampire sleep be over. Then the

beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth

present to a kiss—and man is weak. And there remain one more victim in the

Vampire fold; one more to swell the grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead! There

is some fascination, surely, when I am moved by the mere presence of such an

one, even lying as she lay in a tomb fretted with age and heavy with the dust of

centuries, though there be that horrid odour such as the lairs of the Count have

had. Yes, I was moved—I, Van Helsing, with all my purpose and with my motive

for hate—I was moved to a yearning for delay which seemed to paralyse my

faculties and to clog my very soul. It may have been that the need of natural sleep,

and the strange oppression of the air were beginning to overcome me. Certain it

was that I was lapsing into sleep, the open-eyed sleep of one who yields to a

sweet fascination, when there came through the snow-stilled air a long, low wail,

so full of woe and pity that it woke me like the sound of a clarion. For it was the

voice of my dear Madam Mina that I heard. Then I braced myself again to my

horrid task. (320)

In counterpoint to Harker’s grim fears of the future. Van Helsing is drawn into the past.

His danger is mirrored in the failures of vampire hunters before him who were moved to

delay and ultimately not to kill the vampires before them (because of the hypnotic quality

of feminine vampiric beauty). This is what is happening to Van Helsing, his purposes is

almost blunted entirely by the beauty of the vampire women—this is in total opposition

to being moved to attack as Harker was. Their situation is markedly similar, and yet

despite the recurrence of the scenario, i.e. encountering a vampire in repose at Castle

Dracula— these two men have two very different experiences. It isn’t my point that Van

Helsing is successful (because Mina calls out and pulls him from his reverie) or that

Harker is not. Rather, I want to examine what they muse on in these similar situations:

Van Helsing is moved to delay by “the very instinct of man in me, which calls some of

my sex to love and to protect one of hers” (320) while Harker is moved by a lurid and

horrific “basilisk’s gaze” and is turned aside in the very action of striking. Both men

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muse on the increase of the “grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead,”— Harker by

considering the future, and Van Helsing by considering the past. Meanwhile, both men,

in both situations, are in peril of becoming Un-Dead themselves. What this means is that

Van Helsing imagines what happened before. Jonathan Harker is aware it that will

happen again. And the peril of Un-Death stalks both men, in the meantime. The recursive

structure, the parallel situation, once again points to history as Un-Dead; ever returning to

haunt the present.

A third example of the recursive structure of the novel is the death and rebirth of

Quincey Morris. The space between Quincey’s death in Transylvania and the

introduction of a Harker child whom they call “Quincey” is a paragraph on the final page

of the novel—and yet it signifies a continuity that has been insisted on all along in

Dracula. Harker’s final note to the reader reads, in part, “It is an added joy to Mina and

me that our boy’s birthday is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died. His

mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed

into him. His bundle of names links all our little band of men together; but we call him

Quincey” (326). I consider this an inversion of Un-Death; a wholesome version of

immortality through valiant sacrifice in death, a selflessness that is the opposite of

Dracula’s parasitic predations, and a return to life in innocence via proper matrimonial

love. In a way, of course, Stoker is concluding Dracula by re-establishing order and

normalcy, but in another way, “history” has come back again in the form of a dead man

being given new life. Stoker goes so far as to give explicitly spiritual dimensions to his

return. What was old is new again. Things come back. In this case, heroically instead of

monstrously. Having learned the lessons of the past and faced it on its own terms, and

45

having reconciled themselves as a group that certain kinds of knowledge (of vampires,

for example) is beyond modern means to account for, they have become heroic. The

vampire hunters have affirmed their own place in the past with the manuscript detailing

past events, though it is not proof, and assured their place in the future with a Harker

child named after all of them, including Quincey Morris, wholesomely resurrected.

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Chapter 3: Dracula and Genre

It is generally agreed among literary scholars that the template for the Gothic

novel was The Castle o f Otranto by Horace Walpole, which was published in 1764. E.J.

