Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture and the Arts [1 ed.] 9789004308060, 9789004306172

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Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture and the Arts

DQR Studies in Literature Edited by C.C. Barfoot A.J. Hoenselaars W.M. Verhoeven

VOLUME 60

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/dqr

Dracula and the Gothic in Literature, Pop Culture and the Arts Edited by

Isabel Ermida

leiden | boston

Cover illustration: “Graveyard”, by artist Leslie McMurtry. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015952922.

ISSN 0921-2507 isbn 978-90-04-30617-2 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30806-0 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper.

CONTENTS Gothic Old and New: Introduction Isabel Ermida

1

PART I*RWKLF6SDFHVRUWKH'H &RORQL]DWLRQRID*HQUH “The Son of the Vampire”: Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece? Álvaro García Marín 21 The Old and New Dracula Castle: The Poienari Fortress in Dracula Sequels and Travel Memoirs Marius-Mircea CriЮan 45 Dracula Orientalized Raphaella Delores Gomez

69

Empire, Monsters and Barbarians: Uncanny Echoes and Reconfigurations of Stoker’s Dracula in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians Rogers Asempasah 91 Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: An Anatomy of the American Gothic Carlos Azevedo

119

PART II0XOWLPRGDO5HSUHVHQWDWLRQVRIWKH*RWKLF±)URP WKH6FUHHQWRWKH6WDJHDQGWKH$UWV Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931):The Vampire Wears a Dress Coat Dorota Babilas

137

Aurally Bloodcurdling: Representing Dracula and His Brethren in BBC Radio Drama Leslie McMurtry 157 “Land of Apparitions”:The Depiction of Ghosts and Other Supernatural Occurrences in the First Gothic Plays Eva ýoupková

179

Gothic Architecture, Castles and Villains: Transgression, Decay and the Gothic Locus Horribilis Fanny Lacôte

199

PART III3RVWPRGHUQ*RWKLF±,GHQWLW\7UDQVIRUPDWLRQVRI WKH9DPSLUH Postmodern Gothic: Teen Vampires Joana Passos

2

Vampires “On a Special 'iet”: Identity and the Body in Contemporary Media Texts Lea Gerhards

235

Forever Young, Though Forever Changing: Evolution of the Vampire Maria Antónia Lima

257

Who’s $fraid of Don Juan? Vampirism and 6eduction Maria do Carmo Mendes

271

Destroying and Creating Identity: Vampires, Chaos and Society in Angela Carter’s “The Scarlet House” Inês Botelho 293 Bibliography Notes on Contributors Index

309 331 337

GOTHIC OLD AND NEW: INTRODUCTION ISABEL ERMIDA What we now call “the Gothic”, a literary label that covers such a wide range of expressions in today’s culture and art, has a spurious origin. Italian art historians of the early Renaissance first used it, rather contemptuously it should be noted, to refer to pointed-arch and ribbed-vault styles of medieval architecture, which more recent, elegant and refined neoclassical trends were to overcome. Though the historical Goths had nothing to do with such buildings, the equation of the gothic with the barbarous and rude also extended to medieval culture, which was deemed ignorant and superstitious in light of the revival of classic knowledge and sophistication. As Banister Fletcher remarks, the “new force was the belief that the old Romans had been wiser and more experienced than the mediaevalists”.1 It is little wonder, then, that “Gothic” has long been a term used to refer to a vaguely primitive past, with obscure practices and rites, peopled with archaic creatures and laden with superstitions and misconceptions – a “fictionalized past”2 where the concerns, worries and fears of the present can find a symbolic outlet. In literature, the Gothic assumed a counterfeit and divisive nature from its very emergence. Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, the first published work to boast the subtitle “A Gothic Story”, was a fake medieval tale printed under a pseudonym long after the Middle Ages, in 1764, which, after Walpole’s admission of authorship, critics dismissed as shallow and absurd fiction.3 Even though Walpole’s mode of highly improbable romancing did not bear fruit in the 1

Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method, London: Batsford, 1905, 6. 2 Jerrold E. Hogle, “Introduction: The Gothic in Western Culture”, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 16. 3 See, for example, Gretchen Cohenour, “A Man’s Home Is His Castle: Bloodlines and The Castle of Otranto”, EAPSU Journal of Critical and Creative Work, 5 (2008), 73-87, or Robert B. Hamm, “Hamlet and Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto”, SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900, 49 (2009), 667-692.

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Gothic Old and New

immediately following decades, it suddenly bloomed towards the end of the eighteenth century. As the Age of Enlightenment was drawing to a close, the eruption of supernatural fiction seems to represent a backlash against reason and positivism. In the 1790s such authors as Ann Radcliffe, Eliza Fenwick, Mary Robinson and Matthew Lewis developed a thriving trend of terror romance, which came to be scornfully nicknamed “the terrorist system of novel writing”.4 This scathing, as well as risible, pun derives from the perception among critics that literary terror of this period fed on the Burkean notion of the sublime, the idea that the “passion caused by the great and sublime in nature is Astonishment, ... that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror”.5 With the French Revolution came many seeds of change and many grains of fear, which Gothic literature helped to express and critics hurried to quell. As Robert Miles explains, “By linking Burke’s terror with Robespierre’s [much to the detriment of Burke’s criticism of the latter] ... critics stripped the Gothic of its high literary pretensions, implicitly accusing its authors of being social incendiaries”.6 Despite the hostile criticism, the Gothic genre was at this point vastly popular, mainly among female readers, becoming a steady, albeit contentious, literary influence throughout the Romantic period.7 Even though first-generation Romantics, as Michael Gamer remarks,8 ostensibly opposed this “conspicuously ‘low’ form”, attacking its pernicious effect on Britain’s morality and taste, their own production bears an unmistakable Gothic tang: such is the case of Coleridge’s “Christabel” (1797-1800) and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), Wordsworth’s “Fragments of a Gothic Tale” (1797), supernatural ballads (1800) and Borderers (1797), and Byron’s Child Harold Pilgrimage (1812) and Giaour (1813). Other Romantics, like 4

E.J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762-1800, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 148. 5 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, 39. 6 Robert Miles, “The 1790’s: The Effulgence of Gothic”, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, 44. 7 See, for instance, Robert Hume, “Gothic Versus Romantic: A Revaluation of the Gothic Novel”, PMLA, 84 (1969), 282-90, and David Sandner, Critical Discourses of the Fantastic, 1712-1831, Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. 8 Michael Gamer, Romanticism and the Gothic – Genre, Reception and Canon Formation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 7.



Introduction

3

Blake, Shelley and Keats, all played a key role, according to David Punter, in “shaping the Gothic” and in “articulating a set of images of terror which were to exercise a potent influence over later literary history”.9 The same could be stated of three further landmarks of Romantic terror fiction, namely Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), renowned for its “fictional images of abnormality, perversion, and destruction”,10 John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), a tale of doom and deprivation from the point of view of the powerless vampire-cumvictim,11 and Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), which H.P. Lovecraft refers to as “an enormous stride in the evolution of the horror-tale”.12 In the Victorian era, the more realistic novel mode absorbed some elements of this highly unstable genre, adapting its tropes to new locations and historical backgrounds. The Gothic is updated and domesticated: from the medieval castle it goes to the bourgeois urban home, but the themes of ancestral legacies and haunted pasts remain. Many works of the mid-1800s bear witness to the emphasis on what Mighall13 calls “Gothic transportation”, a dislocation which is both temporal and spatial: Dickens makes terrors and mysteries migrate from the hazy past to the heart of the criminalized London metropolis, as is the case in The Mysteries of London (1845) and Bleak House (1854). The Brontë sisters also incorporate the Gothic into their fiction: Emily’s Wuthering Heights (1847) features ghostly apparitions whereas Charlotte’s Jane Eyre (1847) conjures up older Gothic motifs (Thornfield, the Gothic manor, and Bertha, the

9

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day, London: Longman, 1996, 87. 10 Anne K. Mellor, Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters, London: Routledge, 1989, 57. 11 Emma McEvoy, “Gothic and the Romantics”, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds Catherine Spooner and Emma McEvoy, London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 19-28. 12 H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936), New York: Modern Library, 2005, 119. On Maturin and other non-Anglo-American contributors to the Gothic, see European Gothic: A Spirited Exchange 1760-1960, ed. Avril Horner, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2002. 13 Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction: Mapping History’s Nightmares, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 88.



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Gothic Old and New

bloodsucking “madwoman in the attic”14) but she (re)writes that mode into a “reinforcing juxtaposition – not a depreciative opposition – of ‘realism’ and ‘romance’”.15 But it is perhaps Edgar Allan Poe that most readily comes to mind when considering Victorian reinterpretations of Gothic fiction. In “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) he surveys inner, rather than exogenous, terrors while resorting to classic Gothic topics of madness, aristocratic decadence, and death.16 By the third quarter of the 1800s, the Gothic had diversified itself into what came to be called the “sensation” vogue, a thriving storeroom for Gothic input. A suburban, de-Romanticized view replaces antique Gothic abodes with desolate, newly-built surroundings, deprived of mouldering ruins and their terrifying charm. A few examples are “sensation” authors Margaret Jane Hooper (The House of Raby, 1855), Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley’s Secret, 1862) and Wilkie Collins (Armadale, 1867), who instil a cursed, uncanny past into the lives of the most ordinary and upright middle-class families. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Gothic “moves to a new set of contemporary arenas”,17 which cover not only the bourgeois home and urban slums but also scientific laboratories, where the human form suffers eerie metamorphoses and doctors explore “the less tangible arena of the mind”.18 Late century scientific Gothic informs R.L. Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), H. Rider Haggard’s fantasy fiction, such as the bestselling She (1887), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” (1894), and H.G. Wells’ Gothicized romances of the 1890s, most notably The Island of Dr Moreau (1896). The trans-human, often bipolar figures in these

14

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press, 2nd edn, 2000. 15 Susan Wolstenholme, Gothic (Re)Visions: Writing Women as Readers, New York: SUNY Press, 1993, 58. 16 Patricia L. Skarda and Norma Crow Jaffe, Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry, New York: Meridian, 1981, 181-82. 17 Alexandra Warwick, “Victorian Gothic”, in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, 32. 18 Glennis Byron, “Gothic in the 1890’s”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, ed. David Punter, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 190.



Introduction

5

exponents of late-Victorian Gothic19 inaugurate contemporary concerns not only with the body and its many forms, pressures and enemies, but also with the mind and its potential for transgression and folly. From issues of gender and sexuality through ethnic questions of minorities, imperialism and immigration, the “Other” begins to take shape in these decadent fictions of strangeness and alienation. According to Andrew Smith, the fear of syphilis is then concomitant with “an anxiety relating to the proximity between the normal and the pathological, within what is a covert debate about masculinity”.20 The artificially transformed, medically intervened male body paves the way for a vampiric, predatory, “othered” body, while lending itself to a variety of questionings which feminist and postcolonial criticism would undertake a few decades later. It is at the fin-de-siècle that Dracula (1897) finally makes its appearance. Notwithstanding its status as the ultimate vampire archetype, Stoker’s character follows on the footsteps of a tradition of literary vampires. The prose lineage starts with Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), a suave aristocratic fiend preying on high society, moves on to “The Skeleton Count” (1828), an influential story allegedly written by Elizabeth C. Grey, continues with J.M. Rymer’s penny dreadful Varney, the Vampyre (1845), a sympathetic monster turned suicidal victim by his cursed condition, and acquires grotesque density with Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), a lesbian vampire which presents drastic physical mutations, from a cat-like form to a mass of black haze. The Gothic body gains prominence as a realm not only of supernatural transformation but especially of “degeneration”, a “crucial imaginative and narrative source for the fin-de-siècle Gothic”.21 Count Dracula symbolizes degeneration from a dual point of view: he embodies the non-British source, the outsider, the invader, who threatens to corrode and destroy, from its very midst, a colonial superpower. He also represents degeneration in the form of a contagious blood disease, symbolically spread through vampirism. Daniel Pick elegantly summarizes the forces at play in Stoker’s novel: 19

On Gothic “doubles”, see Linda Dryden, The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. 20 Andrew Smith, Victorian Demons: Medicine, Masculinity, and the Gothic at the fin-de-siècle, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, 8. 21 Kelly Hurley, The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin-de-Siècle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 45.



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it appeared at a time of “crisis and interim, on the verge of the new century, in a kind of corridor between different forms of knowledge and understanding”, and it “sensationalized the horrors of degeneration” at the same time as it “charted reassuringly the process of their confinement and containment”.22 Curiously enough, the Gothic mode turns out to be reactionary insofar as it explores chaos and transgression only to eventually restore order and convention. After Dracula, the Gothic could hardly be “deDraculized” ever again. The influence of Stoker’s work was indeed such that the twentieth-century profusion of Gothic expressions, especially in its last quarter, bears its impact to a greater or lesser extent. As it touches upon a number of contemporary social and moral issues – the dangers of a drifting consciousness, the perils of a contagious, sexualized body, the risks of crossing strange new places and approaching new types of knowledge, scientific and subjective alike – Dracula moulded successive generations of Gothic sensibility. But the 1900s were as much a contradictory and divisive territory for the Gothic as the nineteenth century had been. As Catherine Spooner aptly explains, the genre is often viewed in the twentieth century as a “principally popular form, the object of cult readership and mass-market paperbacks, its sensationalism at odds with the serious, avant-garde experimentalism of modernism and postmodernism”.23 Yet, she concedes, the postmodern eventually proved a more receptive milieu for a Gothic revival, owing to its preference for pastiche, parody, excess and sensationalism. The initial years of the century were active for such authors as M.R. James (Ghost Stories of an Antiquarian, 1904), William Hodgson (The House on the Borderland, 1908), Algernon Blackwood (The Centaur, 1911), and Hugh Walpole (Portrait of a Man with Red Hair, 1925), at the same time as the rise in pulp magazines – like Weird Tales and Horror Stories, the American successor to eighteenth-century penny dreadfuls – provided a prolific venue for horror writing.24 Perhaps the most renowned Gothic name of this period is H.P. Lovecraft, who wrote not only fiction, such as the 22 Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848-1918, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 174. 23 Catherine Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, London: Reaktion Books, 2006, 38. 24 See Ron Goulart, “The Pulps”, in The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, ed. Jack Sullivan, 1986, 337-40.



