Abstract
This essay anatomizes Dracula’s character and behavior, contrasting them with those of his nemesis, the Dutch necromancer Abraham Van Helsing, with a view to presenting a new perspective on the character, conduct, and significance of both the blood-sucking revenant and his blood-letting avenger. As a vampire, Count Dracula is neither human nor sexual, of either homo or hetero variety. The very vampiric ontological constraints of a revenant make it a doppelganger that resembles a male or a female human being from outside without any human emotion other than the animal-instinctual sentiments of self-defense, thirst (not hunger), and rage. This new perspective bypasses the highways of models and theories of the familiar variety such as colonial, imperial, postcolonial, postmodern, and above all, sexual — straight or queer — to interpret Dracula, but follows the unfashionable and humdrum byways of the commonsensical “traditional standards of ‘literalness’.”
Keywords: Dracula, Van Helsing, Stoker, vampire, revenant, doppelganger, literalness
Prolegomena
Bram Stoker’s Dracula has had his partial, sublimated revenge, in that even after Van Helsing’s moral-magical onslaught against him, he remains the centerpiece of a vibrant albeit often volatile hermeneutical battle among scholars who have concocted a heady brew of interpretations of the novel ranging from historical, allegorical, theological, political, colonial, and postcolonial to racist, feminist, Freudian, and queer. Nevertheless, its eponymous protagonist, seen variously as a hetero-homo-bi-sexual predator, an abominable cultural/ethnic other, an anti-Christ, or an embodiment of infectious disease, still remains a shadowy satanic figure as ever. But, as Nursel Icoz maintains, “Stoker’s apparent reluctance to impose a closure on Dracula effectively opens up the novel to alternative interpretations.” There thus remains the possibility of proffering another perspective with a view to shedding some interesting sidelights not yet explored by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or psychologists.
Count Dracula
Dracula is believed to have a human and historical genealogy. As Van Helsing deposes on the authority of the Hungarian scholar Jakob Armin Vambery, the Draculas were noted for their resistance against the imperial Turks. Their progenitor Vlad Tepes [Impaler] III, Voivode of Wallachia (r. 1456-76), had been schooled at the Devil’s academy, the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermanstadt. His initiation by the devil there and later his infamous atrocities together with his father’s name Vlad II the Dracul, who had joined (1431) the Order of the Dragon [dracul], earned him the fearsome sobriquet of Dracula, the junior Dracul, although there is no literary or historical evidence for the bloody Vlad II having ever been referred to as a blood-sucking vampire. After Vlad II’s death by murder his son Vlad Tepes became a revenant as Count Dracula. Dracula the vampire, thus, was not begotten but forged.
Dracula has a human face, physique, and even feelings, though he miraculously shape-shifts at will. Jonathan Harker provides a graphic phrenological description of the Count’s countenance twice. At the first sight he describes him as “a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache.” Later he details Dracula’s visage — very strong face, arched nostrils, massive eyebrows, heavy moustache, cruel-looking mouth, and sharp white teeth protruding over ruddy lips — all of which show an “astonishing vitality in a man of his years.” The only fearsome and loathsome aspects of the Count besides his protruding teeth and extraordinary strength are his hairy palms and rank breath.
Those who view Dracula as human tend to emphasize his libido “with almost prurient interest” and regard him, a la Maurice Richardson, as “a vast polymath perverse bisexual oral-anal-anal-genital sadomasochistic.” The plethora of studies on the concealed sexuality in Dracula furnish a glaring example of how hermeneutics distorts, even mutilates, the text extravagantly. Then, as noted earlier, there is no actual vampire sex: no “kiss,” the erotic mutual labial contact pace Craft, no exchange of niceties, only biting and feeding, in other words, consumption, not copulation.
Abraham Van Helsing
Dracula’s arch adversary, the brawny and brainy aging Dutch polymath Abraham Van Helsing remains a somewhat mysterious and melancholy figure or, to quote Jeanne Cavelos, “arguably one of the most well-known yet least explored characters in literature.” We know virtually little about his antecedents, though we learn that despite his putative reputation as a scientist and a polymath, he is basically a necromancer and shaman par excellence, whose “scientific” explanations and arguments are imbricated in folklore, hypnotism, magic, and witchcraft, and whose prescriptions for protection against vampires include garlic and religious artifacts such as the cross or the wafers.
From the patchy evidence scattered in the novel it appears that Van Helsing is far from what Cavelos believes “part holy man, part mad scientist, part prophet of doom,” but is an aging male, whose deranged wife having been a burdensome and “awful” companion of his loveless, i.e., sexless, late adult life. He suffers from melancholia and from occasional bouts of hysteria. His medical treatment actually aggravated Lucy’s condition and the final treatment of her disease came with a violentum pharmacum prescribed by an exorcist. He refused to put a quick end to her vampiric condition by beheading as her lucky charm the crucifix provided by the doctor had been stolen and thus she presumably had become a complete vampire needing the traditional staking to turn into a truly (dead) human.
The West European Van Helsing is the “Enlightened” (leader of the “Crew of Light”) counterpart of the East European Dracula with this difference — while the latter drains (abnormally) vitality from his victims, the former exhausts himself in transfusing his vital fluid (clinically) into Lucy and possibly in entrancing Mina, the woman of his adoration. If Dracula, whose noble-royal forbears distinguished themselves in defending their homeland against the invading infidels, is a tragic Promethean figure being beleaguered by a band of racist and murderous vigilantes, Van Helsing, Nestor cum Pantocrator as well as a self-chosen psychopomp, is a self-righteous crypto-sadist beneath his respectable veneer as a metaphysician, philosopher, and medical doctor.
Epilogue
Does the character of Dracula have any other symbolic significance than being a lusty Lothario hunted by a band of avenging angels under a villainous Dutch doctor? A meaningful interpretation of Dracula may be divided into three categories: pathological, theological, and allegorical. Fascinatingly enough, Dracula resembles Goethe’s Faust, who traded his soul to the devil for was die Welt im innersten zusammenhalt — Nature’s forces “that bind the world, all its seeds and sources and innermost life,” so that he could control or defy them but eventually had to accept human limitations. The undead figure is a telling testimony to the doleful consequences for humans should they happen to be empowered or condemned to defy natural laws. Thus Dracula is a tragic, even a pathetic, figure rather than his alter ego the psychopomp Van Helsing.
In a seminal study of Stoker’s Gothic novel, Stephen Arata has persuasively argued its colonial-imperial perspective. Count Dracula’s travel to England and his intents and exploits there have been seen as the vile but virile East’s colonial enterprise mirroring Imperial Great Britain’s global triumphal career. In one sense, Stoker’s Dracula is the moral version of the Victorian London’s coping with modernity — the city’s “grinding struggle” with cleansing the filthy environment in which “cleanliness sat alongside dirt, radiance [coming in of electricity] fought murk.” In another sense, Dracula is Freudian thanatos come “alive,” or better, “undead” (libido in a state of limbo) — a tragic outcome of our civilization created by smothering human eros. The “undead” cannot be easily liquidated, despite Van Helsing’s corrective technology, because it lives on in the dark recesses of our psyche and soul, emerging from time to time to wreak its vengeance against the artificial moral world in periodic collective rage, violence, and destruction.
Works Cited
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