Clery notes in his “Introduction” to the Oxford World Classics edition of Walpole’s

novel that:

The Castle o f Otranto is never judged purely on its own merits, but rather as the

founding text of a genre that has flourished, through various permutations, up to

the present Walpole never wrote another novel, but his example was followed by

others in increasing numbers until by the 1790s, an identifiable mode of “modern

romance” or “terrorist fiction” was taking the book market by storm. In the course

of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Gothic has diversified into many sub­

genres, including historical romance, science fiction, and detective fiction, (ix)

Dracula emerged in 1897, fairly late in the history of the Gothic form. Even the modern

Gothic novel (and certainly Dracula) owes something to The Castle o f Otranto. Every

Gothic novel has something of it in its DNA. In the Columbia History o f the British

Novel, John Richetti explains:

Otranto uses the “great resources of fancy” as the occasion for an outrageously

improbably ‘political’ tale—what I would call the paradigmatic Gothic plot—one

of nefarious usurpation and ultimate revenge, set against a vaguely historical

(hence ‘Gothic’) backdrop, enlivened by scenes of supernatural agency, brutal

sexual aggression, undisguised incestuous longings, sadomasochistic fantasy, and

an astonishingly lurid and versatile architectural motif. (220)

All these characteristics are, of course, to be found in Dracula, but with some variation

and difference—a point to which I will return in a moment. I want to consider the

“paradigmatic Gothic plot,” as a jumping-off point for Stoker. For example, Richetti says,

“Manfred, the usurper and sexual aggressor of The Castle o f Otranto, turns every relation

into a perversion and finds ways to turn the very passages of the castle into a sexual

nightmare for the vulnerable heroine” (220). Manfred is not unlike Count Dracula

himself, but instead of menacing a heroine, Castle Dracula first becomes a place of

“sexual nightmare” for Jonathan Harker. Richetti has this to say of the nature of that

sexual nightmare:

Walpole introduces what becomes the hallmark of Gothic fiction: in a single

image he combines the sexual anxiety of a victimized female, the incestuous

desire of a libidinous male, the use of the physical features and an atmosphere

deftly rendered to produce terror and gloom. This scene is retold hundreds of

times in Gothic fiction; it is absolutely basic to the form. (223)

This “hallmark” of Gothic fiction gives us an insight into Dracula that helps us better

understand Harker’s plight. Harker is in sexual peril at Castle Dracula. The Count is the

ultimate architect of this peril, in that he is the source of supernatural power, the source of

vampirism in the novel, Harker is seduced by Dracula’s brides in that famous scene.

Christopher Craft, in his essay “’Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in

Bram Stoker’s Dracula” has argued that Harker is “feminized” in this scene:

Harker awaits an erotic fulfillment that entails both the dissolution of the

boundaries of the self and the thorough subversion of conventional Victorian

gender codes, which constrained the mobility of sexual desire and varieties of

genital behavior according to the more active male and the right and responsibility

of vigorous appetite, while requiring the more passive female to “suffer and be

still.” . . . virile Jonathan Harker enjoys a “feminine” passivity and awaits a

delicious penetration from a woman whose demonism is figured as the power to

penetrate. (445)

If he is the “damsel in distress,” he ultimately manages to extricate himself from his peril

without the aid of a rescuing “hero,” at Castle Dracula. He is definitely in the

“compromised female” role, but he acts with a modern Victorian Englishman’s

exemplary (if idealized) courage and aplomb, given his circumstances. To further

complicate matters, however, he is rescued from sexual ruin (and death, or worse) during

the scene where the “brides” seduce him:

I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my

throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I

closed my eyes in a languourous ecstasy and waited—waited with beating heart.

But at that instant another sensation swept through me as quick as lightning. I was

conscious of the presence of the Count, and of his being as if lapped in a storm of

fury. As my eyes opened involuntarily I saw his strong hand grasp the slender

neck of the fair woman and the white teeth champing with rage, and the fair

cheeks blazing red with passion. (43)

The Count himself rescues Harker. Granted, he does it for his own purposes because

Harker is still of use to him, but consider Stoker’s adherence to and turn away from the

Gothic scene here—the threat of sexual ruin of the protagonist is averted by the

antagonist (of all people). It is somehow familiar that just when the oralistic is poised to

