Elizabeth Miller is recognized internationally for her expertise on Dracula – its origins in folklore, literature and history, as well as its influence on the culture of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has written several books on the subject, the most recent of which–Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula–was published last month. You can find links to all of her Dracula-related writing and research at blooferland.com.
In 1908, Irish writer Bram Stoker (far better known in his own day as a theatre manager than as an author) approached a young Winston Churchill about an interview for a London newspaper. Churchill, who eschewed interviews, made an exception in this case because, as he told Stoker, “You are the author of Dracula.”
The novel Dracula was published in London in 1897. The book has never been out of print, and has been reissued in hundreds of editions including dozens of foreign language translations. Today, its title evokes instant recognition. It is one of those rare novels that just about everyone has heard of but few have actually read. While the novel was by no means a best seller during the lifetime of its author (Stoker died in 1912), its later adaptation into stage plays and movies would assure its immortality. The figure of Count Dracula has managed to permeate just about every aspect of our culture: from comic books to chamber musicals, from Halloween costumes to ballet productions, from Dracula websites to Dracula tours. In a way, Dracula has become a victim of its own success. The plot has been mangled (especially by the movies), and the figure of Count Dracula has been trivialized to the point of ridicule.
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!” With these words, Count Dracula invites Jonathan Harker (and the reader) into his castle. I have a word of advice for the first-time visitor to this unusual novel: leave all your preconceptions and misconceptions outside the castle door. Forget the tacky movies, forget “I vant to suck your blooood” (a line that does not appear in the book), forget the Count on Sesame Street, forget Anne Rice, forget Twilight. And above all, forget Vlad the Impaler!
Bram Stoker did not invent the vampire. While vampires are part of the folklore and legends of many cultures dating back to ancient times, they did not make their appearance in British fiction until the early nineteenth century, with the publication of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819). Polidori based his vampire – Lord Ruthven – on his former employer, the infamous Lord Byron. Interest in vampire literature continued through the nineteenth century. But it was Dracula (1897) that became the yardstick by which all future vampires in both fiction and film would be measured. Though Stoker appropriated certain elements of earlier fiction, his novel represents a major break from the Byronic tradition. He reached back to folklore to establish his vampire as more animalistic and repulsive – a walking corpse with fetid breath, hairy palms and pointed fingernails. The Count Dracula of Stoker’s novel is not, to the disappointment of many first-time readers today, the romantic, suave figure that evolved during the twentieth century.
Thanks to the availability of Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (124 pages of plot outlines, lists of characters, descriptions, medical details, an article entitled “Vampires in New England,” and research notes), we know a great deal about the genesis and development of the novel. For example, the Notes indicate that Stoker found the name “Dracula” in an obscure history book (William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia) in the Whitby Public Library where he was vacationing in the summer of 1890. He had already started his novel, and even had a name for his vampire – Count Wampyr. He was attracted to the name “Dracula” because a footnote in his source indicated it was derived from a Romanian word meaning “devil.” He appropriated the name, and Dracula became a vampire. Apparently, Stoker knew very little about the original Dracula (Vlad the Impaler). As for Transylvania, that was not Stoker’s first choice as a homeland for his vampire Count. That distinction belongs to Styria, a province in Austria and the setting of Le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (1872). The change was apparently inspired by Emily Gerard’s article “Transylvanian Superstitions” (The Nineteenth Century, 1885).
Prior to the 1970s, the academic community paid little attention to Dracula. That began to change, as post-modernist challenges to the traditional literary canon became more widespread. Dracula is now viewed by many as a significant novel. Indeed, its links with a vast range of disciplines, including anthropology, folklore, history, literature, medicine, psychology, religious studies and cultural studies have led to exciting scholarship and criticism. Many point to its psychosexual underpinnings. For others, it provides a window through which we can view the late Victorian age, the “fin-de-siècle” with its many fears and anxieties: the blurring of gender roles, waves of immigration from Eastern Europe, the erosion of traditional Christian beliefs in an increasingly skeptical age; the fear of regression, a reversal of evolution, a return to our more primal animal state.
In spite of its improbabilities, its overwrought dialogue and its internal inconsistencies, Dracula is a classic. The explosion of scholarly interest in what for decades was dismissed as an inferior novel is both a measure of Dracula’s significant contribution to the bridging of the gap between popular and elitist writing and an indication of the enduring power of the myth that Stoker borrowed and reshaped, a myth that resonates in different ways for each generation, inviting them to confront their own fears, anxieties and desires. Dracula has managed to implant itself firmly in our cultural consciousness. While the craftsmanship is somewhat flawed, we have in Dracula another example of what Harold Bloom once said of Edgar Allan Poe, a work that is “somehow stronger than its telling… What survives is the psychological dynamics and the mythic reverberations.”