Introduction

7

influential “The Call of Cthulhu”, a short story of 1928 depicting the insignificance of mankind in light of cosmic horrors, but also criticism: his Supernatural Horror in Literature (1936), in spite of relying closely on Birkhead’s 1921 work, earned him (not her) lasting fame. Around that time, America was also witnessing the genesis of a unique trend of Gothic fiction: Southern Gothic. The US indeed provided ample room for the Gothic to thrive: as Lloyd-Smith remarks, “certain aspects of American experience may be regarded as inherently Gothic: religious intensities, frontier immensities, isolation, and violence; above all, perhaps, the shadows cast by slavery and racial attitudes”.25 Even though America lacked a feudal past, and those vestiges that make up the repository of European Gothic lore, like castles and monasteries and ruins, let alone legends and myths, it did possess a vast wilderness, laden with perils and menaces, where Gothic inspiration could be found. Faulkner, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor all share, like other exponents of the Southern Gothic, a disturbing view of the violence, alienation, poverty and crime of the decadent American South, inserting their deeply troubled characters into a register of magical realism, rather than of the strictly fantastical, and exploring social and cultural issues that scar the nation’s memory. But the twentieth century is also, par excellence, the time when the initially literary legacy boomed into a plethora of different modes, media and expressions. First of all there was cinema. Recovering a stage tradition of the nineteenth century, the first motion pictures are adaptations of Gothic texts, especially of Frankenstein, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Dracula. Murnau’s silent German classic, Nosferatu (1922), portrays a beastly, rat-like vampire, Count Orlock (an unaccredited version of Stoker’s count), a repulsive monster that provides the film, which bears sombre anti-Semitic hints, with a rather obnoxious inaugural representation of the vampire figure. From this initial cinema rendering until Coppola’s 1992 sensual, romanticized and psychologically intense adaptation, Dracula came a long way, reflecting the profound changes the character underwent throughout the twentieth century. These changes involve the extent to which the representation of the same monster can, as Spadoni puts it, “be found frightening, repulsive, ludicrous, pitiful or laughable by audiences in 25

Allan Lloyd-Smith, American Gothic Fiction: An Introduction, New York and London: Continuum, 2004, 25.



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different social circumstances and at different times”.26 Among the numerous directors who tackled Stoker’s character Terence Fisher (1958) and John Badham (1979), respectively starring Christopher Lee and Frank Langella in the title roles, stand out. But perhaps the quintessential cinematographic version of Dracula will remain Bela Lugosi’s groundbreaking performance in Tod Browning’s 1930 version: so iconic was it that the actor ended up starring in satiric remakes of himself, like Charles Barton’s 1948 Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. The comedic trend in cinema adaptations of the Gothic is actually one further subgenre within its extremely prolific film history: other examples of Dracula parodies are Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck (1967), Crain’s Blacula (1971), Dragoti’s Love at First Bite (1979) and Mel Brooks’ Dead and Loving It (1995). As Heidi Kaye argues,27 the variety of manifestations of the Gothic spans through such diverse genres as thriller and comedy, science fiction and film noir, monster movies and slasher films, in short, “anything dealing with the supernatural or nightmarish fears”, in such a way that it is difficult to offer a precise definition of Gothic cinema. Regardless of horror film subgenres, vampire films in particular seem to dwell on two recurrent loci: age and sexuality, with the myriad social and moral issues they raise. Indeed, as Ken Gelder remarks, cinema’s discourse on youth (with its sexual inflexion) is put to work in vampire movies through two key scripts – the nation and the family – shedding light not only on “the cultural variability of these discursive terrains but, more to the point, their downright instability”.28 The anti-establishment nature of the horror genre, with its cathartic exposé of human impulses and its glimpse into the dark alleys of the unconscious, allows it to tackle the notions of identity and belonging, at the same time as it challenges conservative social and moral standards. Gothic film seems indeed to question what it means to be an insider or an outcast, a citizen or a foreigner, male or female, old or young, at a time when traditional

26

Robert Spadoni, Uncanny Bodies: The Coming of Sound Film and the Origins of the Horror Genre, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2007, 45. 27 Heidi Kaye, “Gothic Film”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, 239. 28 Ken Gelder, Reading the Vampire, London: Routledge, 1994, 94.



Introduction

9

models fade away and identity assumes plural and fragmented dimensions, as postmodernism has well shown. It was around the 1950s, when post-war anxieties and rapid social and technological changes jeopardized established values and conventions, that the genesis of academic postmodernist critique occurred. New streams of uncertainty about the future fuelled a steady reaction against objectivity and absolute truth, in a movement that emphasizes such principles as pluralism, relativism, constructivism, and scepticism, or, as Mike Featherstone puts it, “the recognition of openness, randomness, eclecticism, incoherence, ... the acknowledgement of our innerwordliness, our own opaque symbolic self-constitution, our entrapment in a dissemination of signs”.29 That the Gothic naturally mingled with the postmodernist flow comes then as no surprise. According to Maria Beville, “sensationalism, formal experimentations and intertextuality”, as well as “recurrent motifs such as a concern with identity and the human psyche as presented in the form of the monstrous ‘other’”, are Gothic devices which perfectly fit postmodern language.30 She further remarks: “Much like the Gothic, postmodernism seeks to explore the nature of culture and the locale of significance of self, from the liminal position of the hyperreal.”31 In terms of form, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed the multiplication of the Gothic into a variety of media, from radio and television to comic books, cartoons, computer games, anime, manga and pinball machines, representing the ultimate flexibility of a genre to adapt to virtually every form of popular entertainment. Gothic television, in particular, managed to bring to the realm of domesticity a language and a lexicon that imbue it with terror. As Helen Wheatley argues, “one of the definitive aspects of Gothic television is its awareness of the domestic space as a site loaded with Gothic possibilities”, as well as of its ability to turn this domestic dimension into an “interstitial space” between “protection and entrapment”.32 Music and art, too, have absorbed the Gothic input, 29

Mike Featherstone, Consumer Culture and Postmodernism, London: Sage, 1991, 40. 30 Maria Beville, Gothic-Postmodernism: Voicing the Terrors of Postmodernity, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009, 55. 31 Ibid., 69. 32 Helen Wheatley, Gothic Television, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, 18, 107.



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and have in turn informed urban (sub)cultures and underground lifestyles. If Gothic rock bands such as Joy Division, Bauhaus and The Cure characteristically combine introspective and pessimistic lyrics with deep vocal styles and low, keyboard-heavy tunes, contemporary artists such as Cindy Sherman, Douglas Gordon and Gregory Crewdson are, according to Spooner, “concerned not with spiritual transcendence and historical nostalgia, but with the themes of haunting and imprisonment found in Gothic novels” – and also with the motifs of “bodily disgust” and of “duality and the shattered psyche”.33 Other art forms, ranging from sculpture to home décor and furniture design, confirm the recurrence of elements that merge the antique, the baroque and the excessive with the dark, the distorted and the aggressive, resulting in an aesthetics of perversion with frequent sadomasochistic hues. Likewise, video and digital art often reveal elements of organic and technological decay, interspersed with hallucinatory visions of body horror, sexual torture, disease and pain.34 When it comes to Gothic fashion, it is apparent that dress codes function as a password for admission into certain urban tribes and subcultural groups.35 Gothic clothing and accessories embody the outward emblem that a wide range of cultural outsiders, keen on the connotations of rebellion which the Gothic carries, eagerly – and somewhat paradoxically – follow. Gothic fashion is indeed associated with black-clad teenagers and rock musicians, but the clothing styles actually vary a great deal, from the romantic, the ethereal and the neoVictorian, including the “Lolita gothic”, to punk gothic, steamgothic, industrial gothic and cyber-gothic. But Gothic fashion is not limited to subcultural, alternative styles and urban gangs. High fashion designers, such as Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Thierry Mugler, and Yohji Yamamoto, as well as fashion photographers like Sean Ellis and Eugenio Recuenco, have also borrowed from the visuals and plasticity of the Gothic to express their dark glamour. As the century – and the millennium – drew to a close, the intensity of Gothic expressions rose significantly. As David Punter 33

Spooner, Contemporary Gothic, 16. See, for example, Christoph Grunenberg, Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, Boston: Institute of Contemporary Art, 1997. 35 See, for instance, Valerie Steele and Jennifer Park, Gothic: Dark Glamour, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. 34



Introduction

11

suggests, the Gothic has “something quite specific to do with the turn of centuries, as though the very attempt to turn a new leaf unavoidably involves conjuring the shadow of the past, watching its curious shapes fall over the attempted purities of the future”.36 On the verge of the twenty-first century, the Gothic phenomenon had gone global and traces of its presence pervaded every other culture.37 In AngloAmerican literature, particularly, the bestselling status of two particular authors makes us ponder the nature of the Gothic in its curious combination of the popular and the transgressive. They are Stephen King, whose Gothic motifs seem to be at odds with what some critics call his “Emersonian drive”,38 and Anne Rice, a key heiress to the vampire literary tradition who inventively adopts the perspective, not of the victim, but of the vampire, philosophically musing over the nature of good and evil.39 Rice’s Gothic achievements actually follow up on a very strong female trend in twentieth-century Gothic writing, especially New Gothic romances of the 60s and 70s, by such authors as Joan Aiken, Eleanor Hibbert and Phyllis A. Whitney. But it is perhaps the unprecedented success of TV series featuring vampires and generalized Gothic imagery that best epitomizes the definitive mainstream status that the Gothic acquired as of the mid-1990s. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is an example of a TV hit that targets young but educated viewers and is, as Williamson puts it, “couched in terms of middle-class white sensibilities”.40 This can be explained as a successful marketing strategy to attract an affluent niche audience, as well as the consequent cultural legitimacy that television, as opposed to cinema, so persistently lacked. The extreme richness of present-day manifestations of the Gothic was the starting point of the organization of the conference, held in 2012, which gave rise to the present collection of articles. The centenary of Stoker’s death was the event that triggered it: a hundred 36 David Punter, “Introduction: Of Apparitions”, in Spectral Readings: Towards a Gothic Geography, eds Glennis Byron and David Punter, London: Macmillan, 1999, 2. 37 See Glennis Byron, “Global Gothic”, in A New Companion to the Gothic, 369-78. 38 Heidi Strengell, Dissecting Stephen King: From the Gothic to Literary Naturalism, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. 39 Jennifer Smith, Anne Rice, A Critical Companion, Michigan: Greenwood Press, 1996, 13. 40 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire: Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower, 2005, 91.



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years after the Irish author’s demise, the impact of Dracula on contemporary literature, pop culture and the arts remains only too manifest, inspiring a steady flow of reworkings and transformations of the 1897 masterpiece. Besides, this is also a time when the scholarship on the Gothic has attained the status of a full-fledged discipline – Gothic Studies – deserving an international association and a wide range of academic journals, collections and publications. On the following pages is a selection of articles which aims at contributing to this body of scholarship from an interdisciplinary point of view. It uses the input from literary criticism to look at the Gothic phenomenon in its cinematic, theatrical, and televised facets so as to reassess the meanings and forms of the genre in present-day culture, both in its “high” and “pop”, mainstream and alternative, expressions. The present volume is organized into three thematic parts. Part One is entitled “Gothic Spaces, or the (De)Colonization of a Genre” and comprises five articles, all of which focus on the broad motif of Gothic location – ranging from the geographical source of vampire folklore and the spatial ancestry of Western literary Gothic material to the relocations of the genre, especially from a postcolonial point of view. In particular, it debates not only the way in which adaptations of Dracula have travelled and circulated – and, by extension, have been “colonized” by distinct cultural, geographical and epochal input – but also the transhistorical, transnational and transpatial critical readings of Stoker’s work. Part Two concentrates on artistic adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula and of the Gothic imagination other than strictly literary ones. Each of the four articles that constitute this part, entitled “Multimodal Representations of the Gothic – From the Screen to the Stage and the Arts”, dwells on a specific manifestation of Stoker’s legacy in cinema, radio, theatre and graphic novels. Part Three revolves around the issue of the evolution of the Gothic and of the extent to which the vampire figure progressed and changed since its literary inception to the present day. Under the title “Postmodern Gothic – Identity Transformations of the Vampire”, five articles scan new facets of the vampire’s personality and behaviour that rather drastically deviate from Dracula’s character matrix. Next is a brief summary of each of the contributions to these three parts. The first article examines the geographical roots of the vampire mythology by looking into a much neglected predecessor of the 

Introduction

13

Serbian and Eastern European revenants that inspired the Western literary vampire, and hence Dracula: the Greek vrykolakas. A creature that preceded the properly Slavic empires and made its way into Occidental bibliography in the sixteenth century, the vrykolakas prompted the first vampire fictions in Western Europe before Stoker’s Dracula, such as Polidori’s Vampyre. In “The Son of the Vampire: Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece”, Álvaro García-Marín discusses the extent to which the classical bias of philhellenism repressed the existence of a Greek proto-vampire, whose troubling presence blemishes the rationalistic Hellenic matrix of Western civilization with an Oriental or Balkanic uncanny barbarism. García-Marín also debates the suppression that the vrykolakas suffered within the very Greek national narrative, whose postcolonial condition makes the vrykolakas assume a fearful colonizing capacity. Indeed, being both a member of the Greek community and one which possesses alien ethnic qualities, allusive to the presence of Turks, Jews and Slavs in national history, the vrykolakas makes the former colonialist nation run the risk of being colonized from within. The second article, entitled “The New and Old Dracula Castle: the Poienari Fortress in Dracula Sequels and Travel Memoirs”, focuses on a particular topos of the Gothic imagination, perhaps its most representative one: Transylvania. In this celebrated space, cradle to Stoker’s hero, stand the ruins of the Poienari Fortress, rebuilt by the Wallachian voivode Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ܈‬in 1459, a renowned fictional, as well as real, travel destination for vampire lovers and Gothic researchers. Marius-Mircea Cri‫܈‬an presents a critical synthesis of the representations of the fortress in some Dracula sequels and travel memoirs which follow the vampire Count’s trail. In particular, he discusses the symbolic meanings that the old fortress, paradoxically imbued with attraction and interdiction, has acquired throughout the decades, as well as the metaphorical implications that the journey for its discovery holds in terms of the travellers’ identity. Perhaps, Crisan wonders, the castle’s ruins, and by extension the Transylvanian space where they exist, symbolize the borders between possibility and impossibility, reality and dream, history and legend. “Dracula Orientalized” is the title of the third article, which views Stoker’s novel as being deeply ingrained in late 1800s’ Victorian politics, especially with regard to Britain’s colonial enterprise in Eastern Europe. Raphaella Delores Gomez focuses on the 

