A Taste of the Gothic: Film and Television Versions of Dracula
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A taste of the gothic: film and television versions of Dracula Book or Report Section Accepted Version Bignell, J. (2000) A taste of the gothic: film and television versions of Dracula. In: Sheen, E. and Giddings, R. (eds.) From Page to Screen: Adaptations of the Classic Novel:. Manchester University Press, Manchester, pp. 114-130. ISBN 9780719052316 Available at http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/31782/ It is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the work. See Guidance on citing . Publisher: Manchester University Press All outputs in CentAUR are protected by Intellectual Property Rights law, including copyright law. Copyright and IPR is retained by the creators or other copyright holders. Terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in the End User Agreement . www.reading.ac.uk/centaur CentAUR Central Archive at the University of Reading Reading’s research outputs online A Taste of the Gothic: Film and Television Versions of Dracula Jonathan Bignell The genre of Gothic literature is difficult to define. I shall give a brief explanation of what is meant by the Gothic in literature, then narrow my focus onto Dracula and adaptations of the novel in TV and especially film. I shall attempt briefly to both describe the extent of Dracula's penetration into the film and TV media, and also to account for the fascination with this character and story. Victor Sage has characterised a diverse group of historical romance novels of the eighteenth century, including for example Lewis' The Monk (1796) and Mrs Radcliffe's Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), as offering to their contemporary readers an experience of terror and sublime feeling.1 This group of novels Sage calls 'the Gothick', a first surge of cultish popular fiction which was then followed by nineteenth century reelaborations of supernatural and macabre themes in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1820) and novels by Wilkie Collins, Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker, for example. It is this later nineteenth century phase of popular writing which is now normally termed the Gothic (without the 'k'), including works like The Woman in White (1860), Dracula (1897) and A Turn of the Screw (1898). Thus Stoker's Dracula was far from an isolated example of fiction about the eruption of unnatural creatures into the comfort of English society and into the apparently secure world of the middle-class home; by the end of the nineteenth century the literary tradition of the Englishman confronting savage beasts at home 1 and abroad was firmly established. Around the same time that Dracula was published, the security of the private sphere (home and family) and of the public sphere (nation and Empire) was violated in fiction by, for instance, the Beast People in H. G. Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau (1896, filmed in 1996), and by the under- evolved and uncivilised creature Dr Jekyll in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886, most recently filmed in 1996 as Mary Reilly). We should recall that the England of the late nineteenth century was regarded as the highest point of human civilisation, when industrial technology and the power of science appeared to offer a thoroughgoing conquest of nature. But such assurance brought with it a fear of relapse into a savage past, and an anxiety about other forces (especially those within the psyche) which had yet to be explained. Victorians were afraid of degeneration back to a pre-civilised state, known as atavism. Dracula's origin in the 'backward' east of Europe, his unrestrained 'primitive' appetite and sexuality are among the characteristics which made him alien and fearful to Britons. But he is also at home in modern London, strolling the streets like a cosmopolitan urbanite. Similarly, the central characters in the novel try to use modern technology to catch Dracula, primarily by recording information and producing writing, and also by travelling on the new pan-European rail networks and using modern medical science. However, what succeeds are the weapons of pre-urbanised culture, the garlic and wooden stakes of superstition and myth. What we find in the Gothic are attempts to reconcile contradictions between, for instance, civilisation and primitivism, rationality and superstition. A helpful phrase which Sage uses to describe all this fiction, 'equivocal explanation of irrational phenomena', might not be sufficient in itself to distinguish a whole genre of writing, but it points economically to some of 2 the issues which I want to discuss here in relation to the Gothic, and in particular versions of Bram Stoker's Dracula.2 Both cinema and the novel are narrative media, and it is hardly surprising that film and television have adapted novels for the screen. Starting from Sage's phrase – the 'equivocal explanation of irrational phenomena' - we can begin to see how the Gothic novel is suited for film and TV adaptation. Ghosts, vampires, telepathic communication, transformations of the body, and unexplained appearance and disappearance are all 'irrational phenomena' which are routinely found in Gothic fiction and which the technical properties of the film and television media can render as if real. The iconic quality of the visual signs of film and TV, whereby the two- dimensional image appears to render three-dimensional objects faithfully, gives the stamp of authenticity to what is seen on the screen, while electronic recording technologies also simulate sounds in a generally realistic way. 'Phenomena' are things which are perceived to exist, yet these existent things are not susceptible to 'rational' investigation; they remain real, but in a particular and limited sense. Gothic fiction and film and television fictions, since they are narrative forms, are occupied with 'explanation' of these phenomena, in the sense that they portray them and account for them in a way which allows the reader or viewer to accept them in the context of a narrative. But at the same time these narratives convey their shocking and uncanny characteristics through equivocation; by failing to provide enough information for a rational explanation to do away entirely with their emotional and psychological effects. Gothic then, in its literary and its contemporary media forms, is constituted by two sets of features which are themselves composed of radically different elements. Irrational phenomena lead us both to the realism of what seems phenomenologically 3 true, but also to the uncertainty of the fantastic. Equivocal explanation offers us the linearity and closure of a narrative account, but an account which will not deliver a quotidian solution to the enigmas which are presented to us. This rich mixture of the believable and the unbelievable, the coherent account and the accumulation of startling moments of intense experience, are perhaps the source of the power of the Gothic for its readers and for the audiences of adaptations in film and TV. But this internal mixing in the genre has also been the reason for the devaluation of Stoker's novel and other examples of the Gothic, which were not regarded as 'literary' in their day, but as entertaining thrillers. The highbrow literary magazine The Athenaeum reviewed Dracula in 1897, concluding that the novel is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events.... Still, Mr Stoker has got together a number of 'horrid details', and his object, assuming it to be ghastliness, is fairly well fulfilled. Isolated scenes and touches are probably quite uncanny enough to please those for whom they are designed.3 There is a definite implication here that readers of the novel are people likely to be seduced by the 'ghastliness' of the tale, and not sufficiently discerning to notice its apparent failings in literariness. Despite the striking sensations which are produced by the writing, and yet because of their presence, the novel is said to be incoherent, disjointed, and an accumulation of moments rather than a flowing narrative. The problem with Dracula, it seems, is that it can suspend the reader's critical faculties and draws him or her into the role of a duped consumer. We might even argue that the effect of the novel on its readers is parallel to the effect of Dracula on his victims: just as Dracula enslaves women to an appetite for excessive consumption 4 of blood and frees them from civilised inhibitions, so Dracula turns readers into indiscriminate consumers of fiction and deprives them of educated judgement.4 But the pleasure of this absorption in the narrative was described much more positively by another reviewer, in the Daily Mail newspaper in the same year: By ten o'clock the story had so fastened itself upon our attention that we could not even pause to light our pipe. At midnight the narrative had fairly got on our nerves; a creepy terror had seized upon us, and when, at length, in the early hours of the morning, we went upstairs to bed it was with the anticipation of nightmare.5 Here there is a relish in the pleasures of being seduced and made to forget the everyday (like lighting one's pipe). The ambiguity of the phrase 'got on our nerves' tells both of the potentially unsettling loss of control which reading produces, while also testifying to the un-nerving thrill of the emotions generated in response to the text. The effects of the text, which has insinuated itself enough to produce nightmares after finishing the book, are both pleasurable and threatening to the reader's sense of self. This kind of reaction to fiction, in both written and visual forms, can still be seen today in responses to paperback horror fiction, slasher films, 'body horror' and other 'video nasties', and some graphic novels.