Neil Bowen on
Extract from David Punter's seminal study, 'The Literature of Terror' [1980]:
The whole complex of problems received by far its most significant treatment, however, in Bram Stoker's greatly underrated Dracula, which is not only a well-written and formally inventive sensation novel but also one of the most important expressions of the social and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century. For obvious reasons, the intellectual content of Dracula has not been taken seriously; yet it deserves to be, less because of any distinction in Stoker's own attitudes and perceptions than as a powerful record of social pressures and anxieties. It has always been a difficult book to place, largely because if one accepts the conventional view of the expiry of Gothic before the middle of the nineteenth century Dracula becomes a kind of sport; but in fact it belongs securely with Jekyll and Hyde, Dorian Gray and The Island of Dr Moreau, while transcending all of them in its development of a symbolic structure in which to carry and deal with contradictions. The use of the term 'myth' to describe a work of written literature is open to abuse, but if there is any modern work which fits the term adequately, it is Dracula, if on the grounds of reception alone.
At the heart of Dracula (if the pun may be forgiven ) is blood. The vampire thrives on the blood of others, and the whole effort of Van Helsing and his colleagues is to fight this one-way flow of blood, by transfusion and any other possible means. 'The vampire live on', says Van Helsing in his broken English, '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 plenty. But he cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others.' Here, as elsewhere in Dracula, is a religious inversion, brought out the more strongly by the biblical tone of Van Helsing's discourse: the blood is the life. Stoker is well aware of the rich possibilities for ambiguity and bitter humour in this central motif. When Van Helsing recounts the ship's captain's response to his vampire passenger, there is a vertiginous interplay of conventional swear-words and deeper ironic significance: Dracula give much talk to captain as to how and where his box is to be place; but the captain like it not and swear at him in many tongues, and tell him that if he like he can come and see where it shall be. But he say 'no'; that he come not yet, for that he have much to do. Whereupon the captain tell him that he had better be quick [sic] - with blood -for that his ship will leave the place of blood - before the turn of the tide - with blood. (Dracula, pp. 322-3)
But the blood which gives Dracula his life is, as usual in vampire legendary, not merely literal. Dracula the individual needs blood, but Dracula is not merely an individual; he is, as he tells Harker, a dynasty, a 'house', the proud descendant and bearer of a long aristocratic tradition. He recites to Harker a catalogue of the gallant feats of his ancestors, ending thus: when, after the battle of Mohacs, we threw off the Hungarian yoke, we of the Dracula blood were amongst their leaders, for our spirit would not brook that we were not free. Ah, young sir, the Szekelys - and the Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains, and their swords - can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach. The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these days of dishonourable peace; and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told. (Dracula, pp. 38~9)
The long historical progression of the bourgeoisie's attempts to understand the significance of noble 'blood' reaches a point of apotheosis in Dracula, for Dracula is the final aristocrat; he has rarefied his needs, and the needs of his house and line, to the point where he has no longer any need of any exchange-system or life-support except blood. All other material connections with the 'dishonourable' bourgeois world have been severed: the aristocrat has paid the tragic price of social supersession, yet his doom perforce involves others. Cheated of his right of actual dominion, his power is exerted in mere survival:
It is impossible to tell whether what is at stake is Dracula's personal longevity or his total identification with his line.
And if one looks again at the old legends themselves, what emerges as very obvious is that they were partly invented to explain the problem of the his relationship to the world is the culmination of tyranny, yet it is justified in that it is not his own survival that he seeks but the survival of the house, and thus, of course, the survival of the dead. Stoker brings out the ambiguity in the legends very well when Dracula tells Harker his history:
In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a 'boyar' the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house he always said, 'we', and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. (Dracula, p. 37) connection between aristocracy and immortality. To the peasantry of central Europe, it may well have seemed that the feudal lord was immortal: the actual inhabitant of the castle upon the mountain might change, but that might not even be known. What would have been known was that there was always a lord; that by some possibly miraculous means life and title persisted, at the expense, of course, of peasant blood, in the literal sense of blood shed in battle and in cruelty. Dracula can no longer survive on blood of this kind; he needs alternative sources of nourishment to suit his socially attenuated existence. The dominion of the sword is replaced by the more naked yet more subtle dominion of the tooth; as the nobleman's real powers disappear, he becomes invested with semi-supernatural abilities, exercised by night rather than in the broad day of legendary feudal conflict.