The feelings of the hunter: ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker – Book Recommendation

Dracula is such a cultural phenomenon that he barely requires introduction. Nevertheless, like Nosferatu’s Count Orlok (based, of course, on Stoker’s creation), the Dracula of the novel is not the sympathetic, humanised character of many recent renderings within the vampire genre. What struck me in reading the original work is that the Count himself doesn’t actually appear that much. He instead represents a looming, direful manifestation of Victorian fears that into their ordered world of cutting-edge technology, geopolitical dominance, and Christian values there might intrude a primitive, alien force seeking to destabilise, or even conquer, all that they have built. Simultaneously primeval and cunning, the Count stealthily conceals his savage and depraved appetites, and it is his physical absence and the concurrent growing evidence of his presence that conspire to generate a sense of terror in the novel. What Stoker’s work largely portrays, via the letters and journals through which the tale unfolds, is the human reaction to a monster and a menace, a pathology only half understood, and, perhaps most terrifyingly of all, a twisted, bestial version of ourselves.

It may be au courant to suggest that Dracula is imperialist and possibly xenophobic in its ‘othering’ depiction of Transylvania. However, John Sutherland, writing in the afterword in this edition, considers that the struggle at the novel’s heart involving Dracula and Van Helsing represents ‘a contest between the ‘pagan world of old’ and ‘modernity’’, and that the Count comes to England because it is a country at the forefront of technological development. Perhaps self-assured Victorians would have thought this an entirely understandable aspiration whilst (less assuredly) balking at the notion of their own innovations being used against them by a primeval and demonic force. Dracula, then, primarily epitomises Victorians’ sensibilities regarding behaviour, progress, and their place in the world. Incidentally, if we’re thinking about nineteenth-century tensions between the reactionary and the progressive, for all the Gothic tropes of dark castles, madness, and afflicted nightgown-clad women, it is interesting to note that Mina Murray is both victim and agent in the novel, since her input in the venture to vanquish the vampire proves vital.

Dracula epitomises the idea that, modernity notwithstanding, forces of nature still have the power to thrill and instil fear. Most frightening and enthralling of all, Dracula is a fiend we recognise: shed of compassion and propriety, he is an insatiable, clever, and ruthless predator. A very human monster indeed.

 

Dracula by Bram Stoker ISBN: 9780141199337