Dracula as a Vampire Novel: Blood, Fear, and Immortality

The text below is the excerpt of the book Dracula (ISBN: 9781644616215), written by Elizabeth Miller, published by Parkstone International.

It was Dracula that firmly entrenched the vampire in literature. So influential has this novel been that to this day, every author working in the genre is conscious of writing in its shadow. What Stoker succeeded in doing was to bring together many disparate threads from folklore and legend, the Gothic novel and earlier vampire fiction into a novel that resonates with the fears and anxieties of his time as well as our own.

His notes show clearly that he had intended to write a vampire novel from the outset, even before he settled on the name “Dracula” and the Transylvanian locale. Even though his Count Dracula was to become the most famous of all vampires, the vampire had already been well established in literature. Possibly Stoker was familiar with Polidori and Rymer, and may have read Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabic tale Vikram and the Vampire (re-issued in London in 1893).

He certainly knew “Carmilla” by fellow Dubliner, Le Fanu. Its influence can be seen not only in Stoker’s original choice of setting but in his delineation of the female vampire, in particular, the three female vampires in Dracula’s castle and their effect on Jonathan Harker. The sexual themes of Dracula certainly owe much to Le Fanu’s tale of repression, especially the theme of the respectable Victorian gentleman’s anxieties about aggressive, unbridled female sexuality. But he had other sources. In an interview conducted shortly after the publication of his novel, Stoker remarked that “the knowledge of vampire superstitions shown in Dracula was gathered from many miscellaneous readings” (in Stoddard).

When asked whether there was any historical basis for the legend, his reply was as follows: “It rested, I imagine, on some such case like this. A person may have fallen into a death-like trance and been buried before the time. Afterwards, the body may have been dug up and found alive and from this, a horror seized upon the people and in their ignorance, they imagined that a vampire was about” (in Stoddard).

Apparently, Stoker was familiar with the writings of Calmet, extensively quoted in one of his sources, Herbert Mayo’s On the Truths contained in Popular Superstitions (1851). He was also aware of a residue of belief in vampires in the USA. His notes include a newspaper clipping from the New York World (2 February 1896) entitled Vampires in New England. This article records several cases of suspected vampires (victims of consumption) in Rhode Island, whose corpses were exhumed and subjected to prescribed rituals. Also noted were the famous vampire sightings of the eighteenth century, with a suggestion of the origins of the legend in Greece: “a belief was entertained to the effect that Latin Christians buried in that country could not decay in their graves, being under the ban of the Greek church.”

The article pointed out the most terrifying aspect of the legend, that a victim of a vampire would, in turn, become a vampire.

Jonathan Harker describes Count Dracula as follows:

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…

His face was a strong – very strong – aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor…

I could not but notice that they [his hands] were rather coarse – broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine and cut to a sharp point.

For this physical description, Stoker relied heavily on folkloric and literary sources. The Book of Were-Wolves (1865) by Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (author of the famous hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers”) provided him with the broad, coarse hands with squat fingers, long, fine nails cut to a sharp point, and hairs in the centre of the palms. Other features – the aquiline nose, domed forehead, massive eyebrows, heavy moustache covering a “fixed and rather cruel-looking” mouth, and his “extraordinary pallor” owe much to the villains of earlier fiction.

Anyone familiar with nineteenth-century Gothic literature knows that many of these features had by Stoker’s time become conventions of the Gothic villain, that morally depraved individual whose separation from virtue had led to isolation.

In light of the fact that Dracula contains a direct allusion to Cezare Lombroso, it is possible that Stoker had that physiognomist in mind when delineating the Count’s features. In his Criminal Man (1875) Lombroso describes the typical criminal as having an aquiline nose, bushy eyebrows and pointed ears. Some scholars have suggested that Stoker had specific individuals in mind as physical models for Dracula, notably Vlad the Impaler and Stoker’s employer, Henry Irving. While there is no evidence that he accessed either a portrait or a physical description of Vlad (in spite of claims to the contrary), it is possible that Irving’s performances of numerous stage villains (most notably Mephistopheles in Faust) were influential.

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