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Gothic Old and New

representations of Eastern Europe in Stoker’s work as an orientalized alien and as a resisting Other, as well as on the ideological construction of a divide between “us” and “them”, which crept into the late nineteenth-century Victorian colonialist psyche. She thus discusses the tensions of an ever-expanding Imperial England which Stoker’s novel voices, especially the fear of “reverse colonization”, of being taken, invaded and occupied by the alien Other which Dracula symbolizes. By revealing the power hierarchies between the West and the East within Europe, Stoker manages, Gomez claims, to mirror the process of Othering present in British colonial politics in the Orient. And, by portraying Dracula as a degenerate foreigner, one that conquers and subdues Western women and refuses to abide by the social and moral norms of the West, Stoker also constructs a Gothic Other which resembles the Other found in postcolonial discourse. The fourth article, entitled “Empire, Monsters and Barbarians: Uncanny Echoes and Reconfigurations of Stoker’s Dracula in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”, applies the “transhistorical” and, we might add, “translocational” trend in the analysis of Dracula to Coetzee’s work (1982), a seminal reference in postcolonial studies. By regarding Stoker’s novel as an eerie intertext in Coetzee’s Barbarians at the thematic, figurative and structural levels, Rogers Asempasah discusses the latter’s differentiating approach to the “colonizer/colonized” dichotomy and the “civilized/barbarian” opposition. Instead of Stoker’s vampire, a diabolical creature from the outskirts of civilization aiming to invade and colonize the very heart of the sophisticated West, Coetzee’s “vampires” are not actual bloodsucking figures but, like Dracula, they torture the body, invade it and spill blood. In Barbarians, the frontier motif ends up exposing Empire itself as barbaric and monstrous, and the hunting motif – which in Dracula rids England of the alien threat – turns out, instead, to reveal the inherent contradictions of a decadent colonialist power, thus questioning the very notions of evil, foreignness and bestiality upon which it is based. “Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood: An Anatomy of the American Gothic” is the title of the fifth article, which takes the Gothic topography overseas and concentrates on the Georgian author’s first novel. Carlos Azevedo views Wise Blood (1952) as a representative of the genre of anatomy – along the lines of Frye’s “Menippean satire” – and claims that this critical standpoint allows for a combined reading 

Introduction

15

of the theological and secular trends in O’Connor’s writing. In particular, he examines the novelist’s predilection for dualities, which is patent in an expression of the sacred and the religious side by side with the sleazy and the profane, wherein a rhetoric of excess marries an “aesthetics of torture”. Thus, Wise Blood is read as a sharp satire of the deeply religious and conservative American South, of its backward womanhood, of its entrenched bigotry, as well as of a contradictory and deformed consumerist culture, which emerges through the author’s postmodern lens. An exponent of Southern Gothic, O’Connor deviates from the parent genre in that her troubled characters, her decayed settings and the sinister atmosphere she portrays do not solely play a role of suspense, but one of social and cultural criticism. As Azevedo well argues, O’Connor’s taste for what she calls “Gothic monstrosities” and for “everything defined as grotesque” serves her ideological intent of unveiling, through satire, the flaws of America’s decadent South. The sixth article in this volume, the first of Part Two, moves on to another analytical topic: adaptations of Dracula outside literature proper. In “Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931): the Vampire Wears a Dress Coat”, Dorota Babilas investigates this early cinematic adaptation of Stoker’s novel, whose relevance for the history of the horror genre and impact on subsequent film versions is only too evident. In particular, she examines the “sartorial shift” in the character of Dracula from an abhorrent corpse (like F.W. Murnau’s Orlock) to a sophisticated aesthete. Bela Lugosi’s unforgettable performance indeed offers a charming foreigner, dressed up with flawless elegance, instead of the typical hideous monster. Babilas views Lugosi’s Dracula, along the lines of Auerbach,41 as a recreation of the old Byronic association between a vampire and a dandy. By drawing on other films, like The Phantom of the Opera (1925) and Svengali (1931), she discusses the unlikely character combination of a brutal murderer with a gentleman of a refined taste for clothes and debates its implications for the history of the vampire film genre. Leslie McMurtry’s “Aurally Bloodcurdling: Representing Dracula and His Brethren in BBC Radio Drama” is the seventh article in the collection. It analyses five radio shows of the horror genre broadcast from 1998 to 2011, not only of Stoker’s novel but also spin-offs which 41

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995.



16

Gothic Old and New

derive from several strands existing in Dracula (such as Voyage of the Demeter and Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula), as well as other nineteenth-century vampire short stories (LeFanu’s Carmilla and R.L. Stevenson’s Olalla). McMurtry’s central concern is to understand how this material, which relies heavily on visual descriptions of the characters’ freakish appearance and of the spine-tingling settings, can possibly be converted into a genre whose sole channel is auditory. She wonders how the audience of radio drama can appreciate the intensity of the novel’s visual accounts and experience their terrifying effects? Her article elaborates on the strategies deployed and the techniques used, both in terms of narration and sound effects, to render as accurate and impressive a range of emotions as those of the source material. She tries to assess whether or not the adaptations have proved successful in preserving the original threatening mood and in conveying the ominous settings and the scary looks of the characters. The eighth article, “Land of Apparitions – Depiction of Ghosts and other Supernatural Occurrences in the First Gothic Plays”, concentrates on dramatic Gothic, a genre which met with an immense popularity in the latter part of the eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth. Eva ýoupková focuses on plays by James Boaden (Fontainville Forest, 1794), Harriet Lee (The Mysterious Marriage; or, the Heirship of Roselva, 1789) and M.G. Lewis (The Castle Spectre, 1797), as well as on works by Margaret Harvey, James Robinson Planché, and Edward Fitzball. All of these, she notes, introduce a key theatrical element, namely the representation of ghosts, spectres and apparitions on stage, which required from early on a certain technological complexity in terms of props and special effects. As ýoupková points out, Gothic drama has not received adequate critical attention, despite its kinship with the much more acclaimed genre of the Gothic novel. However, she holds, it is worth examining the common devices, aims and artistic methods which gothic narratives and plays share. Furthermore, the richness of influences which Gothic drama absorbed helped bridge the gap between serious and popular theatre, at a critical time of transition between the age of Classicism and Romanticism. The ninth article moves on to yet another expression of the Gothic: graphic novels and TV adaptations. In particular, it focuses on a symbolical motif in Gothic fiction, one which provides the genre with an iconic, identifying function, namely its architecture. In “Gothic 

Introduction

17

Architecture, Castles and Villains: Transgression, Decay and the Gothic Locus Horribilis”, Fanny Lacôte discusses the way in which the traditional Gothic castle conveys an easily identifiable clue as to the sort of action to expect within its walls. By looking at Ted Naifeh’s comic book Courtney Crumrin (2003), the recent horror drama television show American Horror Story (2011), and contemporary literary works such as Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart (1986) and Patrick McGrath’s The Grotesque (1989), Lacôte examines the evolution of the Gothic house and the way in which it has overcome its initial basic function as a stone building so as to assume animate, anthropomorphic features, and to merge into the very identity of its tenant. The Gothic villain and the house where he hides his misdeeds have become a single unit, revealing a close interplay between the habitat and its inhabitant. Crucially, Lacôte discusses the domestication of the formerly isolated Gothic castle: in contemporary Gothic narratives, she claims, horror lurks in the middle of clean, sanitized neighbourhoods and in apparently safe urban décors, where the uncanny startlingly surfaces. The first article in Part Three, the tenth in the collection, is entitled “Postmodern Gothic: Teen Vampires” and tackles the transformation of the vampire character from a repulsive creature into an attractive lover figure. Joana Passos examines the evolution of Dracula from the first (Murnau’s and Browning’s) film adaptations, which voice collective fears of foreign invasion and disease contamination, to recent versions (Coppola’s and the TV Twilight saga), fit for teenage audiences. Whereas the former, in line with Stoker’s original work, project elements of Victorian racism and male chauvinism, representing the vampire as the demonized, alien other from whom the Western women require protection, the latter offer a renewed, postmodern vampire figure, imbued with contemporary aspirations and playful, romanticized shades. The renovation of a once repellent and terrifying character into sexy boyfriend material for young viewers derives, Passos argues, from a key trend in contemporary Western culture: that of borrowing from the past in creative, ironical ways, pasting together elements of diverse origins, reinventing traditions and transforming, through a new language in tune with the times, crystallized and hegemonic cultural symbols of the Western common heritage.



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Gothic Old and New

“Vampires ‘on a Special Diet’: Identity and the Body in Contemporary Media Texts” is the title of the eleventh article, which focuses on a central trait of the vampire character – its feeding habits – as treated in recent Gothic film and television products. Lea Gerhards discusses the way in which contemporary Gothic narratives have shifted the conventions of the genre by “domesticating” the vampire’s natural impulse to feed on human blood. Nutritional alternatives, such as vegetarianism and animal or synthetic blood, allow the heroes in Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and True Blood to exercise their self-restraint, control their sociopathic nature and integrate into an acceptable communitarian life. The disciplining of the body thus achieved functions not only as a marker of character strength and sound morals, but also as a symptom of the postmodern notion that the body expresses the self. Torn between consumption and constraint, or between a physical urge to kill and a moral struggle to abstain from evil, this new ascetic, civilized, and sympathetic vampire expresses, as Gerhards well shows, the replacement of Stoker’s transgressive outcast by a politically correct and socially tamed surrogate. In “Forever Young, Though Forever Changing – Evolution of the Vampire”, the twelfth article in the present volume, Maria Antónia Lima concentrates on contemporary works such as Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles and Stephanie Meyers’ Twilight series to ponder the numerous transformations which the character of the vampire has undergone since Stoker’s literary creation. She highlights the contemporary obsession with youth and physical beauty as a motif which entails a plethora of subsidiary topics in present-day vampire fiction: sexuality, power, alienation, sickness, evil, loneliness and death. By discussing two contradictory facets of the vampire figure – its attractive power and its repulsive nature – Lima argues that vampirism has evolved drastically towards what she calls the contemporary dilemma of the self, divided between conflicting needs and paradoxical aspirations – the body and the mind, the technical and the spiritual, the ephemeral and the eternal. The thirteenth article is entitled “Who’s Afraid of Don Juan? Vampirism and Seduction” and establishes a parallel between Dracula and another persistent literary symbol of seduction: Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan. By identifying the most outstanding connections between the two characters, Maria do Carmo Mendes claims that both of them 

Introduction

19

represent the possibility of a complete gratification of individuality and of the senses, thus implying a social and sexual threat and an emancipation from the common morals of their time. However, the two literary myths also reveal differences: first, in their methods of seduction – which in Dracula’s case involve capturing, hypnotizing and attacking the victim, whereas Don Juan uses deceit and occultation to seduce women but cannot be said to prey on their lives. Secondly, sex assumes in Dracula a central role whereas Don Juan lusts after treachery and power rather than the female body. Thirdly, the characters also differ insofar as vampirism is considered a mental illness whereas Donjuanism is rather a weakness and a moral flaw in a decadent society where dishonesty and bribery are pervasive. Mendes finishes her argument by suggesting that, unlike Dracula’s, the myth of Don Juan has waned with time: ageing, physical decline and a ridiculous self-consciousness, together with a failure to break free from women’s ruses, all contribute to the fall of the Donjuanesque hero in contemporary fiction. Finally, the fourteenth article, entitled “Destroying and Creating Identity: Vampires, Chaos and Society in Angela Carter’s ‘The Scarlet House’”, investigates the transformed image which the vampire has acquired in contemporary fiction. Inês Botelho concedes that the vampire is no longer a symbol of absolute horror or terrifying otherness in contemporary fiction, which has assumed a somewhat sentimentalized outlook. However, she holds, the vampire remains a taker, a predator of vital force, a parasite which feeds not only on the victims’ blood but on their very soul. By focusing on a particular short story, Angela Carter’s “The Scarlet House”, Botelho examines the way in which its male protagonist, the Count, establishes a violent vampiric relationship with the female one, by taking, erasing and manipulating her memories. This psychic version of vampirism is all the more frightening since the predator, who feeds on the victim’s mind, talent and creativity, merges, inconspicuous, into the social tissue. Botelho goes on to claim that vampirism, actually, pervades Carter’s whole tale, becoming a strategy of resistance and rebellion on the part of the female protagonist, who employs her recently acquired vampiric skills to survive her ordeals, and extending to society itself. With this broad range of insights into the Gothic phenomenon, we hope to offer a representative, as well as enlightening, sample of key issues in present-day Gothic scholarship. Indeed, by approaching the 

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Gothic Old and New

multimodal and multimedia manifestations of the genre in the contemporary arena, this volume wishes to reappraise a variety of aspects of the origins, evolution, imagery, mythology, theory and criticism of Gothic fiction and of the Gothic (sub)culture from the standpoint of the twenty-first century. Yet, the breath of such an exercise and the interdisciplinary design that informs it entail an awareness of its inherent complexity. As Fred Botting ventures, the intricacy of the Gothic and the shifting, unstable nature of contemporary aesthetic and cultural conventions may challenge the very legitimacy of the Gothic category: hence the difficulty of a “coherent critical reading of texts conjoining romance, gothic and postmodern characteristics”.42 Therefore, it is imperative to bear in mind the polymorphous, multimodal configurations of present-day Gothic narratives, as well as the diversity of social, psychological, and political issues they address, from a plethora of geographic and historical angles and, particularly, from the realm of subjectivity and the psyche. All these aspects make the approach to the Gothic phenomenon even more demanding – but also, we believe, all the more rewarding.

42

Fred Botting, Gothic Romanced: Consumption, Gender and Technology in Contemporary Fictions, London: Routledge, 2005, 9.