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be a figure of doom over the alphabetic within the novel, it proves itself to be at once the

menace and the maintenance of the same. The relationship is more complex and

interdependent at this moment than mere monster and victim, aggressive male and

helpless female, Stoker has answered these Gothic tropes with fidelity, and yet he has

altered them importantly to fit the story he is telling and the questions he is building

toward. In this scene Stoker asks: How can a modem man be both hero and heroine, how

can his enemy also be his salvation? When might the oralistic depend upon the alphabetic

and vice versa? Can the modem do without the ancient? Of this scene, Peter Garrett

writes in Gothic Reflections:

The affinities between his [Harker’s] blushes and the lady’s blushes and his

arousal are clear, those between her ill-spelt love letter and his shorthand more

obscure, but the insistence of a desire that reveals itself despite its unorthodox or

coded inscription will also run through the scene. As Harker turns his attention

toward his writing, the relation of past and present begins to shift, anticipating the

replacement of the romanticized fair lady by the sexually aggressive “fair girl”

whose “deliberate voluptuousness” he will find “both thrilling and repulsive.” His

last sentence offers the sharpest formulation of the novel’s organizing opposition

between modernity and the archaic powers of the old centuries whose greatest

threat may lie in their seductive appeal, and it is telling (and foretelling) that the

modem is represented here by a technique of writing, that writing is considered as

itself a kind of power, and that modernity will evidently require the aid of

something not merely modern to combat what threatens it. (125)

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This power of the modern embodied in writing is a force against the ancient, it would

seem, but an insufficient force. Something simultaneously “repulsive” and “thrilling”

about the she-vampire recurs —even as Dracula seems to draw clear lines between good

and evil, wholesome and unwholesome, it is always half-seduced by the allure of the

mysterious nature of the past, and never altogether convinced that the modern can do

away with the ancient.

As an extended example of Stoker’s treatment of the Gothic, I want to consider

Jonathan Harker’s carriage ride from the Borgo Pass to Castle Dracula early in the novel.

When Harker first arrives with his fellow passengers to Borgo Pass, Dracula’s carriage

has not yet arrived. This appears to have been deliberate on the part of Harker’s driver,

who has arrived early, and says, “There is no carriage here, the Herr is not expected after

all. He will not come on to Bukovina, and return tomorrow or the next day; better the

next day.” Of course, immediately after this the horses are unsettled and a “tall driver,”

(the Count in disguise) arrives and is immediately on to the driver’s ploy, saying, “You

cannot deceive me, my friend; I know too much, and my horses are swift.” Famously, the

reply comes, “One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger’s

‘Lenore’— ‘Denn die Todten Reiten schnell’— (For the dead travel fast)” (17). Here the

Norton Critical Edition of Dracula makes a note: “Not an exact quotation from Gottfried

August Burger’s 1774 folk ballad, which William Taylor translated into English in 1796.

In “Lenore,” a soldier returns from the dead to claim his bride. Its refrain is, ‘The dead

ride fast.’” (17). Consider the alphabetography of this for a moment: A folk ballad is a

written form based on an oral tradition. “Lenore” was captured in print in German (and

therefore alphabetized) and then translated into English in the late eighteenth-century.

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The Norton editors say it is referenced, but misquoted here, and used to refer to Count

Dracula, who is a (more or less) oralistic villain in a (more or less) alphabetic form.

Stoker has thoroughly confused the matter of origin; is this knowledge of the powers of

the (un)dead from a folk source? Is this a literary reference? Is it properly a quote of

“Lenore” at all or merely a gesture toward it? Whatever Stoker’s intentions, it is a perfect

and unsettling prelude to Harker’s strange carriage ride. It perfectly muddles the modern

and the ancient. This is an echo of Stoker’s Count Dracula: a monster from folk-lore

fused with a historical Transylvanian warlord, transformed into an oralistic literary

figure—his point of origin is not a straight line, but like the Count himself, a sort of

cloud. The more one notes Dracula’s structures, the more one finds them recurring over

and over.

When Harker is swept along into the darkness, the tone has undoubtedly changed.

