Trollheart

Renfield is a character I just don’t get. He doesn’t seem to do much at all in the novel and I feel that in some ways he was merely put into it to allow Stoker to indulge all the worst excesses of horror that he wished to depict, but could not do so with the other characters. A “shock value” player I believe, and certainly one of the most repulsive creatures ever, more closely tied to Igor in later Frankenstein adaptations than anything to do with vampires. Later works would have those who fell under the vampire’s spell and swore to serve them, often allowing themselves voluntarily to be drained - though never to the point of death - maybe in the hope of one day being turned, that is, made a vampire themselves, or assisting by sourcing and delivering to their master fresh victims, but there has never, to my knowledge, been again a character like Renfield. I guess he certainly made an impression, but a bad one, and later writers were not interested in extending his short legacy.

The idea of the dreary, ruined, cold and dark castle is of course a familiar trope in Victorian Gothic literature, featured in such disparate works as Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy, as well as, of course, the original, Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, though here, possibly for the first time, Stoker gives the dread mansion an occupant just as dark and evil as his abode. Gothic literature tended to rely on a sense of suspense, the idea that something awful was lurking in the shadows, but more often than not it either was never shown or turned out to be something quite human and mortal. An old relative, locked away and gone mad. A murderer taking refuge. A child who had some strange defect and had been imprisoned in the house. Here, for (maybe) the first time is a real, honest-to-Satan, in the flesh demon, stalking the halls of his home with arrogant superiority and contempt, and evil intent. The half-glimpsed nightmare come frighteningly to life, the old stories some true, the shadows taking on an actual form. Evil, to use modern parlance, is in da house.

You have to wonder about Quincey too. Of the five men he’s the only one who dies, and of the three men he’s the one Lucy chose. Has she, in submitting to Dracula, not only sold her own soul but that of her lover too? He’s also the one who has the dubious honour of killing her, and later puts an end to her master too; has she cursed, or passed on the curse that has fallen upon her, to her intended? Was Stoker trying to say that by associating with, and being identified with Lucy, the American was dooming himself, was taking upon his own soul the darkness Lucy had embraced? Till death do us part? Was he aligning them in evil, the sins of one becoming those of the other?

Another telling point is that, of the six female characters in the novel, only one survives, and that through the intervention (rescue) of the males. Admittedly, one male dies (two, if you count Dracula and indeed three if you count Renfield) - and this is of course discounting the crew and passengers on the Demeter - but in terms of percentages and ratio, the female side fares the worst in this battle, if you will, of the sexes. Even the sole survivor, Mina, is marked by her experience and is never likely to be the same again. She’ll certainly sleep with the gaslight on for a while, that’s for sure.

I can’t speak for Varney the Vampire or indeed The Vampyre: A Tale, as I’ve yet to read them, but I’m pretty sure Carmilla played out differently, and it seems to me that Stoker was the first to create what I possibly might call the “secret adventure” style of book, where no matter how great the danger, and the fact that it affects everyone, a small band of one or two people, or slightly more, must operate in the shadows, alone, without recourse to any sort of assistance from the authorities. Mostly, I feel, this is because firstly, to enlist the help of, say, the police would be time-consuming, as, in this case, Harker and his friends would have to try to convince them that they were not mad, which would be no easy task. Of course, if they did manage somehow to convince them, panic would surely ensue, making the job the harder.

But there’s also perhaps what you could refer to as the superhero complex here, the idea that these people, and only these people, must save the world/England/Europe/all life from the evil they fight, that only they can do this and they must do it alone. I guess it makes their job harder, taking away any resources they might normally have access to in such an investigation, and thereby the triumph the sweeter. Also, if, as often happens, someone must die in the course of the adventure, it needs to be hushed up, as the law tends to take a very black-and-white view on murder, with few extenuating circumstances considered. And, of course, as in all such enterprises, the more people who know about it the bigger the chance it will fail, as someone either falls victim to the evil or decides their path might be easier if they throw in their lot with it.

