Book Review: Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker

“Listen to them – the children of the night. What music they make!” (22).

Bram Stoker’s gothic classic Dracula was actually conceived out of the same primordial soup as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It all began during that famous stormy summer in 1816 on Lake Geneva when a band of merry romantics gathered after reading the French collection of German horror tales Fantasmagoria and decided to have a little competition telling ghost stories of their own. Among the was: the poet Lord Byron and his physician John William Polidori, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his eighteen-year-old mistress Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as well as her stepsister Claire Clairmont who was having an affair with Lord Byron at the time. When Mary had finished telling her story (an early draft of Frankenstein), Lord Byron then read his story, a vampiric tale about an elderly aristocrat named Augustus Darvell who travels with a young acquaintance to Greece/Turkey and dies in a graveyard after promising to come back from the dead. There, Lord Byron concluded his unfinished tale, although he apparently planned for Darvell to later resurface, very much alive and seducing his companion’s sister. The incomplete story was later published without Byron’s approval varyingly titled “Fragment of Novel,” “A Fragment” and even “The Burial: A Fragment.” But the story was eventually revived by Byron’s physician John Polidori who rewrote and expanded upon the tale, eventually publishing it anonymously without Byron’s permission as The Vampyre (1819). Needless to say, Lord Byron was furious (especially after he received unwanted attribution for Polidori’s story). After Polidori was dismissed by Byron, he fell into disgrace and depression amidst a slew of gambling debts. He died some three years later, possibly of suicide.

While Abraham “Bram” Stoker (1847-1912) was not party to this now-legendary ghost story competition, he did adopt the vampire story as his own, while at the same time managing to weave together a synthesis of many other folkoric Nosferatu mythology as well as more established published works, from Lord Byron’s original conception of the vampire as an elite aristocrat, to the sexualized sapphic vampire as featured in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872). Building on the horror novels that preceded it, Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel, giving it the stamp of realism. It is told via a variety of collected journal entries, letters, telegrams, and news articles which all tell us of an emerging tension between the old world and the new, ancient and modern. In the novel, the busy, bustling, mechanical, industrial world of modern Christian England comes into conflict with a strange ancient otherworldly evil rising out of the East.

Our protagonist is Jonathan Harker, a young upstart solicitor (recently promoted from the role of solicitor’s clerk). He is sent by his boss, Mr. Hawkins, who suffers from gout which prevents him from traveling, to complete a real estate transaction with a mysterious aristocrat located deep in Eastern Europe. A shadowy Count named Dracula is interested in purchasing an old London estate (Stoker apparently used the name “Dracula” erroneously believing it meant “Devil” in Romanian). The opening sections of Dracula are utterly engrossing as we depart from the orderly civilization of the West (where Jonathan regularly fusses about money, his career, and whether the trains will run on time), to the East across the Danube where train tracks disappear and give way to dirt roads, carriages, and a scattering of superstitious peasant farmers. There are no maps or road signs here as Jonathan heads to the “extreme east of the country, just on the border of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains, one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.” Today, the mountaintop ruins of Vlad the Impaler’s castle are located in central Romania. Vlad III (“the Impaler”), son of Vlad Dracul, was a 15th century Orthodox Christian ruler of Wallachia known for his brutality, though it’s debatable whether Stoker actually used him as inspiration for Dracula. Other scholars suggest Stoker may have found inspiration in the life of Elizabeth Báthory, a 16^th century Hungarian noblewoman and sadist who reportedly lured hundreds of young women to her castle where she tortured and killed them. According to popular legend, she was said to have bathed in the blood of young virgins to absorb their youth and vitality).

Since the story of Dracula is one of the most well-known in the world, I’ll attempt to offer a semi-brief summary here to save room for further analysis below. Jonathan Harker arrives at Castle Dracula after crossing the Borgo Pass on the Eve of St. George’s Day “when the clock strikes midnight, all the evil things in the world will have full sway.” Despite the protestations of locals who fear the darkness that haunts this night, the skeptical Jonathan Harker presses onward to conduct his business, only humbly accepting a crucifix from his landlady as protection. But amidst all the nightmares, and sounds of howling wolves across the countryside, Jonathan starts to grow fearful. He realizes he is vulnerable and alone when his first carriage filled with locals meets up with another carriage out of the darkness that takes him up to Castle Dracula. On this journey, he spots strange blue flames out in the night, and his grim ultra-strong driver seems to command the very forces of nature when he raises a hand to direct the wolves himself. Now, the landscape has gone from being quaint and “picturesque” as Jonathan repeatedly describes it, to stark and jagged –not unlike the transition in Shakespeare’s plays from the lush fertile greenery in his comedies to the dark barren wastelands in his tragedies. Here, the horror genre shares something in kinship with classical tragedy.