Harker says, “I felt a little strangely, and not a little frightened. I think had there been any

alternative I should have taken it, instead of prosecuting that unknown night journey”

(18). Already his modern sensibilities are being eroded—the unknown, a hallmark of the

Gothic novel, has made an appearance. Harker’s first real fear does not permit him to

dismiss the misgivings of the locals as mere superstition.

Soon, Harker makes the realization that the carriage is going along in a circle, but

he is too frightened to ask why. He lights a match, and learns it is a few minutes to

midnight. Then dogs begin to howl, and after them wolves “sharper and louder” begin to

howl as well. And then Harker witnesses the driver hopping off the carriage and

disappearing into the darkness in pursuit of mysterious blue flames—flames before which

the driver appears translucent! These blue flames, according to tradition, mark buried

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treasure. Then wolves begin to gather, threatening Harker and the carriage’s horses.

Again, the mysterious driver appears and turns them back with a word, quieting the

beasts and riding on to the crumbling (and ultimate Gothic) site of Castle Dracula.

Obviously, throughout this carriage ride, Gothic tropes are thick on the ground:

buried treasure, darkness, the supernatural, incomprehensibility, fear, foreboding, a dark

castle, a mysterious stranger, and the ancient past. Dracula’s Castle particularly is the

Gothic space to which Harker may travel and which, perhaps dangerously, may be

exported to London, where the world is cutting-edge modem, ordered, rational, and

comprehensible. The Count is more or less explicit about the Gothic properties of his

land, saying, “Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall

be to you many strange things” (27). Indeed, the events Harker details of his journey are

strange to him as a man of “modern” England, and to the reader. Stoker’s treatment of the

Gothic novel reinforces the way the modern world cannot escape the past—whatever

innovations Stoker makes, they are always with an eye to generic convention. Whatever

twists along the way, the old story of the vampire recurs.

The epistolary novel offers the reader objects like letters, journal entries,

newspaper clippings, and so forth that allow for the convention of “found papers.” This

lends a claim of historical truth or reality to the fiction the novel presents. When this

“found papers” sort of testimony is paired with a Gothic novel like Dracula, which has

always hinted at the notion that “after all, there are such things!” (this was what the

curtain speech of the Dracula stage production in America assured audiences in 1927),

the “truth” of horrific monsters and dark powers lends a chilling possibility and a dark

thrill, (Steinmeyer 289). Ultimately, the epistolarity of Dracula has made it all but

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unfilmable as Stoker wrote it. Films and theatre productions abound, but none are

remotely faithful to the novel as written. This has to do, I think, with the particular

features and effects evoked in an epistolary novel that simply are not to be had in any

other medium. For example, simply filming Harker’s trip with a camera lends a

concreteness to his experiences and an apparentness to his reactions—it leaves

unambiguous what the novel purposely makes doubtful. Too much is left to our

imaginations in an epistolary mode that cannot be made so in the medium of film or

theatrical production. This is part of the strength of the epistolary form, and part of what

makes it so effective for Gothic novelization: so much is left in darkness that the reader’s

mind may animate, even unconsciously. Therefore, while Jackson makes a good point

about “showing” letters and therefore locates the epistolary as oralistic in nature, it is also

a form that, unlike the Gothic, is almost inseparable from the written page. Dracula plays

on this as powerfully as any novel ever has and in so doing creates what David J. Skal

calls, “one of the most obsessional texts of all time, a black hole of the imagination.”

(Hollywood Gothic 7). I want to suggest that this is at least in part because of the peculiar

power of the epistolary form. Skal points out Dracula

For instance, includes references to the Kodak camera, the telephone, the portable

typewriter, and updates the epistolary form with transcriptions of Dr. Seward’s

phonographic diary. It is reasonable to assume that the creator of Dracula would

have been as intrigued by the possibilities of film as film would later become

intrigued with Dracula. (25)

Dracula is simultaneously deeply oralistic in nature, but also deeply alphabetic—and

these forms are linked inextricably within the novel. So inextricably, in fact, that

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filmmakers have largely had to cut a great deal and interpose their own plots in order to

make something approximate to, but never quite like, Dracula. Skal posits:

The true horror of Dracula, to the Victorian mind, is his polymorphous perversity.