It is a novel that demands to be read.
Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula: A Facsimile Edition. Transcribed and annotated by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller. McFarland, 2008.
Clive Leatherdale, Dracula: The Novel and the Legend – A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece. Desert Island Books, 2001.
Elizabeth Miller, Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Journey into Vampire Country and the Dracula Phenomenon. Pegasus, 2009.
Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker. Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Carol A. Senf, Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism. Twayne, 1998.
David J Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen. Faber & Faber, 2004.
What a neat intro. I had been figuring on Dracula as something of a lightweight read to bring me down off of IJ, but maybe I’ve sold it short. Scholarly input about a work at a rather greater distance culturally than IJ was will be most welcome, and I hope we hear more from you as the read progresses.
While one risks ridicule by trying to link Jest and Dracula together too closely, I think there’s a real similarity in the structural approach both take … DFW, like many before him, worked hard to confound the traditional novel structure through cut scenes, included reference material, non-linear narrative and outright appropriation of common cultural memes as a part of the overall flow of the story (see The Bricklayer’s Letter section in IJ). It’s a pastiche of sources that brings all of the players and narrative sources together in the end for a not-altogether conclusive conclusion.
I think we’ll find that Stoker did precisely the same thing. I’ve never read Dracula, but I listened to a Librivox.org reading of it during the early part of this year. When Infinite Summer Began, I was just finishing Dracula and was struck at the way Dracula was built … piecemeal and in frustratingly small pieces that demanded the reader pay attention throughout. Just like IJ.
This should be fun.
Already 16.55% of the way through the book, and it’s well worth it. Join me! Enter freely and of your own will — the book is out of copyright, after all.
You won’t quite finish by Halloween, but you can also read Dracula by following Whitney Sorrow’s blog: http://dracula-feed.blogspot.com/
She is posting each diary entry, letter, and newspaper clipping on the appropriate date.
Thank you for that fantastic intro to the book! I read the novel a few years ago, so I’m looking forward to picking up on and benefitting from your insights above.
I just downloaded Dracula for free onto my Kindle, and picked up Frankenstein and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the same time. I’m ready to get into Halloween mode!
I’m in! Halloween is my favourite holiday, and Dracula is one of my favourite books. I haven’t reread it all that closely since taking a graduate-level seminar on Gothic novels in college. I’m kinda heartbroken about missing the Infinite Jest discussion so completely, since that’s _also_ one of my favourite books. But this sounds like great fun!
Ms. Miller, I have a question about the chapter structure of Dracula. I am using Jonathon McNichols chapter-by-chapter PDF, and just finished Chapter 4. I see that Chapters 2-4 end in the middle of a journal entry by Harker, and the entry concludes in the first page of the next chapter. What is the reason for this breaking up of a daily entry into two chapters? Was Dracula first published in serial form, and this was a cliff-hanger way to keep readers anticipating the chapter to come? Or was it to keep the chapters approximately even in length? It’s kind of aggravating, especially when Stoker is writing excellent passages of the novel. The PDF’s being only one chapter at a time may be heightening this effect.
Bob – good question. No, the novel was not first published in serial form. I’m not sure why Stoker chopped up chapters the way he did. Having closely examined his working Notes (which include a couple of chapter outlines), I notice that he seemed to have a fondness for symmetry. (After all, he had been a math major at Trinity College.)I suspect he was aiming at some sense of balance in the length of chapters.
[...] is seeing Count Dracula as a truly terrifying figure once again. As Elizabeth Miller wrote in her introduction to the book this month, it’s a victim of its own success. Dracula has been incorporated into [...]
I’m re-reading Dracula for the third time this year in preparation for an original adaptation of the story for the stage to open in September of 2010. I’ve also been reading some histories and critiques of the novel. One of my all time favorite things ever written is Joseph Valente’s Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood. It explores everything from the politics of the era, to Stoker’s psychology, to narrative techniques. I highly recommend reading it. I wish I would have found this site when you began reading the novel, but just Stumbled it today. I’m maybe a few chapters behind, but will try to catch up and will definitely follow this discussion from here out.
So far I’ve read some great entries, but the entry about Jonathan passivity is particularly nice. You’ll notice how Jonathan and Dracula change places over the course of the novel. Their chacteristics switch completely; young and old, hard and soft, hunted and prey, etc. It’s classic doppelganger effect. In fact, you’ll notice that when the famous mirror scene occurs in Dracula’s castle, Jonathan remarks that there was no one else in it but him. That’s because they’re the same. He later says he never saw the Count in the daylight, but that scene takes place in the morning. How can a creature of the night have been present in the morning were it not because Jonathan himself was present in the morning? They are two sides of the same coin.