At any rate, upon arrival at Castle Dracula, Jonathan is alarmed when he finds a run-down edifice: “Suddenly I became conscious of the fact that the driver was in the act of pulling up the horses in the courtyard of a vast ruined castle, from whose tall black windows came no ray of light, and whose broken battlements showed a jagged line against the moonlit sky” (18). And “Within, stood a tall old man, clean-shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long, quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door” (19). This is our primary introduction to Count Dracula: an older man with a strong face, a highbridge nose, and peculiarly arched nostrils, with a lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, as well as massive bushy curled eyebrows, almost meeting over the nose, and a “cruel looking mouth,” with sharp white teeth protruding over the lips (in addition to pointed ears, hairs in the center of his palms, and long pointy nails). His physical features are mysterious and grotesque, he seems almost primeval and bestial.

For Jonathan, like many British characters before him, his gentlemanly politeness becomes his own downfall. He cannot resist the Count’s insistence that he stay for a few days while they discuss the real estate transaction. But several days quickly turns into a month as Jonathan finds himself enclosed in the upper chambers of the castle and he starts to fear for his life, realizing he has become a prisoner. He starts having horrific nightmares and even experiences a hazy midnight encounter with three terrifying pale seductresses –perhaps mere apparitions— who try to “kiss” his neck. He also sees a bag with a wailing baby inside, followed by a disheveled woman looking for her lost child at the gate (she is then ravaged by wolves). Jonathan is locked in his room for days on end as madness and terror begins to take hold. In one particularly horrifying scene, he gazes out his window as the Count climbs down the huge castle wall like a lizard: “But my very feelings changed to repulsion and terror when I saw the whole man slowly emerge from the window and begin to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings. At first I could not believe my eyes. I thought it was some trick of the moonlight, some weird effect of shadow; but I kept looking, and it could be no delusion. I saw the fingers and toes grasp the corners of the stones, worn clear of the mortar by the stress of years, and by thus using every projection and inequality move downwards with considerable speed, just as a lizard moves along a wall… What manner of man is this, or what manner of creature is it in the semblance of a man? I feel the dread of this horrible place overpowering me; I am in fear – in awful fear – and there is no escape for me; I am encompassed about the terrors that I dare not think of…” (38).

This later gives Jonathan an idea: he climbs out his own window and scales the castle wall much like he had seen the Count do, and enters the Count’s room hoping to find a key so he can escape. But inside he merely finds a stash of gold and jewelry in addition to a stairway that leads down to a shadowy crypt of an old ruined chapel, a place with a sickly odor of old earth that has been newly tunneled, and in one of fifty boxes lying strewn about Jonathan happens upon none other than the Count himself, lying face-up and glassy-eyed like death, with red lips, and no pulse nor heart beat: “The great box was in the same place, close against the wall, but the lid was laid on it, not fastened down, but with the nails ready in their places to be hammered home. I knew I must reach the body for the key, so I raised the lid, and laid it back against the wall. And then I saw something which filled my very soul with horror. There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half restored. For the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey. The cheeks were fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath. The mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran down over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood. He lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.” (55). Jonathan rushes back to his room in terror (only to eventually return again a second time).

Shortly thereafter Dracula makes plans to leave his castle, apparently leaving Jonathan to the whims of his three vampiric seductresses who have been longing to suck Jonathan’s blood. But this little plot twist confused me –why would Count Dracula bring Jonathan all this way and imprison him in his castle only to abandon him? Did Dracula have some grander plan for Jonathan all along? Regardless, Jonathan manages to escape from the castle and he eventually winds up in a hospital in Budapest, recovering from “brain fever.”

