Dracula

Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897, and it has never gone out of print. The novel has accumulated so many adaptations — film, theatre, television, parody — that the source text is easy to overlook in favor of its cultural offspring. This is a mistake. The novel is stranger, richer, and more interesting than most of what it has generated.

Dracula is an epistolary novel: journals, letters, newspaper clippings, a ship's log, a doctor's diary. There is no omniscient narrator, only partial witnesses who compare notes and assemble an account. This form is functional rather than merely formal: the Victorian anxieties at the novel's core are anxieties about what cannot be seen, named, or directly acknowledged. The epistolary structure is the appropriate container for material that the characters resist stating plainly.

What are those anxieties? The count who arrives from Eastern Europe and infects respectable English women is not a subtle metaphor. Victorian England was anxious about immigration, about Eastern European Jews and other "degenerate" races arriving in London, about the contamination of the English social body. The two women Dracula targets — the sensual, free-spirited Lucy Westenra and the capable, thoroughly modern Mina Harker — represent different female types, and what Dracula does to Lucy specifically (she becomes sexually uninhibited and predatory) represents the Victorian male's nightmare about female sexuality unrestrained.

The men who hunt Dracula — Harker, Van Helsing, Holmwood, Seward, Morris — form a coalition of Victorian masculinity to restore the proper order. The novel is about that restoration, and about what it costs.

Count Dracula — the novel's title character who appears far less than you expect. Stoker keeps him largely offstage, glimpsed through other characters' accounts; his power is greatest when least directly observed. He is the Victorian fear of the foreign Other given physical form.

Mina Harker — arguably the novel's most important character. She is the "New Woman" of the 1890s — educated, capable, using a typewriter, organizing the men's intelligence gathering. She is also Dracula's primary target, and the men's treatment of her — alternately relying on her capabilities and excluding her "for her protection" — is one of the novel's richest tensions.

Lucy Westenra — Mina's friend, who is attacked first and who becomes a vampire. Her transformation from sweet English girl to predatory un-dead sexuality is the most disturbing passage in the novel; the men's response to it — driving a stake through her heart while she writhes and screams, then congratulating each other on restoring her to proper womanhood — is Stoker's most uncomfortable material.

Van Helsing — the Dutch professor who arrives to explain vampires and direct the hunt. He is the novel's authority figure, who knows what the others cannot name; his foreignness is the exception to the novel's anxiety about foreigners, permitted because his knowledge serves English ends.

No. 1 · Harker in the castle. The novel's opening section — Jonathan Harker's journal entries from Transylvania — is the novel at its purest Gothic: the strange food, the superstitious peasants, the wrong-way-round shadows, the Count climbing down the castle wall face-first. The horror here is formal and controlled, before the novel moves to England and becomes about what Dracula means.

No. 2 · Lucy's staking. The men gather at Lucy's tomb, confirm she has become a vampire, and restore her to "proper" death by driving a stake through her while she screams and fights. Her lover Arthur performs the act. The scene is then framed as a rescue — they have saved her soul. Stoker seems to intend this as heroic. Twentieth-century readers have found it deeply uncomfortable. It is the scene that most rewards thinking about what the novel is actually doing.

No. 3 · Mina's organization of the chase. In the novel's final movement, Mina — partially vampirized, connected telepathically to Dracula — organizes the data: she types up the journals, coordinates the testimony, maps the count's movements. The men exclude her from meetings to protect her; she is more useful to the hunt than any of them. The tension between what she can do and what she is allowed to do runs through the final hundred pages.

Read this if you are…

• Anyone interested in what the original Dracula text actually contains, before the films and adaptations. It is a different and stranger book than most people expect.
• Readers interested in Victorian gender anxiety and what canonical literature does with it — this is the central document.
• Anyone who wants a genuine Gothic atmosphere: the Transylvania opening and the coastal scenes at Whitby are the best Victorian Gothic set-pieces.

Skip it if you are…

• Looking for contemporary horror pacing: the novel is epistolary and Victorian, which means it is slow and sometimes repetitive.
• Wanting pure sensation: the novel is most interesting as cultural document; if you want it to simply scare you, it may not.

• The epistolary form is doing work. Ask why each section is written by a particular character and what that character cannot or will not say directly.
• Read the Lucy section as carefully as the Harker section. The two sections are the novel's moral poles.
• Mina is more interesting than Dracula. Track her capabilities and what the men's "protection" costs the plot in terms of efficiency.
• The technology is important. Typewriters, telegrams, phonographs, blood transfusions: Stoker's characters fight a supernatural creature with the most modern tools available. The contrast is deliberate.

• Robert Louis Stevenson — Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). The other great 1880s-90s Victorian duality horror: the respectable surface over the hidden appetite, written eleven years earlier with more formal economy.
• Oscar Wilde — The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The third corner of the 1890s Gothic triangle: a young man who remains beautiful while his corruption accumulates elsewhere, explicitly engaged with aestheticism and decadence.
• Mary Shelley — Frankenstein (1818). The origin point: the Gothic novel about the creation of an uncontrollable Other and the disaster that follows. Reading both traces the lineage.

1. Dracula as a foreign aristocrat arriving in England and infecting English women was written in 1897, a decade of intense anxiety about Eastern European immigration. Is the novel's xenophobia inseparable from its horror?
2. Lucy becomes sexually predatory after being vampirized, and the men's "cure" is her death. What is Stoker saying about female sexuality, even if he doesn't intend to be saying it?
3. Mina is the most capable person in the novel's final movement. Why do the men exclude her from planning meetings, and what does the novel think of that decision?
4. The epistolary form means we never get Dracula's point of view. What would the novel look like from his perspective, and why might Stoker have chosen not to give it?
5. Van Helsing is foreign but trusted because his knowledge serves English purposes. How does the novel distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable foreignness?
6. The novel's ending eliminates Dracula and restores Victorian order. Does anything persist — in Mina, in the men, in England — that suggests the anxiety isn't fully resolved?