BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA: THE HORROR OF A HISTORICAL VAMPIRE Item Type text; Electronic Thesis Authors Roberson, Jessica Anne Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 25/09/2021 19:29:58 Item License http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/192953 BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA: THE HORROR OF A HISTORICAL VAMPIRE By JESSICA ANNE ROBERSON A Thesis Submitted to The Honors College In Partial Fulfillment of the Bachelor's degree With Honors in English THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA May 2009 I~+-t---+-t~""--"---r-:Io-'--'<..,t-Jv''--------- ! 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I acknowledge that University of Arizona Library may elect not to distribute my thesis in digital format if, in its reasonable judgment, it believes all such rights have not been secured. SIGNED: , i.Z../Y;yC/0 I Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Horror of a Historical Vampire In 1928, self-proclaimed expert of the supernatural Montague Summers was already able to declare that Dracula “has veritably become a household word.” The Transylvanian count that Stoker cobbled together from bits of history and folktale has become a monument of popular culture, often almost wholly removed from the context of Stoker’s novel – in which Dracula himself can only be seen through the eyes of those record keepers. His character is entirely a product of record. Why is this historical vampire so frightening? I argue that Dracula is horrifying because he is an active embodiment of Mina’s opening disclaimer, that the novel is a “history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief.” He is a vampire, an undefined, frightening figure come out of the past, and in order to defeat him, the modern protagonists have to confine him to history through their own narratives. This paper will rely primarily on a close reading of Dracula, in order to determine the ways that Stoker defines time, history and their relationship to the frightening power of the vampire. It will also draw on the work of several contemporary Dracula critics and Twentieth Century vampire texts. Roberson 1 There is no single figure in English literature more provoking than that of the vampire. Whether seducing young women, presiding over an ancient castle, lurking in a New Orleans swamp or even shining iridescently on a Washington hillside, the vampire has maintained a presence in the cultural imagination for the last two hundred years.1 The vampire survives because it is flexible, easily molded into whatever shape the author desires it to take. The vampire is the ultimate other: undead, immortal, inhuman. The vampire can be anything other than what we know. The vampire must be defined by negations, by an explanation of what a vampire is not, rather than what it is. For the purposes of this study, however, I am going to use the definition provided by Brian J. Frost in The Monster With a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and History, very slightly abridged: “A vampire is fundamentally a parasitic force or being […] whose paramount desire is to absorb the life force or ingest the vital fluids of a living organism in order to […] perpetuate its unnatural existence” (Frost 27). Still, even this definition is ambiguous, because the ways and means of the vampire’s parasitic lifestyle are left to the individual author. The vampire is an infinite predator, around whom “have clustered the most somber superstitions, for he is a thing which belongs to no world at all" (Summers 1).2 If we are to look for a definitive vampire, however, then there is little doubt that we must turn to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Although it was published over a hundred years ago in 1897, the novel remains a rare cultural phenomenon. It has never been out of print, and has inspired a huge number of adaptations, spin-offs and wannabes. In 1928, self- 1 John Polidori’s The Vampyre, Dracula, Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, respectively. 2 Montague Summers agrees with the fear of the indefinite: “The authentic note of horror is struck in the eerie suggestion which, as we have noticed, is of intent left ill-defined. Nothing could be more crude than an explanation” (Summers 273). Roberson 2 proclaimed expert of the supernatural Montague Summers was already able to declare that Dracula “has veritably become a household word" (Summers 333). Dracula was by no means the first of his species to appear in the English language. The myth of the reanimated corpse is a common one, though it was slow to reach England, spreading first throughout Eastern Europe, and then through Germany to the north. The word began to appear in literature at the beginning of the nineteenth century, influenced by German folklore and the gothic novels of Goethe, first translated in the late 1700s, as well as sensationalist reports of vampire sightings throughout Europe. The earliest examples of vampire-like figures in English literature are in the Romantic poetry if people like Coleridge, Keats and Byron: Christabel’s sinister Geraldine, La Belle Dame Sans Merci and the Giour, for example. Then in 1816, Byron’s physician John Polidori published The Vampyre, a short novel based on an unfinished fragment written by his famous employer. And so, the vampire has entered the dialect of the English novel. It continues to pop up over the next eighty years, most notably in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and in more popular, comical serialized stories like Varney the Vampire, with a camp and bestial aristocrat as the main character.3 None of these early vampires retain the influence of Dracula, a legacy that is particularly noticeable in the vampire stories written since its publication. The vampires who follow him are all in his shadow. As influential as the novel has been to the development of the horror genre and the evolution of the gothic, its power as a novel pales beside the vampire himself. The famous Transylvanian count that Stoker cobbled together and named after a vicious medieval nobleman, who, in a book composed entirely 3 For a more thorough treatment of the first century of vampire literature, see Carol Senf’s The Vampire in Nineteenth Century Literature. Roberson 3 of first hand accounts, never truly speaks for himself. This appears to be deliberate. An amendment to the front of the manuscript, ostensibly compiled by Mina Harker, may give some insight into how Stoker intended the novel to be perceived: How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made clear in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past events wherein memory may err, for all of the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them (Stoker 0). It is worth noting that Dracula is not presented as a novel, but as a fictional history. History is a word that due to common use, has a definition that is often simplified or assumed to mean ‘the past’ in general, with no real differentiation between different methods or means of narrating the events that make up the past. It is easy to forget that history is not in fact the events themselves, but rather “a relation of incidents (in early use, either true or imaginary; later only of those professedly true); a narrative, tale, story” (OED “history”). A manuscript presented as a history to the public, then, is one step removed from the action of the story. Combined with the first person narrative, which invites intimacy and identification with the characters, the fictional history creates a dichotomy of intimacy and distance. Stoker also points out the bias of his own historians, who can only operate “within the range of knowledge” that they possess (Stoker 0). The vampire’s viewpoint is not shared; this technique allows Stoker to isolate the vampire from the human experiences expressed in the novel. The vampire is immediately relegated to the role of something other than human. Dracula himself can only be seen Roberson 4 through the eyes of those record keepers. His character is entirely a product of record. The title of the novel is aptly chosen, because the history of Dracula is what forms his character. Dracula, then, is not the record of a vampire hunt so much as it is the record of the vampire.