From here, the narrative turns to Jonathan’s young fiancée Wilhelmina “Mina” Murray (an assistant schoolmistress) and her close friend Lucy Westenra, a beautiful lady on holiday in coastal Whitby where she is fielding marriage proposals from a trio of men: Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood (note: contrast this trio of young gentleman with the three vampiric women who accost Jonathan in Dracula’s castle). Lucy eventually accepts Arthur Holmwood’s proposal, but she soon starts behaving strangely and sleepwalking, with horrid nightmares, especially after a storm comes and a mysterious Russian schooner called the “Demeter” crashes into the dock at Whitby, with its helmsman shockingly tied to the wheel wearing a plethora of crucifixes and beads (the ship’s log, translated by the Russian consul clerk, describes a crew gone mad and a dark stranger below deck preyed upon them). We later find Lucy on a cloudy moonlit night in the old Whitby Abbey churchyard as a long black figure is spotted bending over her leaving two little piercings on her throat (this abbey is based on the actual Abbey at Whitby and the ship the “Demeter” is an allusion to the Greek goddess of agriculture and fertility, the deity most closely associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries, and the mother of Persephone who was kidnapped and taken down to the Underworld – interestingly enough, in the novel the boat “The Demeter” is also carrying the metaphorical Angel of Death from the Underworld to Western Europe).

At any rate, Lucy is at first treated for her illness by her former suitor Dr. John Seward (who runs an asylum that houses a great many people, including a fly-eating madman named R.M. Renfield), but Dr. Seward quickly turns to the expertise of one Abraham Van Helsing, “M.D., D.Ph., D.Litt., etc., etc.” in Amsterdam. Upon his arrival in Whitby, Van Helsing quickly realizes the dire situation and he starts organizing blood-transfusions and fills Lucy’s room with garlic flowers, but her mother –unaware of the garlic’s importance– opens a window to release the odor and together she and her daughter are eventually overwhelmed and attacked by a wolf in the night. Lucy’s mother dies of fear and Lucy grows faint before she dies shortly thereafter, as well (luckily, Lucy managed to write down all of her experiences in the night). Lucy is then given a funeral, but rumors begin to emerge of disappearing children in the town. In several highly atmospheric sweat-inducing scenes, Van Helsing and Seward camp out at night in the graveyard where they come to believe Lucy is actually now a member of the “Un-Dead,” a vicious nosferatu preying on young children –“It was a lonely vigil. Just after I had taken my place I heard a distant clock strike twelve, and in time came one and two. I was chilled and unnerved, and angry with the Professor for taking me on such an errand and with myself for coming. I was too cold and too sleepy to be keenly observant, and not sleeping enough to betray my trust; so altogether I had a dreary, miserable time… Suddenly, as I turned round, I thought I saw something like a white streak, moving between two dark yew-trees at the side of the churchyard farthest from the tomb; at the same time a dark mass moved from the Professor’s side of the ground, and hurriedly went towards it. Then I too moved; but I had to go round headstones and railed-off tombs, and I stumbled over graves. The sky was overcast, and somewhere far off an early cock crew. A little way off, beyond the line of scattered jumpier-trees, which marked the pathway to the church, a white, dim figure flitted in the direction of the tomb. The tomb itself was hidden by trees, and I could not see where the figure disappeared. I heard the rustle of actual movement where I had first seen the white figure, and coming over, found the Professor holding in his arms a tiny child” (202-203).

Van Helsing and Dr. Seward beckon Lucy’s other two suitors, Mr. Morris and Arthur Holmwood, to join them as they open Lucy’s coffin, and upon finding it empty, they venture out into the night and soon encounter a pale walking corpse –the body of Lucy– which is strangely described in necrophiliac fashion as a ‘beautiful’ woman with red lips. The men lure her back into her coffin and Arthur, Lucy’s betrothed in life, becomes the one to hammer a wooden stake into her heart: “The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it. His face was set, and high duty seemed to shine through it; the sight of it gave us courage so that our voices seemed to ring through the little vault” (220-221).

Admittedly, from this point the novel slows and wanders a bit. It grows somewhat drab as Mina nurses Jonathan Harker back to health and they return to London. Eventually they join up with Van Helsing before Dracula embarks on a fearsome nighttime ritual, tormenting and controlling Mina, in which he and Mina both drink each other’s blood, while the group starts destroying Dracula’s earth boxes which he requires for sleep. But when the men try to entrap Dracula in his Piccadilly home, he flees having saved one extra secret box for himself: “You think to baffle me, you – with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a butcher’s. You shall be sorry yet, each one of you! You think you have left me without a place to rest, but I have more. My revenge is just begun! I spread it over centuries, and time is on my side. Your girls that you all love are mine already. And through them you and others shall yet be mine, my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed. Bah!” (312-313). They trail Dracula back to Transylvania (Mina included), but the group splits up in Romania with Van Helsing (briefly flanked by a hallucinating Mina) venturing onward to Castle Dracula where Van Helsing kills the three vampiric wives while Jonathan Harker and Arthur Holmwood follow Dracula’s boat the “Czarina Catherine” downriver. Once back on land, Dr. Seward and Mr. Morris jump the band of gypsies who are transporting Dracula’s box and eventually they wrestle it away, pry it open, and Jonathan Harker decapitates the Count while Mr. Morris stabs him straight through the heart, the act which finally kills the Count (later Mr. Morris also dies after succumbing to his wounds sustained in fighting the gypsies). The death of the Count releases Mina from her vampiric trance and lifts her blood curse: “I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well… As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph… But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr Morris’ bowie knife plunged into the heart… It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight… I shall be glad as long as I live that even in the moment of final dissolution there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there… The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun” (384).

