Dracula

This winter holiday, I read the novel Dracula. Because recently literary works centered on vampire stories have sprung up, and among them are the best selling novels Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, which are well received and have been put on the screen, the image of vampires that people know from contemporary best selling novels has been renewed almost entirely, and it is very different from that in Dracula published in 1897. However, it is well accepted. So, I want to know the initial image of vampires in classic literature, the composing background of Dracula, and the strategies of image presenting.

In a time when the renewed vampire image prevails, the research of the image of vampires in Dracula helps to know again the initial vampire image in classic literature, compare the original vampire image and contemporary vampire image when reading both Dracula and modern best selling novels, and find out the change or development of vampire image.

    First the introduction of Dracula will be made, then the composing background and the image presenting strategies will be analyzed, and finally the image of vampires in Dracula will be stated.

The research methods include the reading and note taking of Dracula and its relevant academic papers, and the analyzing of texts, the composing background of Dracula, the strategies of image presenting and the image created.

Dracula was written by Bram Stoker and published in 1897. And Count Dracula became widely known because of the novel.

1 The Strategies of Vampire Image Presenting:

1)      The Gothic Writing Style

The Gothic style writing is a strategy to present the vampire image. This strategy can be seen applied in the Gothic style setting depiction and plot narration in the novel.

a)        The Gothic Style Setting Depiction

We can see the Gothic style setting depiction in the description of Castle Dracula:

“The castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything! As far as the eye can reach is a sea of green tree-tops, with occasionally a deep rift where there is a chasm. Here and there are silver threads where the rivers wind in deep gorges through the forests.

But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit.

The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner! ”

We can also see this kind of depiction when it comes to the arrival of the ship which bore Dracula into Whitby harbor:

“To add to the difficulties and dangers of the time, masses of sea-fog came drifting inland – white wet clouds, which swept by in ghostly fashion, so dank and damp and cold that it needed but little effort of imagination to think that the spirits of those lost at sea were touching their living brethren with the clammy hands of death, and many a one shuddered as the wreaths of sea-mist swept by. At times the mist cleared, and the sea for some distance could be seen in the glare of the lightning which now came thick and fast followed by such sudden peals of thunder that the whole sky overhead seemed trembling under the shock of the footsteps of the storm. Some of the scenes thus revealed were of immeasurable grandeur and of absorbing interest – the sea, running mountains high, threw skywards with each wave mighty masses of white foam, which the tempest seemed to snatch at and whirl away into space; here and there a fishing-boat, with a rag of sail, running madly for shelter before the blast; now and again the white wings of a storm-tossed sea-bird. ”

b)       The Gothic Style Plot Narration

The Gothic writing style was also applied on plot narration. One of the examples is the narration of Harker’s experience in Transylvania.

2)      The First-Person Accounts

The second strategy that Stoker used to present the image of vampires is the use of first-person accounts of events.

Most of the first-person accounts were told to be made by shorthand, typewriters and phonograph. The mention of these scientific inventions helped convince readers of so much material and that they were made and transcribed easily:

“They were so tired and worn-out and dispirited that there was nothing to be done till they had some rest; so I asked them all to lie down for half an hour whilst I should enter everything up to the moment. I feel so grateful to the man who invented the “Traveller’s” typewriter, and to Mr Morris for getting this one for me. I should have felt quite astray doing the work if I had to write with a pen…”

In first-person accounts, apart from scientific inventions, scientific theory was also mentioned to present Dracula’s image.

During the final pursuit of Dracula, Van Helsing, Seward, and Mina carry on a discussion of criminal types. Van Helsing defines Dracula as a criminal with a child-brain predestinate to crime. Van Helsing has advanced: “the Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua criminal he is of imperfectly formed mind”. The image of vampires can be known through scientific theory - Nordau and Lombroso’s theory.

Dracula’s viewpoint is not shared; this technique allows Stoker to isolate Dracula from the human experiences expressed in the novel. The vampire is immediately relegated to the role of something other than human. Dracula himself can only be seen through the eyes of those record keepers. His character is entirely a product of record.

The first-person accounts were used out of the need of the plot. Individual characters slowly but surely share their personal records with each other. By virtue of their communal ethos, they create a single, apparently coherent narrative from the various potentially subjective or unreliable accounts. This collective coherence, possible only because of Mina’s skill with the new technologies, appears to authenticate their separate experiences and therefore to prevent their separate drifts into isolation and madness. Their success implies that it was still possible to construct a cultural coherence in the face of the perversity Dracula represents. It also makes it possible for the protagonists in the novel to reduce their nemesis to a set of predictable movements and so defeat him. The most formal effect of this strategy is to transform the literary to the scientific with its premises of truth and objectivity, its belief in the possibility of rational explanation. It is, in this sense, as if Stoker sought to transfuse the former with the latter, slowly replacing the connotations of the literary with those of the scientific.