PART I*RWKLF6SDFHVRUWKH'H &RORQL]DWLRQRID*HQUH

“THE SON OF THE VAMPIRE”: GREEK GOTHIC, OR GOTHIC GREECE? ÁLVARO GARCÍA MARÍN While it is widely accepted that the Serbian and Eastern European revenants that came to light in the 1730s are at the origin of the Western literary vampire, and therefore of Dracula, the critique has neglected a prior source probably more prominent in the West during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: the Greek vrykolakas. In fact, this creature appears in Occidental European bibliography before the properly Slavic vampires, and continues to be relentlessly present throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, either in theatre, poetry, prose fiction, ethnography, or travel accounts. This article argues that the disturbing presence of a Greek vampire was repressed both in and outside Greece due to the classical bias of Philhellenism, which tried to pose a suprahistorical Hellenic world as the origin of Western civilization (and consequently could not accept the stain of a barbaric and Oriental or Balkanic remainder such as the vrykolakas). The article also discusses the crucial entanglement of the Greek revenant not only with the origins of the literary vampire (Polidori’s Vampyre acts for the first time in Greece like a Greek revenant), but also with Gothic literature itself. Before the fixation of the vampire myth accomplished by Bram Stoker, many of the first vampire fictions were actually inspired by the Greek creature, destabilizing thus the reified image of Greece as the cradle of rationalistic Europe by means of its intertwining with the uncanniness of the revenant.

Why is Dracula a Transylvanian? My main point in this article will be to try to answer, or at least to pose, this seemingly banal question, which is however crucially entangled with the history of European modernity and of Greece’s national construction. This question may be posed in other terms: why is Dracula not a Greek? If we were to judge from the standpoint of a Western European of 1730 or 1820, Dracula, without any doubt, should have been a Greek. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the Slavic vampire was still unknown to the West, the Greek vrykolakas had been recurring in theological treatises, travel accounts or books on occultism from the beginning of the sixteenth century. In the following pages, I would like to present some of these allusions, highlighting their unresolvable negotiations and dialectic

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Álvaro García Marín

between the (re)construction of Modern Greece as an Oriental Other for Europe and its definition as the core of Europe’s cultural and epistemological origin. The very concept of the West is destabilized by the presence of this irrational monster at the roots of hyperrational modernity, as long as its disturbing logic of resuscitation and undeadness epitomizes the historical gap underlying this process of rebirth. I will also interrogate the decentring role of the vrykolakas in Greek discourses of national configuration, considering the colonial context in which they develop. The vrykolakas stands in a certain sense for colonial difference itself, and tries to be effaced from the official cultural imaginary. In the first section, some early mentions of the vrykolakas in the Renaissance are analysed from the perspective of an incipient Philhellenism entrenched in the logic of early Occidental modernity. Section two focuses on the role played by the vrykolakas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the discursive construction of Greece as the ethnic, religious Other of the West, and simultaneously its philosophical or epistemological ancestor. In section three, the Romantic revival of the vrykolakas in the heyday of Philhellenism is connected to the broader emergence of vampire fiction, while section four analyses how the Greek (and, thus, too European) origins of the vampire are gradually effaced in favour of Eastern European ones so as to externalize the inner threat posed by the uncanniness of modernity. Three founding allusions to the vrykolakas in the Renaissance By the time when Ancient Greece was being recovered (or even resurrected) in the Occident, three founding allusions brought the vrykolakas to the fore of European thought for the first time. Antonio de Ferraris, a Renaissance author, orientalizes the monster and the superstition in his De situ Japygiae (composed between 1506 and 1511, but first published in 1558), inaugurating a long-lasting association of the vampire belief with the Others of the West, or even making it historically coincide (and not casually, as we will see) with the very construction of the West as the Self of its Others: It is like the fable of Brocolae, which exists in the entire East: they affirm that the souls of the persons who devoted themselves to a wicked life use to fly in the night as balls of flames over their graves, to haunt acquaintances and friends, to feed on animals, to scare and



Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece?

23

kill the children, and then to return to their tombs. Superstitious people dig the graves and, after pulling the heart out of the corpse, they burn it and scatter the ashes to the four winds, that is, to the four corners of the world: so they believe they will stop the plague. Even if this is a fable, it provides us with an example of how all those who lived according to evil, either dead or alive, are hated and cursed.1

There is already, as we can appreciate, a discursive distrust in such Oriental beliefs, labelled with contempt “fabulae” and “superstitiones”. Western references to the vrykolakas, and to vampires at all, thus start by implicitly opposing a rational, discursively and spiritually healthy “we” to a superstitious and unhealthy “them” that paradoxically overlap, at least in this case, with the very origin the Occident claims for its historical uniqueness: Greece. Consequently, is the vrykolakas external or internal to the modern notion of Europe? Is it not reinscribed in the very gesture of its discursive expelling? The Greek vampire, as a strange body, will prevent from perfect closure the fiction of a Western incorporeal mental and epistemological space founded on a non-mediated continuity with Ancient Hellenes. It will somehow become the ineffaceable bodily rem(a)inder of the historical difference inherent in such a narrative. Cornelius Agrippa’s De occulta philosophia highlights in 1531 the coarse corporealness of Greek revenants, alluding to the Cretan version of the vrykolakas, the katakhanas: We read also in the Chronicles of the Cretensians, that the ghosts which they call Catechanæ were wont to return back into their bodies, and go to their wives, and lie with them; for the avoiding of which, and that they might annoy their wives no more, it was provided in the common laws that the heart of them that did arise should be thrust through with a nail, and their whole carcase be burnt.2

Even the Proto-Philhellenic text by Martin Kraus, Turcograecia (1584), while trying to clearly distinguish the glorious Greeks from the barbaric Ottomans who rule them at the moment, is haunted by the 1

Antonio de Ferraris, De Situ Japygiae, Basel: Petrus Perna, 1558, 620-21 (my translations throughout). 2 Cornelius Agrippa, De Occulta Philosophia Liber III, item Spurius Liber de Caeremoniis Magicis, qui Quartus Agrippae habetur, Paris: Beringos Fratres, 1531, 430.



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uncomfortable simultaneity of strangeness and Greekness in the vrykolakas: In Pentecost Saturday, the Turks burned a Greek dead two years before, which the crowd believed to come out from his grave in the night, and to kill men. Others hold that the true cause is that fifteen men, after seeing his spectre, died. They unburied him, and saw how his flesh was consumed but his skin was intact and stuck to his bones.3

Following the logic of the Freudian uncanny, Greekness, a historical revenant on its own, presents itself to modern Europeans as familiar and strange at the same time, the ideal summit of civilization towards which the West must always progress, and the Other in/of the Occident. Philhellenism, so important an undercurrent in the Enlightenment two centuries later, both for the construction of a rationalistic concept of Europe and for the promotion of an independent Greek nation, is therefore pervaded from its inception by the uncanny figure of the vampire, which unfolds, and to some extent embodies, many of the paradoxes and inconsistencies inherent in the project of modernity and in the construction of Western transparent epistemology. The seventeenth- and eighteenth-century reinforcement of the “low” Greek Other During the seventeenth century, references to the vrykolakas multiply, especially in theological works. The creature became so popular as to be included in another Philhellenic effort: the first dictionary of Modern Greek, Charles du Fresne’s Glossarium ad Scriptores Mediae et Infimae Graecitatis (1688). From this title we can infer that such “medium” and “low” Greekness is already mediated by a historical difference that makes it less or worse than itself, far away from its properness, a sort of subproduct of the once bright Hellenic people just like the vampire is the subproduct of a man or of the catholic Resurrection of the Body. Theological arguments were indeed the most common context for the vrykolakas in the seventeenth century. 3

Martin Kraus, Turcograeciae Libri Octo: Quibus Graecorum Status Sub Imperio Turcico, in Politia et Ecclesia, Oeconomia et Scholis, iam inde ab amissa Constantinopoli, ad haec usque tempora, luculenter describitur, Basel: Leonardus Ostenius, 1584, book VII, 490.



Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece?

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Greece, still under Ottoman yoke, was orientalized not only on the grounds of its being under Muslim rule, but also of its belonging to a space of intra-European otherness defined by Christian Orthodox faith. The “schismatic” Greeks are relentlessly blamed for their heretic dogma, not afar from superstition, as the very example of the vampire tradition demonstrates. From the twelve works that mention the monster from Heinrich Kornmann’s De miraculis mortuorum in 1610 to Robert Saulger’s Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs et autres souverains de l’Archipel in 1698, most references are found in theological treatises by Jesuit missionaries in the Cycladic islands who tried to refute Orthodox dogmas by showing the backwardness, irreligiosity and ignorance in which their populations lived. Though sometimes the authors explicitly believe in it, the mention of the vrykolakas is always used to attack the alien faith and to highlight the gap between the spiritual and salvation doctrine of Western religion, and the superstition and rude materialism of the East. François Richard’s Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable à Saint-Erini Isle de l’Archipel depuis l’établissement des Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus, published in 1657, is probably the best known work in this genre, as the frequent quotation by later authors attests. François Richard explains how the fact that no Catholic in the Archipelago has ever become a vampire after his death proves that Catholicism, unlike the Orthodox Church, is the only faith to provide full redemption. But maybe the most influential of all these theological treatises is Leo Allatius’ De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus (1645), quoted by almost every author after him. Leo Allatius himself was a Greek who converted to Catholicism and wrote against his childhood beliefs, among which was the vrykolakas and his destructive power. Leo Allatius’ refutation, published in Cologne, not only contributed to deepen the orientalization of Greece on the grounds of its faith, but made the vrykolakas widely known in the West due to the great detail of the author’s narrative. Theologians continued studying and mentioning Greek vampires during the first third of the eighteenth century, as in Johann Gottlieb Heineccius’ monograph Dissertatio de absolutione mortuorum excommunicatorum seu tympanorum in ecclesia graeca (1709), or in John Covel’s Some Account of the Present Greek Church (1722), but they were gradually replaced by philosophers and scientists. Likewise, science and philosophy increasingly replaced the discourse of 

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theology, though still at work in some texts. Credulous narratives and abstract presentations now gave way to more analytical examinations of the facts that tried to demystify and explain them in order to reduce the superstition to the modern epistemology it had come to defy. The power of the Western rationalist thought was thus deployed to convey a sense of political and cultural superiority. The French botanist Joseph Pitton de Tournefort’s Relation d’un voyage du Levant became the best illustration of this. Joseph de Tournefort travelled to Greece in the winter of 1700-1701 and in 1717, after sixteen years, published what was probably the most widely known story about vampires before the 1730s events in Serbia. His book was actually supposed to be a journal of the scientific mission he was commissioned to fulfil in Greece as a botanist, so vampirism emerges as a disturbing body in the context of accuracy and precision of the scientific discourse. As such, the excess has to be reduced through integration into the semiotic framework of modern epistemology, that is, through scientific explanation (what in this age means also the naturalization and redefinition) of the phenomena he contemplates. So, he narrates the epidemic of collective fear unleashed by the alleged apparition of a vrykolakas in Mykonos while he was visiting the island, in the late autumn of 1700, and seeks to meticulously describe all the ceremonies in order to make clear not only his disbelief (his epistemological disconnection from the credulous Greek peasants as a representative of the modern Europe), but also the true interpretation of the facts. Even though the title of the chapter where this narrative is included is “État présente de l’Église grecque”, his focus is not already on heresy, but on superstition and underdevelopment: On the tenth day they said one mass in the chapel where the body was laid, in order to drive out the demon which they imagined was got into it. After mass, they took up the body, and got everything ready for pulling out its heart. The butcher of the town, an old clumsy fellow, first opened the belly instead of the breast: he groped a long while among the entrails, but could not find what he looked for; at last somebody told him he should cut up the diaphragm. The heart was pulled out, to the admiration of all the spectators. In the meantime, the corpse stunk so abominably, that they were obliged to burn Frankincense; but the smoke mixing with the exhalations of the carcass, increased the stink, and began to muddle the poor people’s



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pericraniums. Their imagination, struck with the spectacle before them, grew full of visions. It came into their noodles that a thick smoke arose out of the body; we durst not say it was the smoke of the incense. They were incessantly bawling out vroucolacas, in the chapel and place before it: this is a name they give to these pretended redivivi. The noise bellowed through the streets, and it seemed to be a name invented on purpose to rend the roof of the Chapel. Several present there averred, that the wretch’s blood was extremely red: the butcher swore the body was still warm; whence they concluded, that the deceased was a very ill man for not being thoroughly dead, or in plain terms for suffering himself to be reanimated by the devil; which is the notion they have of a vroucolacas. They then roared out that name in a stupendous manner. Just at this time came in a flock of people, loudly protesting they plainly perceived the body was not grown stiff, when it was carried from the fields to the church to be buried, and that consequently it was a true vroucolacas; which word was still the burden of the song. I don’t doubt they would have sworn it did not stink, had we not been there; so amazed were the poor people with this disaster, and so infatuated with their notion of the dead being reanimated. As for us who were got as close to the corpse as we could, that we might be more exact in our observations, we were almost poisoned with the intolerable stink that issued from it. When they asked us what we thought of this body, we told them we believed it to be very thoroughly dead: but as we were willing to cure, or at least not to exasperate their prejudiced imaginations, we represented to them, that it was no wonder the butcher should feel a little warmth when he groped among the entrails that were then rotting; that it was no extraordinary thing for it to emit fumes, since dung turned up will do the same; that as for the pretended redness of the blood, it still appeared by the butcher’s hands to be nothing but a very stinking nasty smear. After all our reasons, they were of the opinion it would be their wisest course to burn the dead man’s heart on the sea-shore: but this execution did not make him a bit more tractable; he went on with his racket more furiously than ever: he was accused of beating folks in the night, breaking down doors, and even roofs of houses; clattering windows; tearing clothes; emptying bottles and vessels. It was the most thirsty Devil! I believe he did not spare anybody but the Consul in whose house we lodged. Nothing could be more miserable than the condition of the island; all the inhabitants seemed frightened out of their sense: the wisest among them were stricken like the rest: it was an epidemical disease of the brain, as dangerous and infectious as the



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Álvaro García Marín madness of dogs. Whole families quitted their homes, and brought their tent-beds from the farthest parts of the town into the publicplace, there to spend the night. They were every instant complaining of some new insult; nothing was to be heard but sighs and groans at the approach of night: the better sort of people retired into the country. When the prepossession was so general, we thought it our best way to hold our tongues. Had we opposed it, we had not only been accounted ridiculous blockheads, but atheists and infidels. How was it possible to stand against the madness of a whole people? Those that believed we doubted the truth of the fact, came and upbraided us with our incredulity, and strove to prove that there were such things as vroucolacas by citations out of the Buckler of Faith, written by François Richard, a Jesuit missionary. He was a Latin, they say, and consequently you ought to give him credit. We should have got nothing by denying the justness of the consequence: it was as good as a comedy to us every morning, to hear the new follies committed by this night bird; they charged him with being guilty of the most abominable sins.4

Joseph de Tournefort defines thus two epistemological spaces which both his narrative voice and the Greeks in Mykonos assume: the one of the West, privileged in the binary opposition, from where he himself speaks, and the one of the East, which the superstitious peasants inhabit. The authority is conferred to the first one both by the narrator, through the rhetorical devices he deploys, and by his autochthonous interlocutors, who consider it more believable than their own. But where is Joseph de Tournefort’s epistemology considered to come from? Is it not a by-product of Ancient Greek civilization? Is it not Greek itself, after all? Where is then the vrykolakas to be put as a historical and even geographical figure? Is its space not undefined and undecidable from this point of view? Is the colonizing logic of European epistemology not being colonized by this irreducible creature and its questioning of discursive authority? Joseph de Tournefort seems to perceive this paradox, as he feels himself compelled to explain the difference between proper and improper Greeks, thereby inscribing a historical difference in the core of Greekness (which is the historical difference brought about by modernity in Europe), a difference governed by the logic of the 4

Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un Voyage du Levant, Fait par Ordre du Roy, Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1717, 132-34.