In a final “note” from Jonathan, recorded seven years later, he recalls all the terrifying events surrounding the rise of Count Dracula with some degree of distance. He shares that he and Mina now have a son named Quincey, named after the late Quincey Morris, and that Dr. Seward and Arthur Holmwood are also married. This is all recounted to us as the young boy Quincey is seated on Van Helsing’s lap and Van Helsing reminds us: “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” The compilers of these documents are clearly aware they are speaking to a largely skeptical audience.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula is a profoundly anti-enlightenment novel; it is skeptical of modern rationalism as the end-all be-all. As is fitting for a major work in the Gothic-Romantic literary tradition, Dracula questions the fruits of the enlightenment by confronting readers with a deep primal fear of an elemental ancient “Un-Dead” demonic figure who preys on the innocent. Characters cannot reason their way out of this predicament. This is a world where evil affirmatively exists and it can only be stamped out by good men who practice religion. Dracula suggests that even amidst the many comforts we are afforded through modern science and technology, some ancient fears and superstitions are still worth purging by means of horror and tragedy. It is a troubling realization. In many ways, the rustic peasants are shown to possess greater wisdom than Western doctors and scientists, whose devices are no match for the awesome power of nature. And in the modern Christian world (as opposed to the ancient Pagan world), the figure of Count Dracula invokes horror in readers precisely because he is a troubling alternative to the figure of Jesus Christ. In some ways, like Jesus, Dracula offers life after death by means of drinking blood and initiation rites –he is part-supernatural and part super-human. However, unlike Jesus, Dracula is very much a being of ‘this world.’ That is, he is corporeal and he can ultimately be killed. He is also earthy and connected to nature (he sleeps in the dirt and lives in a crumbling castle atop the rural Carpathian mountains); he can command the behavior of wild animals, like wolves and rats; he thrives on blood, an inherited natural substance over which people have little control; and he has harnessed the power of transfiguration (as opposed to transubstantiation), he can shapeshift himself into a bat or a wolf. With this in mind, we might rightly interpret Count Dracula as more akin to an ancient Greek deity, whose gods often bore the touch of evil and which were not subject to the radical soul-body break as introduced in the rise of Christian theology –perhaps Dracula would have even had his own mystery rites ceremony in ancient Greece.

Yet it is also Dracula’s strange status as an “other” which rouses such terror. He is an immigrant hailing not simply from another part of the world, but also from another age entirely, a pre-industrial hellhound straight out of the ancient superstitions and natural fears that were found among the cultures of Europe in antiquity. He is a vicious predator who undermines civilization’s order by sneaking into the West and preying on young women and children, defiling them and rendering their blood impure, while at the same time awakening chaos by unleashing scores of bats and rats, wolves who howl in the night, tempests at sea, and even madness and psychosis among his chosen adherents (as in the peculiar case of Renfield, an acolyte of Dracula, who eventually dies in the novel). Count Dracula is an aristocrat of the East, a region where, at the turn of the century, Jews were fleeing the violent pogroms of Eastern Europe and settling in Western Europe, a movement which generated a backlash, leading to a rising zeal against scary foreigners and their strange customs. Dracula exploits these fears by letting loose an old-world terror on the innocent, polite Englishmen whose modern industrialism and newfangled technologies are shown to be ineffectual in the face of an ancient ghoul.