Overall, the work must be done in secret, the victory - if there is one - must be celebrated in secret and never spoken of outside the circle, and if necessary, a cover story must be invented and stuck to by all participants. This tends to hold true for most vampire novels from here on in; you rarely if ever see the police, the government, the military or any other authority involved. I don’t say never, but the trope Stoker seems to have developed here runs mostly along the lines of keep the circle small and secret the better to succeed, and this is followed in most of the stories that come after, build on or are given birth to by his novel.

The battle in Dracula is, of course, at its heart and at a very basic level, the age-old struggle of good versus evil, with, as I noted above, no doubt as to who is on which side. It’s also, almost by association, the battle of religion versus superstition, lore against reality, ignorance versus science and the ancient world versus the enlightened one, both meeting in a truly terrifying way, as Stoker’s characters realise that the monsters they were always told never existed were there all along, not under the bed but lurking in a castle hundreds of miles away. On another level, too, as already indicated, it’s a battle between cultures: the strange and foreign versus the comfortable and the familiar, the “godly” against the “heathen”, England against darkest Europe.

It’s also possible that, given Stoker’s fierce Protestant upbringing and his mother’s hatred of Catholics, that Dracula and his dark lore are standing in for the older, more superstitious (as Protestants saw them) practices of Roman Catholics, the Count himself a dark Pope, ready to come over and rend and rip the country’s “true” religion with his bloodstained hands. Ever suspicious of each other, Dracula could be read as the Protestant Ascendancy fear that Catholics were growing too powerful as the Penal Laws were relaxed and then repealed, and that their way of life, their very faith was under threat from this “foreign power”, ie Transylvania taking the place of Rome, where another “dark prince” watched England with (as they would believe anyway) hate-filled and envious eyes, and plotted how to bring it again under his yoke.

And as there is a battle going on between faiths, and as this is 1890s Victorian England, God has to win, but unlike the braver Mary Shelley, whose Frankenstein does not end well for either protagonist and says a lot about hating others just because they’re different, Stoker I feel takes the easier way out, the happy ending (even though people die, the vampire is defeated in the end and the good guys win the day) and in this, for me, though I love the novel, misses an important opportunity to explore further, as Shelley did, the very nature of humanity, evil and faith. To some extent, Stoker’s characters are a little cardboard-ish, caricatures of Victorian adventurers who take on all comers and, despite losing one of their number (and after all, he’s only an American, not a God-fearing Englishman!) win through. Hurrah!

Although there had been a few vampire stories, novels and plays before this, most of them had taken what they wanted from the vampiric legends and discounted what they did not. Stoker, to be fair, did this too, but his is the most complete and comprehensive early image of the vampire we have in writing, and in terms of research, nobody except maybe Byron had done more. However, Byron contemptuously told us that he did not have any interest in vampires (making it, to me, more and more likely that Darvell was no vampire, nor intended to be) so Stoker is the first to put it all together and with the enthusiasm of a real adherent of the lore. He may have seen, with the massive popularity of Varney the Vampire and later Carmilla, the appetite (sorry) for vampire stories, and tailored his novel to that need, but he surely saw too that nobody before him had done it properly, and determined to set that right.

The truth is that Stoker should have earned the title held today by Stephen King as the master of horror, but he did not. Though Dracula was well received it made him little money and brought him little fame, and a screw-up over copyright meant that an American version was able to be printed and sold without his getting any royalties at all. In a similar manner to Dickens, cheap copies, knock-offs, imitations and unauthorised adaptations of his work were to flood the market, and with copyright law in the fluid state it was in at the time, it was hard, even impossible to protect his work. Later, his widow would successfully sue to prevent a film - the first ever - being made based on his novel, but once the floodgates were open, rather like the emergence of the Count himself on the shores of England, there would be no stopping it and it would flow like a river, crushing all before it.

In a very real and tangible way, the true age of vampire literature had begun.

__________________
Trollheart: Signature-free since April 2018