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revenant itself: “Après cela ne faut-il pas avouer que les Grecs d’aujourd’hui ne sont pas grands Grecs et qu’il n’y a chez eux qu’ignorance et superstition!” (“After such an instance of folly, can we refuse to own that the present Greeks are no great Greeks and that there is nothing but ignorance and superstition among them?”).5 Before the Serbian cases of vampirism came to light in 1732 and spread the fame of the creature across Europe, other theoretical works, such as Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M. Huet (1722), by Pierre Daniel Huet, reflected also on the stories about the Greek vrykolakas from a philosophical point of view. But even after 1732, the Greek specimen seems to remain the source of all vampires in the mind of many experts and theoreticians. In the most famous and influential treatise on vampirism in the eighteenth century, Augustin Calmet’s Dissertation sur les vampires (1746), the author returns to the heresy argument and blames the Orthodox Greeks as the origin of this superstition, created just to distinguish themselves from the Western Catholic Church: The belief of modern Greeks, who will have it that the bodies of the excommunicated do not decay in their tombs or graves, is an opinion which has no foundation, either in antiquity, in good theology, or even in history. This idea seems to have been invented by the modern Greek schismatics, only to authorize and confirm them in their separation from the church of Rome.6

He appears also disappointed by the fact that the “spiritual Greeks” have fallen to such a state of intellectual poverty and materialism as to introduce such dangerous and coarse bodies into the West: The vroucolacas of Greece and the Archipelago are again revenants of a new kind. We can hardly persuade ourselves that a nation so witty as the Greeks could fall into so extraordinary an opinion. Ignorance or prejudice must be extreme among them since neither an ecclesiastic nor any other writer has undertaken to undeceive them.7

5

Ibid., 136. Augustine Calmet, Dissertation sur les Apparitions des Anges, des Démons et des Esprits et sur les Revenants et Vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie et de Silésie, Paris: De Bure, 1746, 251-52. 7 Ibid., 252-53. 6



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Augustine Calmet’s work was widely commented by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, whose rationalism had been strongly challenged by the phenomenon of vampires. Dozens of scientific monographs were produced in Germany and France around 1732 in order to refute or explain the possibility, or not, of vampirism. But, some decades later, the most important philosophers in Europe, such as Voltaire, Diderot, or Rousseau, were still trying to eradicate this belief. The vampires made it into the Encyclopaedia, where Louis de Jaurcourt wrote that Augustine Calmet’s treatise on the subject was not only absurd, but unbecoming to such a personality. The German Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon also included an entry on vampires where Greek vrykolakes occupy a pre-eminent position, and Gerard van Swieten, the physician in charge of carrying out the fieldwork research commissioned by the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa in Central Europe, blames also the Greeks, orientalizing them once more, in his Anhange vom Vampyrismus (1768): “The origin of this evil has its roots without any doubt in the naivety of the Greek schismatics, who believe that the devil can possess people’s bodies replacing their souls.”8 But maybe Voltaire’s is the most extensive and important allusion in this sense. The vampires make it too into his Philosophical Dictionary (1764), which attests their relevance in the configuration and empowerment of the Enlightened epistemology. Voltaire once again expresses the paradox that had stricken Joseph de Tournefort and Augustine Calmet, that is, how could the “philosophical Greeks” have given rise to such an irrational belief? By expressing his bewilderment, he nonetheless acknowledges the widely spread belief about the Greek origin of vampirism: Who would believe, that we derive the idea of vampires from Greece? Not from the Greece of Alexander, Aristotle, Plato, Epicurus and Demosthenes; but from Christian Greece, unfortunately schismatic.9

Voltaire inscribes the same historical gap as Joseph de Tournefort into the notion of Greekness, inverting the narrative of progress and development inherent in the Enlightenment, and thus challenging it: 8

Gerard Van Swieten, Abhandlung des Daseyns der Gespenster, nebst einem Anhange vom Vampyrismus, Augsburg: No publisher, 1768, 6. 9 Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique (1769), Paris: Cosse, 1838, 920-21.



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Modern Greeks are but the degeneration of Ancient Greeks, while Europeans, starting also from the Hellenic culture, continuously advance toward rationalism leaving aside barbarism and superstition. A revival of the Greek revenant in the nineteenth century In the last third of the eighteenth century there appear to be fewer allusions to the vrykolakas. The first vampire fictions, in fact, seem to exclusively draw from the Slavic events of the 1730s. But around 1810, coinciding with a boost in Philhellenism due to the claims of the Greek-speaking communities of the Ottoman Empire for independence, a clear revival of the Greek revenant pervades European literature. The most famous Philhellene at the time, Lord Byron, wrote the poem Giaour in 1813. Curiously enough, in the first part, he depicts Greece itself as an undead; the shores of Ancient Greece are in the present like a corpse waiting for a soul to be able to stand up and walk:10 He who hath bent him o’er the dead Ere the first day of death is fled, The first dark day of nothingness, The last of danger and distress, (Before Decay’s effacing fingers Have swept the lines where beauty lingers,) And mark’d the mild angelic air, The rapture of repose that’s there, And fix’d yet tender traits that streak The languor of the placid cheek, And – but for that sad shrouded eye, That fires not, wins not, weeps not, now, And but for that chill, changeless brow, Where cold Obstruction’s apathy Appals the gazing mourner’s heart, As if to him it could impart The doom he dreads, yet dwells upon; Yes, but for these and these alone, Some moments, ay, one treacherous hour, He still might doubt the tyrant’s power; So fair, so calm, so softly sealed, 10

See Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East, New York: Palgrave, 2006, 26-27.



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Álvaro García Marín Such is the aspect of this shore; ’Tis Greece, but living Greece no more! So coldly sweet, so deadly fair, We start, for soul is wanting there.11

This introduction thematizes the content of the poem, whose protagonist, a giaour (a Christian of mixed racial origins rather than a pure ethnic Greek) fighting the Ottomans in order to attain Greece’s independence, is cursed by his Turkish enemy to become a vampire after his death. Even if Byron supports the modern Greeks’ claims for autonomy, it seems as if the spurious population of contemporary times could only (re)emerge as a vampiric counterfeit of their glorious ancestors, precisely because of the Oriental impurity and the historical difference inscribed in them. Some scholarly footnotes in the Giaour, as well as one in Robert Southey’s Thalaba the Destroyer, show that the figure of the vrykolakas was still well known in the broader context of vampirism. Indeed it is this figure that stands at the origin not only of the two vampire fictions produced during the renowned 1816 evening in Villa Diodati, but even of the very reformulation of Gothic that took place there. The two great myths of horror fiction in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the monster of Frankenstein and the modern vampire, were born exactly that evening among famous Philhellenes, some of whom would participate a few years later in the Greek War of Independence. John Polidori’s The Vampyre, originally a rewriting and a completion of Byron’s “Fragment” told that very evening in Villa Diodati, stands at the beginning of the line of vampire fictions that will culminate in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The vampire in it is modelled on the vrykolakas, and acts for the first time in Greece. In the Introduction John Polidori explains the traditions upon which it is founded, referring especially to Greece: The superstition upon which this tale is founded is very general in the East. Among the Arabians it appears to be common: it did not, however, extend itself to the Greeks until after the establishment of Christianity; and it has only assumed its present form since the division of the Latin and Greek churches; at which time, the idea becoming prevalent, that a Latin body could not corrupt if buried in 11

Byron, The Works of Lord Byron, London: John Murray, 1900, III, 70.



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their territory, it gradually increased, and formed the subject of many wonderful stories, still extant, of the dead rising from their graves, and feeding upon the blood of the young and beautiful. In the West it spread, with some slight variation, all over Hungary, Poland, Austria, and Lorraine .… In many parts of Greece it is considered as a sort of punishment after death, for some heinous crime committed whilst in existence, that the deceased is not only doomed to vampyrize, but compelled to confine his infernal visitations solely to those beings he loved most while upon earth – those to whom he was bound by ties of kindred and affection.12

The protagonist, Lord Ruthven, is an English aristocrat who resuscitates for the first time in Greece after being murdered by a group of autochthonous brigands who eventually become his accomplices. He comes back from Greece to England to haunt and kill some bourgeois ladies he has previously seduced. This half-Greek vampire contaminating modern and bourgeois Europe from the outside was an immediate success after the first publication of the work in 1819. A whole bunch of Ruthvens spread over Europe across the nineteenth century, and especially during the 1820s (precisely the decade when Greece was fighting for secession from the Ottomans with the support of the Western public opinion). Charles Nodier’s theatrical adaptation of Cyprien Bérard’s novel Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires in 1820 unleashed a long series of sequels that filled the French, English and German stages for decades. More than twenty such texts are premiered or published just in the 1820s, and the popularity of Ruthven along the whole century represents without any doubt one of the main influences on Bram Stoker. Repression and effacement of the Greek vampire The birthplace of the vampire, however, was gradually shifted. While in the 1820s Greece coexisted with Scotland, Moldavia or Hungary as the birthplace of fictional vampires, by the 1870s allusions to the vrykolakas were almost only to be found in travel accounts and ethnographic scholarship. As the 1828 novel by the German Theodor Hildebrand indicates, at this moment the Greek vampires were still considered the source of the whole species: though the protagonist of the book is an undead woman from Moldavia, the subtitle is Ein 12

John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale, London, 1819 (Woodstock facsimile edn, 1990), xix and xxii.



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Roman nach neugriechischen Volkssagen (A Novel after a Modern Greek Folktale). That the vrykolakes lost popularity and prominence is demonstrated by the fact that, in the first edition of his Dictionnaire Infernal (1818), Jacques Collin de Plancy included two separate entries for broucolaques and vampires, while in the fourth one, from 1845, the entry broucolaque refers the reader to “vampire”. In any case, in French, the word broucolaque, attested from the 1780s, is still used in 1924 by Gaston Leroux in his novel La Poupée sanglante to allude metaphorically to vampires, and, in English, it is employed until at least 1880.13 This means that Greek vampires were well enough known to the readers so as not to need an explanation for the term. How can we explain, then, the process of repression and effacement undergone by the vrykolakas and Greece as a land of vampires in the Western European culture during the nineteenth century? It seems that, as these monsters became more popular and crystallized in a myth of modernity, the Greek factor slowly disappeared until it left almost no traces at all at the present. To help solve this riddle we should look at the entwinement between modernity, Greece, and the Freudian uncanny, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All of them, as well as the vampire, are governed by the same logic: resurrection, return, discontinuity and historical gap. It is not a coincidence that both Greece and the vrykolakas (re)appear together in the West, in a period called “Renaissance”. The Renaissance entails a rebirth of the dead Ancient Greece, which tries to be constructed as the origin and the foundation of the Occident. But there is always an excess and a difference in such a return: as in the Freudian uncanny, Greece is the familiar that comes back as the strange, or the strange that reveals itself as the familiar. I contend that the vampire, a revenant who returns from the grave neither dead nor alive to haunt the living and to destabilize the borders between neatly defined concepts, times and spaces, emblematizes such a disquieting difference, which disjoints the aim to full identity inherent in modernity. As soon as Western Europeans turn their gaze on modern Greece, they perceive a

13 In Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Fate of Madame Cabanel”, a short story published in the Christmas number of All the Year Round, XXIX (1880), “Vampire! Broucolaque!” appears several times.



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historical gap that undermines their claims of continuity for Western civilization. The constructed nature of such a concept comes to light in an uncanny manner. Vampire stories, as happened in Serbia in the 1730s, emerge in contexts of cultural crossing, especially when the Turks are involved. They come to symbolize, both inside and outside this territories, the monstrosity transmitted by the contact with the full alterity of such oriental aliens. In short, they embody the disjoining of identity, continuity and ethnic group that haunts Western Europe in its process of alleged modernization and self-delimitation. But, while the notion “Eastern Europe”, created in this period precisely for the Slavic regions that were haunted by vampires, became a comfortable container for border communities split between familiarity and otherness, Greece exceeded such a narrow categorization. It was intended to be not just familiar to Europe, but the very historical and spiritual core of its modern reconfiguration. Percy Bysse Shelley even said “we are all Greeks”. Hence the bewilderment of philosophers and scientists such as Voltaire, Joseph de Tournefort, or Rousseau, before the fact that vampires, that such a figure undermining the whole discourse of Enlightenment, belonged to the same Greece they were trying to reify as its origin. Greekness, then, has to be orientalized as a part of the process of self-delimitation of the West, but that, paradoxically, implies a destabilization of all accepted cultural categories. Philhellenism, a crucial current of Enlightenment, is thus haunted from the beginning by the vrykolakas (as we have seen regarding the protophilhellenic work by Martin Kraus) and by the disquieting logic of undeadness and vampirism. Neither wholly Occidental nor Oriental, Ancient nor Modern, dead nor alive, exactly like the vampire, Greece challenges the encyclopedistic epistemology that tries to assign a unique signified to each signifier, and vice versa. That is also, as Helène Cixous14 or Samuel Weber,15 among others,16 have asserted, a feature of the 14

Hélène Cixous, “Fiction and its Phantoms: A Reading of Freud’s Das Unheimliche”, New Literary History, VII/3 (Spring 1976), 525-48. 15 Samuel Weber, “Uncanny Thinking”, in The Legend of Freud, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000, 1-31. 16 For a general panorama of the critical reflection about the uncanny, see Anneleen Masschelein, The Unconcept: the Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twentieth-Century Theory, New York: State University, 1995.