More horrible still is the possibility that he is not merely an external threat, but

something already lurking inside. Early in the book, Stoker suggests that the

vampire may be a second self as Harker puzzles over Dracula’s failure to reflect

in his shaving mirror. “The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was

no sign of a man in it, except myself.” Doubling and splitting of identity is

associated in clinical terms variously with the inability to escape extreme anxiety

or physical violation, or to reconcile cruelly paradoxical circumstances, all of

which have their thematic resonances in Dracula. (34)

While I don’t suggest (and I don’t think Skal is suggesting) that the Count is merely a

construct of Harker’s mind, the momentary suggestion sketched out in Stoker’s scene at

Castle Dracula is designed to evoke a precise pitch of anxiety, that is, the particular fear

of madness that Harker himself suffers during the early portion of the novel. Variations

of this scene have been shot in several Dracula films, and while the unsettling vampire

trope of the Count approaching the unsuspecting Harker, (or startling him because he has

no reflection) is visually titillating and duly horrifying, it does not approach the fearful

possibility that the novel manages to touch effortlessly: what if Harker is really mad? The

inextricably-linked strains of alphabetic, oralistic, and form in Stoker’s novel create (or

reveal) such submerged fears simultaneously. '

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Another example of the possibilities opened by the epistolary form is the

character of Quincey Morris. He is a bit of a fly in the ointment, it would seem, in my

discussion of the vampire hunters as alphabetic characters. After all, he writes no journal,

keeps no phonograph diary, and exchanges no letters. His sole contribution to the final

“document” (in terms of writing, obviously) is a single telegram. Beyond that he is

reported on, rather than reporting—a characteristic I have suggested is that of an oralistic

character in this novel. Is Quincey oralistic? In some ways I believe he is. A Texas

cowboy is, perhaps, as exotic as the Transylvanian gypsy and as far-removed from

London life. In Stoker’s notes for Dracula, “the Texan,” or Quincey Morris, as we come

to know him, is a fusion of several other characters—primarily “An American Inventor

from Texas,” whom he names early on as “Brutus M. Marix.” (Bisang and Miller 27).

This is important because it would suggest that Quincey was conceptualized to be on the

cutting edge of technology, making bold new steps in the modern world. And yet, by the

1890s, the Texan cowboy of legend was almost synonymous with the personality of

Buffalo Bill Cody, whom Stoker met during a tour of America. As happens so often in

Dracula, the more closely we examine a piece of it, the more complex and overlapping

oralistic and alphabetic elements become. Morris is almost certainly based on Cody, who

was a real person and a legend in his own time, who nevertheless personified a fictional

experience of the American West—he was a performer and showman, above all else. So,

if Quincey is rooted in a true personage, he is also rooted in a fictional genre. If he had

been a Texan inventor instead of a Texan cowboy, but still corresponded with the

characters and the reader in only one document throughout the novel, would “Morris”

still be an alphabetic character instead of an oral one? Is he an oralistic character, after

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all? It is an open question, but I think doubt and fear, as I have said earlier, are Stoker’s

objectives in this case. The reader should be on shaky ground about who and what can be

trusted to heighten the experience of Gothic horror. Perhaps Quincey is what he appears

to be. In fact, I’m inclined to think so, but the way Stoker has written Dracula leaves the

matter open to question. The ambiguity surrounding Quincey Morris as a character has to

do with exactly the same characteristics of the epistolary novel as Harker’s episode with

the mirror. It evokes doubt. Is Quincey to be trusted? Is he, like Renfield, a servant of

darkness? In his forward to The New Annotated Dracula, Neil Gaiman comments,

The story is built up in broad strokes, allowing us to build up our picture of

what’s happening. The story spiderwebs, and we begin to wonder what occurs in

the interstices. Personally, I have my doubts about Quincy Morris’ motives. (The

possibility that he is Dracula’s stooge—or even Dracula himself—cannot, I am

convinced, entirely be discounted), (xvii)

Gaiman sums up nicely what the epistolary form is doing in Dracula and why the

reader’s connection to Morris is so tenuous. I don’t argue that he is “correct” in his

reading of Morris, or “incorrect”: I only argue that Stoker has deliberately left that door

open to sow doubt and fear in the reader as to who may (and may not) be trusted. The

villain is quite explicitly the mustachioed menace, the vampire Count lurking and leering

from the shadows in his dark cape, but for the reader sinister forces may (or may not) also

be present in the guises of the ordinary Englishman in the glass, or the seemingly helpful

foreigner from Texas whose actions and motivations are sometimes obscured. Even when

the novel ends, what has really happened remains unclear. Gaiman characterizes it this

way.