The first-person accounts helped the protagonists think rationally and scientifically, and they led to the next actions of the protagonists. For example, in the novel, the list of analysis of the patient Renfield’s words and symptoms shed light on Dr. Seward about what caused Renfield’s behaviours and dug out Dracula’s threat or scheme:

“Several points seem to make what the American interviewer calls “a story”, if one could only get them in the proper order. Here they are:

Will not mention “drinking”.

Fears the thought of being burdened with the “soul” of anything.

[…]

Logically all these things point one way! He has assurance of some kind that he will acquire some higher life. He dreads the consequence - the burden of a soul. Then it is a human life he looks to!

And the assurance - ?

Merciful God! The Count has been to him, and there is some new scheme of terror afoot!”

The same effect of first-person accounts is Mina’s list of conclusion drawn from previous papers and written down as exact as her thought to be read:

“My new conclusion is ready, so I shall get our party together and read it. They can judge it; it is well to be accurate, and very minute is precious.

Ground of inquiry. – Count Dracula’s problem is to get back to his own place.

(a) He must be brought back by someone. […]

(b) How is he to be taken? […]

1. By road. […]

(a) […]

(b) […]

(c) […]

2. By rail. […]

3. By water. […]

Firstly, […]

Secondly, […]

Of course it may not be either the Sereth or the Pruth, but we may possibly investigate further. Now of these two, the Pruth is the more easily navigated, but the Sereth is, at Fundu, joined by the Bistritza, which runs up round the Borgo Pass. The loop it makes is manifestly as close to Dracula’s Castle as can be got by water.”

By the use of first-person accounts, the contents and feelings of the protagonists seemed true and the sense of existence of vampires was pressed on readers. Thus the image of vampires was made real.

Reading, for instance, unites the men and Mina in a safe and mutual bond of disclosure and confidence. After Mina listens to Dr. Seward’s phonograph recording of his account of Lucy’s death, she assures him: ‘I have copied out the words on my typewriter, and none other need now hear your heart as I did’ […] Writing and reading produce the vampire as the ‘truth’ of textual labor; he is a threat which must be diffused by discourse. […] mass-production of a group of professionals – doctors, psychiatrists, lawyers. Writing, or at least who writes, must be controlled since it represents the deployment of knowledge and power; similarly, reading must be authorized and censored.

3)      The Exploitation of Vampire Myth

 The third strategy to make the story real and impress the image of vampires on readers is the exploitation of the vampire myth, which met the desire of readers. The real answer to the novel’s remarkable power more probably lies in the subtle ways in which Stoker exploits the tradition of Dracula himself and the mysteries and latent implications that surrounded him. Vampirism, in some form or another, has appeared in all cultures, in all times. […] the vampire cult has emerged during periods of strangely spreading infection and disease. […] Stoker used to wonderfully unsettling effect its most important variation for the genre - a sub-plot, full of comic tones, involving a Hungarian vampire who visits England and initiates one of the novel’s heroines and whose nature is defined by an unpredictability that can be temporarily combated by the methods of science. He relies heavily on non-fiction sources, one of which was his brother George’s With the Unspeakables; or Two Years Campaigning in European and Asiatic Turkey (1878). A second was Emily Gerard’s popular book The Land Beyond the Forest (1887). One of the innumerable Victorian travel books written to satisfy the period’s enormous desire for knowledge about unknown and exotic people and places, Gerard’s text introduced Stoker to the real-life fifteenth-century prince or viovode of Wallachia, Vlad the Impaler, whose notorious reputation for staking his enemies to death provided Stoker with a further model for his Count.

2. The Image of Vampires

The most nebulous of presences, he casts no shadow and reflects no image in a mirror. He is, moreover, virtually plastic. He can change himself into an almost infinite number of shapes, most familiarly those of wolves and bats and dogs, and into the airy nothingness of a tellingly grey mist, the colour of which implies both this essential in-between-ness and the air of uncertainty that Dracula casts about the affairs and understanding of the other characters in the novel.

Dracula is likened to ‘mist,’ to a ‘red cloud,’ to a ghost or a shadow until he is invited into the home, at which point he becomes solid and fleshy.

But as well as being a creature of animal appetites and dangerous spontaneous impulses, Dracula is sophisticated, calculating, cunning and has an evolving brain to rival the rational faculties of human beings.