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uncanny. If we accept, following Terry Castle,17 that the concept of uncanniness is historically determined and emerges in the Enlightenment, I would dare to suggest that Philhellenism and the dream of a revivified Greece, however entangled with rationalism they seem to be, are inextricably linked to the uncanny and, therefore, to the conditions that gave rise to Gothic literature. The Greek War of Independence brought this process to a climax. Europe projected on the nation to come the ideals of Philhellenism, the utopia of the Enlightenment. Paradoxically, the idea of founding a new nation from scratch as an embodiment of the internal structure governing modernity had to rely in the restoration of the ancient. It was already the resuscitation of a corpse. The new state was called “Modern Greece”, even if it could not wholly fulfil the conditions of any of both terms: it was not modern, since it had to carry on its shoulders the burden of the Ancient, and it was not sufficiently Greece, since it was a contemporary region under Ottoman rule. Where the Europeans thought they would find an empty lot to build their particular Hellenistic utopia, they actually found an Orthodox Christian community with oriental customs unaware of who their glorious ancestors were. The encounter with the “body of Greece” was also, by itself, uncanny, and destabilized the Philhellenic ideals through a kind of secondary revenance: that of Greece’s Orientalist and Balkanist Otherness linked precisely to the superstitions of vampirism. This conglomerate of factors, and the reluctance to wholly categorize Greece as “Eastern Europe”, brought about the repression of the vrykolakas in Western European fiction. The focus was shifted towards Romania, Serbia, and such easier emblematizations of intraEuropean Otherness. The space of the Balkans remained associated with vampirism itself because of its alleged attachment to previous stages of historical development and to premodern violence, while Greece was turned into just another Mediterranean paradise of exotic authenticity and light. However, despite any repressions, the uncanny always comes back to haunt – this time not outside, but within Greece. European Philhellenism prompted the construction of the Greek state in the nineteenth century, to the point that many authors have coined for this 17

Terry Castle, The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.



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process the term “metaphorical colonization” or “colonization of the mind”.18 Since the Greek elite itself assimilated such a discourse as the only chance to achieve national independence, Vangelis Calotychos has used the more accurate term “self-colonization”.19 Instead of founding a nation, the Greek-speaking Ottomans inhabiting the Ancient territories of Hellas found themselves trying to resuscitate one, even if it did not coincide at all with their daily practice and recent background. Self-colonial pedagogy, to borrow Homi Bhabha’s concept,20 dictated nonetheless the logic of uncanniness as the way to structure the nation: completely alien elements had to be familiarized, while familiar ones were despised as alien and inadequate. Modernization and Europeanness became the main goal of the state. Superstitions, marks of backwardness or oriental customs, in short everything that might deny the dogma of uninterrupted continuity between Classical and Modern Greece, were repressed in the official discourse. Anxiety about self-identity prevailed over any other collective feeling. The tradition of the vrykolakas, as allegorizing not only the fear of impure ethnicity and of discontinuity, but also the economy of revenance structurally governing the process of national configuration, underwent a particularly intense repression. It not only represented an embarrassment for Greece’s claims of belonging to the West, but also revealed the constructedness of the nation and the uncanny fractures in the national narrative. In the first wave of Greek nationalism, the vrykolakas tried even to be de-orientalized and assimilated to the Hellenic lineage. Adamantios Korais, one of the founding fathers of the country, wrote in his Atakta, an early dictionary of the modern Greek language, a fake classical etymology for it, disregarding the clear Slavic origin of the term, in order to suggest continuity in vampire lore from Ancient to modern times.21 In spite of the moderate success of this theory, within the country and among some foreign folklorists, the revenants did very soon what they do the best: to come back from the death-like fixation through which they tried to be controlled and obliterated. 18

See especially Stathis Gourgouris, Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996, and Artemis Leontis, Topographies of Hellenism: Mapping the Homeland, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. 19 Vangelis Calotychos, Modern Greece: A Cultural Poetics, Oxford: Berg, 2003. 20 Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London: Routledge, 1994. 21 Adamantios Korais, Atakta, Paris, 1832, II, 84-85; and Atakta, Paris, 1835, V, 31.



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The economy of revenance governing Greek national construction brought them back. After the first classicist wave, around the 1880s, a group of intellectuals began claiming the autochthonous heritage of their country. Naturally not the Ottoman elements, but the Byzantine and the popular ones developed under Turcocracy. Colloquial language, folkloric traditions, and oral literature were recovered, though often as an attempt to prove the survival of Ancient customs in Modern Greece, and thus historical continuity. Not surprisingly, the revival in the national discourse of previously repressed strata of selfidentity brought about the resuscitation of vampires. Once more an allegory of the very structure of collective self-conceptualization, the vrykolakas, first banned from the public space, started now to appear again in journals, fictions and even ethnographic studies. From the 1860s until the first decades of the twentieth century, a set of short stories about vampires was published in Greece. However, such voluntary revival seemed to exceed its initial aim and became uncanny and anxiety-provoking. Maybe that is why these incipient samples of Greek Gothic underwent censorship and repression in their turn, not assuming Gothic generic conventions, but the conventions of the narrative of customs and manners, and, yet, becoming almost totally excluded from the literary canon. Unlike European ones, Greek literary vampires do not come from remote colonized lands, but from the same community, and even family, as their victims. Like the famous Serbian vampire Arnold Paole, however, they carry a mark of Otherness usually connected to contact with the Turks or, in the case of Greece, even Slavs. The repressed plurality of identities through which Greece was initially constructed, returns now under a monstrous form to destabilize and weaken the foundations of the community. In the first of our texts (see Appendix II), Aristotelis Valaoritis’ Thanasis Vagias (1867), the dead hero who pays a visit to his terrified widow has been accused of committing treason against Greece by revealing national military plans to the Turks in the War of Independence. The alleged vampire in “The Grave of the Excommunicated” (1926) is discovered to have had secret commercial dealings with Turks, whose revelation to his family and fellow countrymen seems to be the only cause of his vampirization. While it is not said whether the vrykolakas in “The Son of the Vampire” (1933) be a Turk at all, the description of the cave 

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where he lives reminds one of an Ottoman Palace as those which the ruling class of Turkish governors of Greek regions, the pasha, used to inhabit. Since the vampire was always someone excommunicated from the Orthodox Church, Andreas Carcavitsas’ “The Excommunicated” (1888) features a man who is banned from the community before he dies by means of a public sentence for theft, and has to leave his village to go to live among the nomadic Slavs of the mountains. In other cases, it is the transgression of a communal taboo that leads to vampirization, either for practising sorcery, as in “She did not decompose”, or for not submitting oneself to collective superstitions, as in “The Vampire”. A fear of not belonging enough, of not being sufficiently pure as a Greek, is at stake here. This is reinforced by the anxiety of having descendants with vampires and thus prolonging the spurious lineage for the nation. A motif in folklore itself, intercourse or even marriage with a vrykolakas is thematized both in Thanasis Vagias and in “The Son of the Vampire” as the uttermost horror to be endured by a Greek woman. While the hero in the former proposes that his wife has a child, which seems to be for her more horrible than the apparition itself, in the latter the child has already been born, with several monstrous marks that make him unhuman. I contend that these short stories, which would deserve a much more detailed study, allegorize the economy of revenance and the uncanniness involved in the construction of Modern Greece, and express the anxiety about discovering fearful secrets in the body of the national self: especially, alien ethnicities and deviant identities. But, unlike Western representations of alterity through vampirism, the vrykolakas in such postcolonial context does not embody the fear of “reverse colonization”, in Stephen Arata’s expression about Dracula (1990), but of “reverse self-colonization”. That is why Dracula is a Transylvanian, since depicting him as a Greek would have been too fearful for Europeans themselves: Otherness would not come from outside, but would have been already, from the beginning, among them.



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Álvaro García Marín Appendix I: List of Western works that mention the vrykolakas

1506-11 (published 1558): Antonio de Ferraris, De situ Japygiae, Basel. 1531-33: Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, Paris and Cologne. 1584: Martin Kraus, Turcograecia, Basel. 1610: Heinrich Kornmann, De miraculis mortuorum, Frankfurt. 1645: Leo Allatius, De Graecorum hodie quorundam opinationibus, Cologne. 1657: François Richard, Relation de ce qui s’est passé de plus remarquable à Saint-Erini Isle de l’Archipel depuis l’établissement des Pères de la Compagnie de Jesus, Paris. 1660: Christian Friedrich Garmann, De miraculis mortuorum, Leipzig. 1664: Jean de Thévenot, Relation d’un voyage fait au Lévant, Paris. 1674: S. Gerlach, Tagebuch der vonzween Glorwürdigsten Römischen Kaysern Maximiliano und Rudolpho, Frankfurt. 1676-86: Alexandre Noël, Selecta historiae ecclesiasticae capita, et in loca ejusdem insignia dissertationes historicae, chronologicae, dogmaticae, Paris. 1677: Jean-Baptiste Cotelier, Ecclesiae graecae monumenta, Paris. 1678: Paul Ricaut, The present state of the Greek and Armenian Churches, London. 1688: Charles du Fresne, Glossarium ad scriptores Mediae et Infimae Graecitatis, Lyon. 1695: Sieur de la Croix, État présent des nations et Églises grecque, armenienne et maronite en Turquie, Paris. 1698: Robert Saulger, Histoire nouvelle des anciens Ducs et autres souverains de l’Archipel, Paris. 1698: Thomas Smith, De Graecae Ecclesiae hodierno statu, Utrecht. 1704: Paul Lucas, Voyage au Lévant, Paris. 1709: Johann Michael Heineccius, Dissertatio Theologica Inauguralis De absolutione mortuorum excommunicatorum seu tympanicorum in ecclesia graeca, Helmstedt. 1717: Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, Relation d’un voyage du Lévant fait par ordre du roy, Paris. 

Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece?

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1722: John Covel, Some Account of the Present Greek Church, Cambridge. 1722: Pierre Daniel Huet, Huetiana ou pensées diverses de M. Huet, Paris. 1730: Antoine de la Barre de Beaumarchais, Lettres sérieuses et badines sur les ouvrages des savans, et sur d’autres matières, The Hague. 1732-54: Joseph Heinrich Zedler, Großes vollständiges UniversalLexikon aller Wissenschaften und Künste, Halle and Leipzig. 1733: Willem Cuypers, Ad Historiam Chronologicam Patriarcharum Constantinopolitanorum – in Acta Sanctorum Augusti I, Antwerp. 1741: Antoine Banier-Jean-Baptiste Le Mascrier, Histoire générale des cérémonies, mœurs et costumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde, Paris. 1745: Richard Pococke, A Description of the East and Some other Countries, London. 1746: Augustine Calmet, Dissertations sur les Apparitions des Anges, des Démons et des Esprits, et sur les revenants, et Vampires de Hongrie, de Bohème, de Moravie, et de Silésie, Paris. 1751: Nicolas Lenglet-Dufresnoy, Traité historique et dogmatique sur les apparitions, les visions et les révélations particulières avec des observations sur les Dissertations du R.-P. Dom Calmet, Avignon. 1764: Voltaire, Dictionnaire philosophique, Paris. 1768: Gerard van Swieten, Vampyrismus, Augsburg. 1799: Saverio Scrofani, Viaggio in Grecia, London. 1801: Robert Southey, Thalaba the Destroyer, London. 1809: Marc-Phillippe Zallony, Voyage à Tine, l’une des isles de l’Archipel de la Grèce, suivi d’un Traité de l’Asthme, Paris. 1810: John Wilkes, Encyclopaedia Londinensis ; or, Universal Dictionary of Arts, Science and Literature, London. 1812: S. Chardon de la Rochette, Mélanges de critique et de philologie, Paris. 1813: Lord Byron, The Giaour. 1818: Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire infernal, Paris. 1819: Gabrielle de Paban, Histoire des fantômes et des démons qui se sont montrés parmi les hommes, Paris. 1819: J. W. Polidori, The Vampyre. 1820: Cyprien Bérard, Lord Ruthwen ou les vampires, Paris. 

42

Álvaro García Marín

1820: Charles Nodier, Pierre Carmouche and Achille Jouffrey d’Abban, Le vampire (theatre), Paris. 1820: Eugène Scribe and Mélesville, Le vampire, ou Le vampire Amoureux (theatre), Paris. 1820: Nicholas Brazier, Gabriel Lurieu and Armand d’Artois de Boumonville, Les trois vampires, ou le claire de la lune (theatre), Paris. 1820: Emile B. L., Encore un vampire (theatre), Paris. 1820: August Rousseau, Les Etrennes d’un Vampire (theatre), Paris. 1820: Marc Antoine M. Désaugiers, Cadet Buteux au vampire (theatre), Paris. 1820: Anonym, Le Vampire (theatre), Paris. 1820: James Planché, The Vampire; or, The Bride of the Isles (theatre), London. 1820: William Thomas Moncrieff, The Vampire (theatre), London. 1820-22: François de Pouqueville, Voyage de la Grèce, Paris. 1821: James Planché, Giovanni the Vampire!!! or How Shall We Get Rid of Him? (theatre), London. 1821: St. John Dorset, The Vampire, London. 1821: Heinrich Ludwig Ritter, Der Vampir oder die Totenbraut (theatre). 1822: Charles Nodier, Infernaliana, Paris. 1822: Cäsar Max Heigel, Ein Uhr! (theatre), Munich. 1822: L. Ritter, Der Vampyr oder die Todten-Braut (theatre). 1823: François Alexis Blache, Polichinel Vampire (theatre), Paris. 1826: Karl Spindler, Der Vampyr und seine Braut, Berlin. 1826: Martin Joseph Mengals, Le vampire (theatre). 1826: Charles Swan, Journal of a Voyage up the Mediterranean, principally among the Islands of the Archipelago and in Asia Minor, including many interesting particulars relative to the Greek Revolution, London. 1827: Friederike Ellmenreich, Der Vampyr (theatre). 1828: Theodor Hildebrand, Der Vampyr, oder die Todtenbraut : ein Roman nach neugriechischen Volkssagen. 1828: August Wohlbrück and Heinrich Marschner, Der Wampyr (opera), London. 1828: C. M. Heigel and P. von Lindpainter, Der Vampyr (opera), Berlin. 