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None of the people who are telling us the story knows the entirety of what is

actually going on. This means that Dracula is a book that forces the reader to fill

in the blanks, to hypothesize, to imagine, to presume. We know only what the

characters know, and the characters neither write down all they know, nor know

the significance of what they do tell, (xvii)

Particularly in Gothic fiction, it’s rarely a challenge to spot the villain (until the advent of

detective fiction, at any rate). There were and are established codes for spotting the

smirking villain in any drama—but Dracula is different. The power of Dracula is

questions like these: What has really happened? Who are these characters? Who is

Quincey P. Morris and where do his allegiances truly lie? Stoker has harnessed inherent

epistolary ambiguity, and used it to reinforce the uncertainty of the present and the way

the past returns to haunt modem pages.

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Conclusion

This thesis has focused on specific ways in which Stoker’s Dracula uses

structure, character, dialogue, plot, mode of storytelling, and genre to weave a story that

frames the past itself as a member of the “grim and grisly ranks of the Un-Dead” (320).

However, Stoker shows that by engaging with the past on its own terms, which is to say

accepting oral story on its own terms, or accepting folklore as a form of wisdom at least

equal to and often inseparable from alphabetic knowledge, modern man can survive to

become in some sense heroic. The first chapter discusses the apparent opposition and

ultimate interdependence of alphabetic and oralistic modes of storytelling and other

technologies and superstitions. The second chapter outlines the narratological techniques

and recursive structure of the novel. Chapter three explores the way Dracula negotiates

form by adhering to conventions, while at the same time innovating and departing from

expectation—always with an eye to the past.

In a book as obsessed with technology as Dracula, the past still holds a power

“that “mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (41). Count Dracula is a monster of legend, an

oralistic creature spawned from folk stories and ancient history—he emerges from a

different time and place to trouble the alphabetic present of the novel. The alphabetic and

oralistic modes, like the vampire and the vampire hunters, seem to be hostile to each

other, but in Dracula, they are inextricable and interdependent. Therefore, since Van

Helsing must use folk/faith remedies like garlic to ward off the vampire and the Host to

sanctify his grave, and since Dracula must use letters and contracts and bills of lading to

accomplish his designs, the technology of writing (and therefore all technology) does not

advance man beyond the vampiric predation of the past.

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Stoker also uses various structural and narratological techniques to point up the

way the past won’t stay in its grave. Stoker uses techniques like mirroring, pitting an evil

self against a character’s better nature, doubling, or making characters face down a

diametrically opposed “other” with whom he/she shares certain traits, and recurring or

parallel situations to reveal the ways in which events recur in Dracula.

Dracula is an epistolary Gothic novel, and it remains faithful to many common

tropes that are the hallmarks of those forms, but it also innovates, addresses old problems

in new ways, and provides fresh approaches to the conventions of both forms. Stoker uses

the inherent ambiguity of the epistolary novel to bolster the fear and uncertainty of his

tale. His ability to turn a “weakness” of Epistolarity into an advantage is, in itself, another

way of demonstrating the way in which the past can return and make use of the “modem”

for its own survival. He inverts or restructures Gothic conventions like the castle or the

sexually compromised maiden to shape a story in which history is cyclical, but advances

in surprising ways. What this amounts to is a novel that consciously registers the reality

that the past is inescapable, and that modernity is an illusion. The past, through the

conventions of Gothic and epistolary predecessors, is present in Dracula. Stoker’s novel

finds new ways to go over the same ground, much as the characters do throughout the

book, progressing to a heroic end that has faced down the vampire in the same place

where the novel (more or less) began. As Doctor Seward so cogently observed, “There is

no such thing as finality” (196).

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