“Dracula”, by Bram Stoker

 

200 pages, Penguin Classics, ISBN-13: 978-0140434064

Whenever I write one of these here reviews I try to get the exact edition of the book I read but, for the life of me, I don’t know which version of Dracula by Bram Stoker that was, so this edition by Penguin Classics will do. Well, then…what can one say about one of the most famous works of Western Literature ever written? First things first: Dracula was first published in 1897 as an epistolary novel, meaning that the tale is told through letters, diary entries and newspaper articles. The main protagonist is English solicitor Jonathan Harker, who takes a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula, and make certain property transactions all across London at the nobleman’s behest. Hilarity ensues.

It was good to revisit a proper vampire – y’know, undead, fangs, blood-sucking, general disregard for human life – rather than these faggy emo pretty boys who spend their unlives bitching. Dracula is THE vampire Mac-Daddy who does as he likes and your life be damned. A proper goddam vampire with a Master Plan and the will to implement it. A life taker feeding on the blood of the living to perpetuate his own existence. Evil. E-V-I-L. Dead and loving it. “Living” for himself and not giving a damn about the world or others in it, except as food. A real nogoodnik. Bad with a capital “B”. A devil incarnate who makes no bones about his need and desire to dominate and oppress. And feed; this vampire drinks the blood of the living – and likes it.

So, yeah, there’s all that. Vampire and other tales of the supernatural are a dime a dozen anymore, amiright? But Dracula helped to start it all and probably sparked the imaginations of many wannabe writers, too. While gothic tales had been all the rage in the first half of the 19^th Century – forbidden castles, mysterious strangers, stormy nights, shrouded pasts, family secrets, etc. – they all dealt with villains and monsters that were all too human. But Dracula – and, it must be said, its precursors like Varney the Vampire from the 1840s or Carmilla from 1872 – was something new in which the antagonist was an inhuman thing that could not be vanquished merely by strong Englishmen and true armed with a writ from the Bench of High Court.

As to why it gripped the Victorian imagination, perhaps it was because Dracula – and vampires – represented the superstitions of the Old World as opposed to the scientific rationalism of the Modern, represented by the vampire hunters and their wares. Furthermore, seeing as how Dracula – this bloody foreigner – is also buying up properties all around London, perhaps he also was seen by Victorians as one of the unwashed masses descending on their capitol as a dark symbol of untrammeled immigration, feared especially as leading to ever-increasing levels of crime in the city and the rise of blighted, ethnic ghetto communities (remember, Jack the Ripper’s exploits ended a mere decade before Dracula was published).

There is, of course, the blood, with vampirism and tainted blood suggesting the fear of sexually transmitted diseases, or the physical and moral decay that was believed by many commentators to be afflicting society of the time. Such fears are not to be lightly dismissed, as the spread of maladies was still misunderstood by many. It was only in 1854 when John Snow at last proved that cholera was spread through contaminated water, while Mary Mallon – known to you and me as Typhoid Mary – spread that disease by her mere presence in the early 20^th Century. That a creature could do its worse by feeding on the blood of the living and spreading its curse in the same manner is hardly shocking in this context.

And then there’s sex, with the vampire used as a sexual allegory in which English female virtue is menaced by foreign predators. Dracula’s attentions are, at first, focused on the beautiful Lucy Westenra, the dangerously modern young woman who succumbs to the Count and his foreign, mysterious ways, while Mina, Jonathan Harker’s fiancé, is a quite different woman, symbolized especially by her selfless – and symbolic – nursing of her intended in a convent…on what was supposed to be their honeymoon, no less. It is because she is traditional and virtuous that Mina is able to resist the contemptable continental’s advances, while the much more free-spirited Lucy is quite powerless without a traditional moral grounding.

The writing style, meanwhile, is…okay, not to say curious. When the characters make diary entries almost unto their moment of death, or record supernatural predations before they nod off, or write in accented English (as Van Helsing does), it all adds a whiff of disbelief to a work already asking said disbelief to be suspended (it puts me in mind of found-footage films in which people continue to record everything even as the world is crashing down around them). Would one really take the time to record everything they see, even if they are on the trail of an inhuman monster and time is of the essence? Somehow, I don’t think so. But it is what it is, so just power through like I did and crack on (oh, and Dracula’s death at the end was pathetic, especially for such a powerful creature).

There’s a reason certain books, music, plays, movies and what have you endure: because they speak to something immortal in us; they touch a deep truth that we all recognize; they stir something within that drives us forward; or, they’re just ripping good yarns that entertain as they distract. And so that’s what Dracula does. Like all good fiction, it is escapism, even if dark and brooding escapism.