Greek Gothic, or Gothic Greece?

43

1828: A. Cosmar, Der Vampyr (theatre), Berlin. 1835: William Martin Leake, Travels in Northern Greece, London. 1837: Robert Pashley, Travel in Crete, London. 1837: Richard Alfred Davenport, Sketches of imposture, deception and credulity, London. 1841: Ferdinand Aldenhoven, Itineraire descriptif de l’Attique et du Péloponèse. 1846: James K. Paulding, “The Vroucalacas: A Tale”, in Graham’s American Monthly Magazine of Literature and Art, Philadelphia. 1869: Henry Fanshawe Tozer, Researches in the Highlands of Turkey, London. Appendix II: Greek poems and short stories about the vrykolakas 1867: Aristotelis Valaoritis, “Thanasis Vagias” (“ĬĮȞȐıȘȢ ǺȐȖȚĮȢ”). 1888: Andreas Karkavitsas, “The Excommunicated” (“ȅ ĮijȦȡİıȝȑȞȠȢ”). 1890: Alexandros Papadiamantis, “The Injured Woman” (“Ǿ ȤIJȣʌȘȝȑȞȘ”). 1894: Kostas Pasagiannis, “The Vampire” (“ȅ ȕȡȣțȩȜĮțĮȢ”). 1907: Alexandros Moraitidis, “Koukkitsa” (“ȀȠȣțțȓIJıĮ”). 1907-1908: Christos Christovassilis, “She did not decompose” (“Ǿ ȐȜȣȦIJȘ”). 1926: Ȁonstantinos Kazantzis, “The Grave of the Excommunicated” (“ȉȠ ȝȞȒȝĮ IJȠȣ ĮijȠȡİıȝȑȞȠȣ”). 1933: Achilleas Paraschos, “The Son of the Vampire” (“ȅ ȖȣȚȠȢ IJȠȣ ȕȡȣțȩȜĮțĮ”, first published this year, unknown date of composition).



THE OLD AND NEW DRACULA CASTLE: THE POIENARI FORTRESS IN DRACULA SEQUELS AND TRAVEL MEMOIRS MARIUS-MIRCEA CRI‫܇‬AN The representation of Transylvania as the land of vampires has flourished especially since the 1970s. With the recent rebirth of Gothic narratives, Transylvania has become again one of the favourite locations of vampire stories. Some of these recent vampire novels have been successful in Romania too: Dacre Stoker and Ian Holt’s novel Dracula, the un-dead was translated into Romanian in 2010. If in Stoker’s novel Transylvania is a vivid complex place, characterized by contrasts, in the recent sequel Transylvania is reduced to a theatre background. One of the tendencies of Dracula sequels is to locate some Transylvanian places into Wallachia, the province lead by Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫܈‬. The Poenari fortress is represented here as the centre of the Romanian vampires, a location where magic rituals which transform common people into vampires are performed. This article discusses this and other places of Romania which have been associated with Dracula, such as Sighi‫܈‬oara, Bistri‫܊‬a and the Monastery Snagov. My aim is to explain how real locations have become fictional spaces and how the stereotypes related to a certain place have evolved since the publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Since the 1970s, the Poienari fortress has become the favourite location of Dracula’s castle in most sequels of Bram Stoker’s vampire novel. Some critics have speculated about certain connections between the novel and this citadel, but there is no evidence that Stoker had any information about it. The stronghold is not referred to in the 1897 novel, and there are no mentions of it in any of Stoker’s sources for Dracula. Without having any connection with the vampire count, the fortress is related to the historical Dracula, Vlad ‫܉‬epes, the medieval voivode of Wallachia. Contemporary literary criticism has admitted that the connections between the vampire Count Dracula and this fortress are speculative. Sir Cristopher Frayling, who in a radio

46

Marius-Mircea CriЮan

broadcast narrated his visit to the ruins in the 1970s, says that Bram Stoker “can have known nothing about this fortress”.1 This article proposes a synthesis of the reflections of the Poienari fortress in some Dracula sequels and some travel memoirs which follow the Dracula trail. As this category of literature has numerous (if not endless) titles, I have selected some of the works in which the reflection of the fortress is well contoured: the novels Dracula Unborn 1977 (part of the trilogy Dracula Lives! omnibus edition 1993) by Peter Tremayne, Children of the Night by Dan Simmons (1992), The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova (2006), and the travel memoirs Digging for Dracula by John Sean Hillen (1997) and In the Footsteps of Dracula by Steven P. Unger (2010). Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ’܈‬fortress and the transfer of meaning As Elizabeth Miller shows, a distinction between the Wallachian voivode and the vampire count is fundamental in Dracula studies.2 Bram Stoker took the name of the voivode and gave it to his bloodsucking aristocrat. The working notes prove that his information about the historical leader was limited, and the references to him occur only in some passages of the novel. When Stoker read William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, he observed a footnote in the text which referred to the meaning of the word “Dracula” in Romanian: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil.”3 And this detail made him change the name of the aristocratic vampire from Count Vampyr to Count Dracula.4 The only items of information Stoker found in Wilkinson referred to his anti-Ottoman attitude and his attack against the Turkish troops on the opposite bank of the Danube: This article was supported by a grant from the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number: PN-II-RU-PD-2011-3-0194. 1 Sir Cristopher Frayling, in the BBC Radio 3 series Bram Stoker: Examining the Life and Work of Bram Stoker, 18 April 2012): http://www.bbc.co.uk/ programmes/b01g5z43 (accessed 2 December 2012). 2 Elizabeth Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island, 2006, 149-50. 3 William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia. Including Various Political Observations Relating to Them, London: Printed for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1820, 19. 4 Marius Cri‫܈‬an, “Bram Stoker’s Transylvania: Between Historical and Mythical Readings”, TRANS – Internet Journal for Cultural Studies, 17 (April 2010): http://www.inst.at/trans/17Nr/6-7/6-7_crisan17.htm.



The Old and New Dracula Castle

47

Their voivode, also named Dracula, did not remain satisfied with mere prudent measures of defence: with an army he crossed the Danube and attacked the few Turkish troops that were stationed in his neighbourhood; but this attempt, like those of his predecessors, was only attended with momentary success. Mahomet having turned his arms against him, drove him back to Wallachia, whither he pursued and defeated him.5

There is no evidence that Stoker knew anything about Voivode Dracula’s cruelty or about the torture of impaling which is usually associated with him. The novelist was not aware of the historical nickname of this voivode: Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ – ܈‬Vlad the Impaler. But hundreds of pages of suppositions have been filled in order to strengthen the connection between the vampire and the voivode. And if critics and historians left enough room for speculation, the door for creative writing was generously opened. In Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, Elizabeth Miller argues that “Stoker knew next to nothing about the historical Dracula” and “never has so much been written by so many about so little”.6 One of the works which consolidated the link between the vampire and the voivode was McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula (1972). According to Miller, “their historical research was and remains invaluable”, but “they speculated that Stoker knew much about Vlad, and that his sources included Arminius Vambery and various items researched at the British Museum”.7 In the 1970s there was room for speculation in this field, because Stoker’s working notes for the novel had not yet been examined. Dracula’s Castle as imagined by Bram Stoker is undoubtedly a fictional building. Much has been written about his sources of inspiration, but the only conclusion that can be drawn is that this imaginary castle is a mixture of what Bram Stoker saw, what he read and what he imagined.8 In Stoker’s sources, there was no mention of any castle or ruin located in Pasul Bârgău (Borgo Pass in Dracula) or in the region of Bistri‫܊‬a. Recently, Hans Corneel de Roos has proposed the hypothesis that Stoker imagined Dracula’s Castle on the 5

Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia & Moldavia, 19. Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, 148-49. 7 Ibid., 153. 8 Marius Cri‫܈‬an, “The Models for Castle Dracula in Stoker’s Sources on Transylvania”, Journal of Dracula Studies, 10 (2008), 10-19. 6



48

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top of a mountain located at approximately 20 km from Pasul Bârgău.9 But there is no evidence that Stoker learned about any castle in the region. So, there was enough room for him to build a fictional one. Even in the Communist period the Romanian authorities had to satisfy somehow the Occidental tourists’ need for Dracula attractions. In the 1980s a hotel with a design inspired from Stoker’s description was built in Pasul Bârgău. But the first historical monument associated with Dracula’s castle was the Bran Fortress. Besides the fact that this thirteenth-century citadel is very well preserved, it is also easily accessible from the highway, and it was part of the national tours offered to the foreigners who visited Romania. As the Bran Fortress was the only Transylvanian castle included in this type of tour for foreigners, the Western visitors “projected everything they knew about Transylvania and Dracula on it”.10 But the access to Bran is too easy for the traveller who is looking for an adventurous sojourn, and for some the connection between this fortress and the historical Dracula has been reduced. The association between the Poienari fortress and Dracula’s Castle started in the 1970s, due to the success of McNally and Florescu’s book: they were the first authors who linked it with the most famous vampire and labelled it as Dracula’s Castle.11 The fortress is a small ruin, situated on a cliff in the Carpathian Mountains at an altitude of 850 metres, in the valley of the River Arge‫܈‬. It is located in Arge‫ ܈‬County, village Căpă‫܊‬ânenii Pământeni, commune Arefu, at a distance of approximately 20 km. from Curtea de Arge‫܈‬, and close to the route of Transfăgără‫܈‬an – DN7C, a national road constructed in the 1970s which crosses the highest mountains in Romania (Mountains Făgăra‫)܈‬. In spite of its name, the stronghold is not in the area of the Poienari village, which is located on the opposite bank of the river. Although several Dracula sequels present it as a Transylvanian citadel, the fortress of Poienari belongs to the historical province of Wallachia, not to Transylvania. It was rebuilt by Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫܈‬, during 9

Hans Corneel de Roos, “Castle Dracula: Its Exact Location Reconstructed from Stoker’s Novel, His Research Notes and Contemporary Maps”, Linköping Electronic Articles in Computer and Information Science, 21 (2012): http://www.ep.liu.se/ea/cis/2012/001/. 10 Ioan Prahoveanu, quoted in Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, 131-32. 11 Duncan Light, The Dracula Dilemma: Tourism, Identity and the State in Romania, Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2012, 98-100; Miller, Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, 134.



The Old and New Dracula Castle

49

his second and most important reign (1456-1462), and the historians consider that the fortress had the role of a refuge, because it was built far away from the main highways of the country, close to impassable mountains (even nowadays the Transfăgără‫܈‬an road is usually closed from November to June). Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ܈‬is undoubtedly the most worldwide famous voivode of Romanian history, because of his fictional connection with Count Dracula, invented by Stoker. However, ‫܉‬epe‫ ܈‬became famous in his time too, and it seems that fiction had its role then as well. The historical Dracula earned his notorious fame due to the German pamphlets published in the 1460s. Torture was not a rare practice in medieval times, but the method of torment this voivode frequently applied was impalement. He had some commercial and political conflict with the Germans of Transylvania, particularly with the merchants of Bra‫܈‬ov, who supported a military attack which was aimed to replace Vlad with another pretender to the throne, Dan. Vlad won the battle, Dan was beheaded, his soldiers impaled, and after a time the voivode took revenge by setting on fire the outskirts of Bra‫܈‬ov, a church, and some villages in the region. The historians confirm that he also practised impalement on a hill in the neighbourhood of Bra‫܈‬ov.12 Although less painful, the Germans’ revenge lasted much longer, because in 1460s several pamphlets about Voivode Dracula and his atrocities were published, in which the dimension of his cruelties was exaggerated.13 Sometimes there is only one step from history to fiction, and Vlad became the character of several legends, either written or oral. If the German versions speak about a diabolic cruelty, the Romanian variants present his cruelty as a tool used in order to establish honesty within society. Voivode Dracula distinguished himself for his courage in the antiOttoman battles. In Romanian history, the fights of the Wallachian and Moldavian voivodes against the Turkish invaders constitute the most important episodes in the study of the medieval period. The voivodes who proved their courage in the anti-Ottoman fights are considered national heroes. This tendency to glorify the heroic past of the nation was very strong during the Communist regime of Nicolae Ceau‫܈‬escu, based on a national ideology. In this context, Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫܈‬ 12

Matei Cazacu, Dracula (translated from French into Romanian by Dana-Ligia Ilin), Bucharest: Humanitas, 2008, 175 and 178. 13 Ibid., 21.



50

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was perceived as a great fighter against the Ottoman yoke. However, this perspective is characteristic not only of the Communist period: the perception of Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ܈‬as a cruel but honest prince is frequent in Romanian history and literature. This is why for Romanians the Poienari fortress will never be Dracula’s Castle, but Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫’܈‬ fortress. As Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ’܈‬main reign is veiled in legend, so is his reconstruction of the Poienari fortress. Historians admit that Vlad had a plan to eliminate the boyars who were susceptible of treason, and invited them to an Easter celebration at Târgovi‫܈‬te, on 25 March 1459. The feast was only a pretext for punishment: the chronicles and the pamphlets write about a collective massacre, but the number of the victims is uncertain. According to a German variant five-hundred boyars were impaled. The historian Matei Cazacu considers this account an exaggeration, because the guest room of the voivodal palace could not take in more than forty or fifty people.14 A medieval chronicle states that the reason for this atrocity was the fact that the boyars of Târgovi‫܈‬te had buried Mircea, Vlad’s brother, alive. The chronicle also narrates that only the old people were impaled, and the young ones were brought, together with their wives and children, to Poienari and forced to do exhausting work: to build the unconquerable fortress.15 There is no doubt that McNally and Florescu’s book In Search of Dracula has had a great impact on several Dracula sequels and travel memoirs which found in this book their main source of inspiration. At the end of the novel Children of the Night (1992), Dan Simmons acknowledges his debt to the authors and also recommends their books to the interested reader. And In Search of Dracula has inspired several patterns in Dracula sequels and travel memoirs. The first feature of the fortress is its isolation and its inaccessible position. Far from common highways and traditional passes, the stronghold was “virtually impregnable, able to resist the heaviest cannon fire from the Turks”.16 Consequently the ascent is difficult and the actual climb takes about an hour – from the valley to the fortress.

