By Heidi Simmons
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Dracula
By Bram Stoker
Fiction
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Tis the season to celebrate what scares us. Literature has provided readers with indelible characters that still haunt us. Dracula by Bram Stoker has remained a popular horror classic since its publication in 1897.
For those unfamiliar with the epic 400 plus pages in 27 chapters, the novel is epistolary — told through letters, journals, diary entries, telegrams and news clippings. It begins with Jonathan Harker’s journal entry regarding his responsibility to his firm as a new lawyer to get legal papers signed for the purchase of property in England by a Count Dracula who lives in Transylvania.
Harker makes the arduous journey and quickly comes to realize his shape-shifting, bloodthirsty host is evil. Harker is psychologically tortured, nearly raped by the Count’s three hungry vixen vampires and held prisoner while the Count makes his way to England in a coffin on a death ship.
When the Count arrives in London, he soon discovers Mina, Harker’s fiancé, and Lucy, Mina’s best friend. The coquettish Lucy is courting three men at the same time. But she is soon seduced, bitten and controlled by the vampire Count. Under his spell, she is unable to resist and craves his physical attention.
Mina and Lucy’s boyfriends realize Lucy is not herself and bring in the expert Van Helsing, a philosopher who recognizes Lucy’s problem is supernatural. The Count must be stopped. But first, in order to save her soul, they must kill the beautiful and sensual Lucy who has become a full-blown vampire. After she is stabbed through the heart, beheaded and buried, her “Christian immortality” is once again secured.
The Count is then tracked and hunted across Eastern Europe by Mina and Harker, the boyfriends and Van Helsing. After a bloody confrontation the Count, is finally destroyed in the nick of time just as the sun sets.
Even today, Stoker’s Dracula is a compelling and provocative read. The narrative, formed through mostly first person correspondence and personal journals, provides intimate insight into the characters. The reader gets to know the characters’ personal fears and anxieties as they discover and understand the profound threat that is Dracula. The contributors are all credible witnesses and reliable sources, which give the story gravity and make it engaging.
Mina, Harker and the Van Helsing crew are serious about stopping Dracula. He is an ancient relative of the infamous Vlad the Impaler and his blood lust could potentially create “a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons to batten on the helpless.” The Count is a formidable foe and a threat to human existence.
Set in the Victorian age, the issues of society, science and sex are prevalent to the story and perhaps relevant to our age. Dracula is an outsider. He is “the other”, a gothic pagan spreading a virus that usurps free will and enslaves one to a life of darkness.
The Count is a sensual creature seeking to be a part of the modern world. He feeds on men and women with the same lust. He is Satanic-like and a perversion. His needs are insatiable. His immortality is a burden and a curse. But he is alone in the world without true love. Even Mina observes a strange sadness and relief at his demise.
Dracula brazenly and seductively comes into the Victorian age’s repressed and chased lives and is cut down by Christian iconography and religious dogma.
Is it frightening that Dracula can be a sensual lover and yet a horrible monster? It is terrifying to think we could surrender our free will for immortality? Is it scary to invite “the other” into our lives? Is it fear that keeps religion alive?
Abraham “Bram” Stoker was not the first to write about Vampires. In 1819 Dr. John Polidori wrote Vampyre. The vampire genre is alive and well. It peers at us from billboards, movie theaters, TV screens, T-shirts, graphic novels and books. Even with a stake in his heart, Dracula remains immortal.