Perhaps Dracula might rightly be interpreted as a pessimistic or conservative novel. It reinforces certain cultural fears and prejudices about a dangerous “other,” a hostile stranger who is always lurking in the shadows, ready to strike, repelled only by the use of Christian imagery and icons. Dracula does not show us gradations of morality, but rather a simplistic binary between good and evil. Interestingly enough, despite taking place in Protestant England, Dracula is saturated with Catholic religious imagery and iconography, such sacred communion wafers and rosaries and crucifixes and so on. This is despite the fact that Bram Stoker was an Irish Protestant of the Anglican Church of Ireland (hailing from a seaside village outside Dublin). As a child, he was sickly and bedridden but he grew to become a civil servant, a student at Trinity College, and a drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail, before he was appointed manager of the famous Lyceum Theatre in London where he served as assistant to the gregarious and domineering actor Henry Irving, a man whom Stoker both feared and respected (scholars have since speculated on the many similarities between Stoker’s description of Count Dracula and Henry Irving himself). Stoker’s full relationship with Henry Irving remains a somewhat fascinating, albeit opaque story, though one which has fueled much speculation. Romantically speaking, Stoker was married to a woman, having hurriedly married Florence Balcombe in 1878 (she was previously linked to Oscar Wilde for a couple years) but the Stoker marriage was rumored to have been loveless and Stoker was often away traveling or promoting theatre business. While on his many tours of the United States, he befriended American literary lights like Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, the latter of whom Stoker shared a now famous exchange in which Stoker used a string of metaphors and double-entendres leading many scholars to interpret as a confession of Stoker’s own concealed homosexuality (it was a confession delivered to Whitman who was almost undoubtedly homosexual, as well). But with the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde fresh off the presses in 1895, Victorian England was hardly a place of openness on this matter. Neither was the United States for that matter.

Now all of this might be titillating for latter-day observers, many whom may feel at liberty to comfortably speculate about the sexuality of a writer who died over a century ago, but it actually serves to illuminate an important point about the book. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is one of the great literary studies of psychological and sexual repression. The figure of Count Dracula comes in the night, when there is a dearth of light, trespassing upon sacred spaces, infiltrating dreams, cracking open psychological complacency, and plaguing people with his fearsome ancient pre-modern godlike abilities. His divine presence awakens a latent sexuality in the novel that seems to spring forth from the very characters as they seemingly become aware of eroticism as if for the first time, beginning with the depictions of the vampiric seductresses (i.e. they are perhaps a metaphor for the emerging phenomenon of the “New Woman”) along with the walking female “Un-Dead”, whose red lips are depicted as alluring and their bodies “voluptuous.” The vampire is not simply a geographic “other” in this novel but also a sexual “other.” A vampire offers women a chance to release their animalistic inhibitions and embrace a more natural, elemental way of being (despite all the grotesque imagery of blood-sucking). They represent a sexual impurity and impropriety. In the novel, the confining sensation of living in Victorian England is only released via a purgation of primal fears, and a subsequent catharsis that arrives at the other end of horror. When Count Dracula comes to Western Europe, he brings modern Christianity’s worst fears to bear –namely that an ancient pagan god (understood as the modern manifestation of evil) still walks among us, a vicious pan-like satyr who carries just a touch of Ares and Hades and plenty of nods to the brooding atmosphere of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as well as the ominous Gothic settings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre. Count Dracula’s very existence further reinforces the modern Christian view that the world is a grand battlefield between the forces of good and evil. And the greatest good can hardly continue to exist without the greatest evil.

Bram Stoker died in 1912 (some say of syphilis). His widow subsequently published a posthumous collection of her husband’s work in 1914 which included a fascinating short story entitled “Dracula’s Guest” (it is sometimes included at the end of contemporary publications of Dracula, though some scholars seem to regard it as little more than an early draft of the opening chapter of the book). It concerns a young unnamed Englishman who stops in Munich while en route to Transylvania to meet with Count Dracula (perhaps this Englishman is intended to be Jonathan Harker). But when he goes out for a walk on a stormy Walpurgis Night, stopping in a graveyard, he experiences a strange vision of a woman being struck by lightning and a wolf attack before he is rescued by a band of local soldiers. “Dracula’s Guest” is a fascinating little addendum to the novel. Although Bram Stoker died in 1912, the “Un-Dead” life of Dracula was really only just beginning. It was adapted for the stage during his lifetime, but it was F.W. Murnau’s now-legendary uncredited and unattributed silent film adaptation Nosferatu (1922) that inspired a financially struggling Florence Stoker (Bram Stoker’s widow) to successfully sue for copyright infringement, an act which nearly saw every print of the film destroyed. Universal Pictures later acquired the copyright to release Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) featuring Bela Lugosi in his iconic, career-defining performance as the Count. Dracula has since been adapted numerous times to film, from Christopher Lee’s performance in 1958 to Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1992, and even more recently in Robert Eggers’ remarkable remake of Nosferatu in 2024. It’s clear that the allure of the vampiric myth only continues to haunt the Western mind.