As Twilight permeates our culture, as fan girls galore come pouring out of Hot Topic to declare their undying love for Edward Cullen, I can't help but recall another time, when fans of vampires wore petticoats and corsets while reading that new horror novel by Henry Irving's stage manager, Bram Stoker. Little did they know that the horror novel would do more than any other work to define the twentieth-century conception of the vampire. That's right, I'm talking about the one, the only,
Dracula You can't argue with the classics, and Stoker's Dracula is certainly a classic. For those of you who know the name but not the premise, this Victorian horror novel recounts the story of the cunning Count Dracula who buys property in England in order to learn about the culture and of course to drink the blood of a few unsuspecting Victorian women. When Dracula preys on young noblewoman Lucy Westenra, her three devoted suitors and her friend Mina Harker band together with vampire slayer Abraham Van Helsing to defeat the Count.
In the novel, Dracula has a number of powers that were attributed to literary vampires in the nineteenth century, but have since been dropped from the canon. For example, he can transform at will into a wolf or a bat, and he can control the weather. He also has to sleep in his native earth during the day (a problem that he circumvents by bringing a collection of coffins filled with Transylvanian soil to England. And I thought that I didn't know how to pack light). He can disappear at will and can transform into mist, and can be killed only by a stake through the heart or decapitation. Also, unlike many subsequent vamps, Dracula can go outside in the sunlight. He just doesn't have any powers during the day (in Stoker's early drafts of the novel, Mina Harker is both startled and titillated when she encounters Dracula sparkling on the streets of London in the middle of the day. Stoker later scrapped the idea. No, I'm just kidding. Dracula never sparkled).
The first edition of Dracula appeared as a yellow-covered volume in 1897. According to Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller, the book was far from a bestseller when it was first published. But since then, it has steadily gained popularity and defined our image of the vampire. The play and movie adaptations of Dracula that followed only helped to popularize the Count, especially when he began to wear his trademark cape in stage versions. Stoker staged a performance of Dracula in London not long after the book's publication. The dramatic rights were sold to Hamilton Deane in 1924 and to Universal Pictures in 1930. In the century since its publication, Dracula has been featured in countless other media, from breakfast cereals to Sesame Street.
But Dracula is more than just a popular culture icon. If you read the book carefully, you'll see that, whether on purpose or not, Stoker was making several statements about sexuality, religion, and British anxieties about reverse colonization. For example, Dracula's devoted follower, Renfield, a mental patient, repeatedly asserts that Dracula "promised [him] eternal life," in a fairly obvious parody of Christianity. Also, the scenes in which Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood and Arthur stakes the newly vamped-out Lucy are pretty sexual. In this sense, like other vampires before him, Dracula is not a demonic spirit completely divorced from the ways of human society; instead, in many ways, he is like us. He was once human. He just happens to be an undead bloodsucker now.
But perhaps more importantly, Dracula, as an eastern Europe with different customs, represents the foreign Other that both frightened and fascinated late-nineteenth century Englishmen. This use of the vampire as a metaphor in politics was not unprecedented. In the 1880s, during the controversy over Irish Home Rule, a series of cartoons appeared in Punch (the Victorian equivalent of Mad Magazine) showing an Irish vampire bat preying on an innocent maiden. And as far back as 1732 an article appeared in England called "Political Vampyres" which compared politicians to bloodthirsty bats. The use of the vampire as symbol continued in the post-Dracula world; over the past century, the vampire has been a metaphor for a wide variety of social problems. Besides making Count Dracula famous, Stoker's novel set the precedent for this usage of the vampire as metaphor in literature.
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