14

Ibid., 167. Ibid., 168. 16 Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula, New York: Greenwich, 1972; rev. edn, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994, 71. 15



The Old and New Dracula Castle

51

Another pattern is the sympathetic attitude towards the unhappy boyars who worked in the construction of the fortress. The authors emphasize the suffering of the boyars. Besides the exhaustive work, the road to the location of the fortress is presented as agonizing: “The fifty-mile trek from Târgovi‫܈‬te was a painful one, particularly for the boyar women and children. Those who survived it received no rest until they reached Poienari.” Another pattern is the association of the fortress with evil spirits: “In the vivid imagination of the peasantry, evil spirits abound in abandoned fortresses where treasures were once stored.”17 McNally and Florescu point to the inhospitable attitude of the inhabitants towards the foreigners who want to visit the fortress: In a manner that has almost become a horror film cliché, when a stranger approaches peasants to ask directions to the castle, they usually turn away and emphatically refrain from giving help. If the tourists persist, they simply shrug their shoulders in quiet disbelief that anyone should be so bold as to tempt the spirit of evil, or they mutter nu se poate …

And the temptation to stay overnight in the fortress is even more influential: “spending a night on the site of Dracula’s castle” in a gloomy atmosphere, and listening to wolves howling to the moon “has become a sport” for some particular visitors to the fortress. Rosemary Ellen Guiley’s book, Vampires Among Us (1991), translated into Romanian in 1993, includes a chapter entitled “A Night in Dracula’s Castle”, which refers to the Poienari Fortress. The author refers to her meeting with Vincent Hillyer, an American adventurer who spent a night at the fortress in 1977, and was presented in the press as the first Western visitor to have this experience. Hillyer tells her that his meeting with Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu in 1974 had a great influence on him, because he learned from them about the ruins of Dracula’s castle at Poienari and immediately felt a strong desire to visit it.18 He succeeded in coming to Romania in 1977, and had a meeting with the minister of Tourism, ‫܇‬tefan Enache, in Bucharest. The official tried to convince him to renounce his intention 17

Ibid., 74. Rosemary Ellen Guiley, Vampirii printre noi; translated from English (Vampires Among Us 1991) into Romanian by Drago‫ ܈‬Nu‫܊‬ă, Bucharest: Venus, 1993, 307.

18



52

Marius-Mircea CriЮan

to spend a night at the fortress and informed him that a bear had killed a German tourist just a few days before. The American visitor was offered a guide who accompanied him in Transylvania and Wallachia, but they arrived at the bottom of the fortress in the evening, and the guide left the visitor alone in front of his greatest temptation. Hillyer’s presence at the bottom of the ruin meant for him the climax of a dream. He narrates that during the ascent, he was afraid of bears, but was confident in the power of the cross, the only weapon which he had with him, besides a blanket, a lantern and some food. The climb of the stairs took an hour and a half, and he got to the top at sunset. After he checked the ruins in order to know where to move when the night fell, he enjoyed the meal he brought there, and got rid of the starving spiders which attacked his provisions. When he observed the nightfall and listened to the howling of the wolves, Hillyer had the impression that he was looking at a film. His uncomfortable sleep was interrupted by a nightmare, and when he woke up and walked among the ruins, instead of Dracula the American tourist observed an old wolf which ran away when it felt a human presence. As he could not sleep anymore, the visitor decided to descend even if it was still dark, but before coming down, he went to a ruined tower and observed the fires which signalled the presence of a gypsy camp. When he finished his descent and met his companions, they observed a spider bite, which looked very similar to a vampire bite.19 The legends of the reconstruction of the fortress under Vlad ğepeú’s supervision have been mixed with new legends connected to the myth of the vampire Dracula. Thus, new stereotypes emerged, on which many of Dracula sequels or travel memoirs are based. History and legend The real or fictional visitors who describe their experiences at the fortress are interested in Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ’܈‬life and reigns. Two years before the account reported in his book, Hillen had visited the village Arefu as a participant in the first World Congress of Dracula, organized by the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, an event which attracted many foreign vampirists. He remembers their meeting with two old women dressed in traditional costumes, who told them legends about Vlad the 19

Ibid., 313-14.



The Old and New Dracula Castle

53

Impaler.20 Unlike the German legends, the stories of the local inhabitants take the voivode’s part, and depict the story-tellers’ ancestors as faithful subjects of Vlad. During his visit to Arefu, Hillen often reflects on the voivode’s personality. When he approaches the fortress, the journalist tries to imagine how the stronghold was organized during Vlad’s reign, and has the feeling that “it took little imagination to recreate the castle in its heyday and the frantic activity within as guards on watch-duty spied Turkish armies approaching on the edge of the horizon”.21 Steven P. Unger writes that of all the places associated with Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ܈‬which he visited, only at Poienari did he feel that the voivode “was somehow still keeping watch”, and his impression is that “Poienari remains Prince Vlad’s own private Wallachia, pristine and almost inaccessible”.22 If the travel memoirs focus on Vlad’s courage and on his strategic perspective, the fictional works include accounts which focus on the voivode’s cruelty. The episode of the Easter feast is narrated in Kostova’s novel, where the motivation for the persecution of the boyars seems to be that Vlad “needed cheap labour” in order to “rebuild the ancient Castle Arge‫”܈‬.23 The narrator refers to the massacre of the boyars, without mentioning the impalement: “he gave them a great deal of food and drink. Then he killed the ones he found most inconvenient, and marched the rest of them – and their wives and the little ones – fifty kilometres up into the mountains to rebuild Castle Arge‫܈‬.”24 The burial of Vlad’s brother alive as the motivation of the voivode’s revenge is also mentioned in The Historian: Dracula’s older brother Mircea had been murdered years before by their political enemies in Târgovi‫܈‬te. When Dracula came to power he had his brother’s coffin dug up and found that the poor man had been buried alive. That was when he sent out his Easter invitation, and the results gave him revenge for his brother as well as cheap labour to build his castle in the mountains. He had brick kilns built up near the 20

John Sean Hillen, Digging for Dracula, Dublin: Dracula Transylvanian Club, 1997, 197. 21 Ibid., 210. 22 Steven P. Unger, In the Footsteps of Dracula: A Personal Journey and Travel Guide, 2nd edn, New York: Audience, 2010, 173. 23 Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian, London: Time Warner Books, 2006, 423. 24 Ibid., 423.



54

Marius-Mircea CriЮan original fortress, and anyone who’d survived the journey was forced to work night and day, carrying bricks and building the walls and towers.25

Vlad’s aim to build the fortress as a refuge is also mentioned in the novel: “The second time he captured the Wallachian throne, in 1456, he decided to build a castle above the Arge‫ ܈‬to which he could escape invasions from the plain.” As they approach the fortress, Bartholomew is reminded of the episode of the boyars of Târgovi‫܈‬te and he feels compassion for their sufferings.26 In Bartholomew Rossi’s letters from Romania, the accounts related to the Wallachian voivode are narrated by the character Georgescu, a Romanian professor with specialized knowledge of Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫܈‬. This historian also tells him the legend of Dracula’s wife who threw herself from the tower for fear that she could become a prisoner of the Turks, and explains that the river bears her name: Râul Doamnei – “the Princess’s River”.27 Georgescu also gives details about the original architecture of the stronghold, and specifies that it initially had five towers, “from which Dracula’s minions could watch the Turkish incursions”. From his Romanian colleague, Professor Rossi also learns about the results of the archaeological investigations. They show that the fortress had a chapel, a deep well in the courtyard, and a secret passageway which was used during the sieges and which helped Dracula escape the Turks in 1462.28 But history is only a pretext for fiction, because the main idea of the novel is that “the prince had become a pricolic, a vampire”.29 However, Professor Rossi has every reason to be satisfied that he visited the stronghold and came back: “We have been, to my solemn awe, up to Vlad’s fortress and back. I know now why I wanted to see it.”30 A frequent practice in Dracula sequels and even in travel memoirs is to locate Arefu and the fortress of Poienari in Transylvania. Hillen remembers the conversation he had with some inhabitants in “the 25

Ibid., 423-24. Ibid., 428. 27 Ibid., 430. 28 Ibid., 429. 29 Ibid., 394. 30 Ibid., 425. 26



The Old and New Dracula Castle

55

centre of the tiny Transylvanian village of Arefu”.31 And the misconception goes on with the traveller’s conviction that “Bram Stoker had spent endless hours in the British Museum pouring over maps and old documents relating to this mysterious region, enthralled by the exploits of the bloody Impaler”.32 The journalist seems to be under a spell, because when he approaches the fortress and admires the panoramic view of the region, he is aware that “the road wound upwards into the very heart of the Carpathians, linking the region of Wallachia with Transylvania”.33 His detailed account of the way to the fortress is filled with geographic details – references to the road distances, the mountains, the main objectives of the area (the hydro-electric power station, for instance) etc. So if he was aware that he was still in Wallachia after having left Arefu, why would he have considered Arefu in Wallachia? Either he was so fascinated by the Dracula connection with the Poienari fortress that he forgot he was actually in Wallachia, or he mislead his readers in order to emphasize this association. In Dracula sequels, the Poienari fortress is represented as Dracula’s Castle and some fictional works locate it in Wallachia, whereas others present it as a Transylvanian castle. In Peter Tremayne’s trilogy Dracula Lives!, it is located on a mountain top which offers an ample perspective on the Wallachian plains, whereas the mountains which separate Wallachia from Transylvania are observed in the distance.34 In Children of the Night (1993) Dan Simmons offers accurate geographic details and precise information regarding the access to the castle. In Kostova’s The Historian the region of Arefu is depicted as a backward region of Transylvania. During her childhood reminiscences, Mrs Getzi narrates: “When I was a girl, I lived in the tiny village of P – in Transylvania, very close to the Arge‫܈‬.”35 More than geographic precision, the author needed a fictional location in accordance with the stereotypical Transylvania, a land of vampires, witches, superstitions and evil spirits. As Bartholomew Rossi’s letter

31

Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 196. Ibid., 199. 33 Ibid., 206. 34 Peter Tremayne, Dracula Lives!, London and New York: Signet, 1993, 96. 35 Kostova, The Historian, 387. 32



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suggests, in The Historian Transylvania is rather a fictional concept than a concrete territory: What comes to your mind when you think of the word Transylvania, if you ponder it at all? Yes, as I thought – wisely, you don’t. But what comes to my mind are mountains of savage beauty, ancient castles, werewolves, and witches – a land of magical obscurity. How, in short, am I to believe I will still be in Europe, on entering such a realm?36

The “Transylvanian” village located “on the Arge‫ ”܈‬is approached after “a day’s ride through mythically steep mountains” in the wagon of a farmer.37 The foreign visitor is delighted here to discover “a place of wonder”, “something from Grimm, not real life” and wishes his friend was with him to “see it for just an hour, to feel its immense distance from the whole West European world. The little houses, some of them poor and shabby but most with a rather cheerful air, have long eaves and large chimneys, topped with the gigantic nests of the storks who summer here.” The description of the village and its surroundings continues in the same manner: welcome to the fictional Transylvania (even though these places are actually located in Wallachia). However, in another letter by Rossi the coordinates of the region seem to be different: the professor refers to “Dracula’s mountain fortress” located close to “the mountains between Târgovi‫܈‬te and Transylvania”.38 So here he seems to be aware that the territory of Transylvania begins on the other side of the mountains. The texts which depict the fortress of Poienari as Dracula’s castle start from certain historical realities and use narrative scenes of the legends about Vlad ğepeú. But the use of history is sometimes only a step to its distortion, because historical fact is altered by the mixture of images of the voivode and of the vampire. Although the move from history to fiction may be very subtle, sometimes the changes are so evident that they even affect geographic reality.

36

Ibid., 410. Ibid., 424. 38 Ibid., 423. 37



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Attraction and interdiction on the journey to the unknown The fortress of Poienari is perceived as an irresistible attraction both in travel memoirs and in fictional works. For its real or fictional visitors, it is a dream which has to be fulfilled or a duty which must be performed. John Hillen expresses this view when he tells of his second visit to this place, and gives several details about his previous excursion with the Transylvanian Society of Dracula and his participation in the International Dracula Congress. His second visit aims at revisiting the fortress in different circumstances. Before being realized, this dream is dreamt with open eyes, and when he gets to Arefu, he feels an extraordinary excitement: “I now contemplated the journey to the unknown that I was about to undertake.”39 “The journey to the unknown” is a must, “one main task to perform”, and it implies getting to the fortress after the sunset and spending the night there. It is a dialogue between him and the fortress, a conversation between present and past, and a trial to overpass his limits: “the ancient castle of Dracula lay high above me on a bare, craggy peak, and I had come back from America to spend the night there.”40 Elizabeth Kostova’s character Bartholomew Rossi has to get to the Poienari fortress in order to find information about Dracula, to examine the remains of the stronghold in the company of an archaeologist specialized in the voivode’s biography, and to make sure that the vampire’s grave is not on this spot. Many real or fictional travellers, who visit the fortress, want to spend the night among its ruins. Kostova’s character has his own reasons: “We intended to stay the night, to give ourselves ample time to examine everything.”41 But each visitor has his own motivation. And, as in any story, the desire is counterbalanced by interdiction. Both in travel memoirs and in fictional works, the foreign visitor is advised not to ascend to the fortress. Hillen’s hosts explain him that the ruin is “a favourite after-hours picnic place for earthly beasts of the night”, filled with snakes, wild boars and bears. Their explanation seems to be convincing enough:

39

Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 197. Ibid., 197. 41 Kostova, The Historian, 426. 40



58

Marius-Mircea CriЮan Ceau‫܈‬escu used to hunt wild boar and bears here. Now they’re feeding up there for winter. They’re hungry. And you could be their dinner.42

The soldiers who guard the power station on the road near the ruins can be another obstacle. The hosts tell the foreign journalist that they could shoot an intruder approaching in the night.43 The journalist’s drive to the fortress was also obstructed, because the Transfăgără‫܈‬an was closed (it was autumn), and the access road beside the river Arge‫ ܈‬was blocked. The first marks that they were approaching the fortress were not encouraging at all: “Accesul interzis. Drum inchis – Forbidden way, Road closed.”44 But the desire cannot be repressed: We stopped, stepped outside the car and stared upwards. It was unmistakable. Threatening. High above us, stood the twisted rock and cracked, weather-beaten remains of castle walls that defied time.45

The cold breeze which began to blow was also felt, and the night visitors started their ascent armed only with a lantern to frighten off animals, Kent with cigarettes to appease soldiers in case of an unexpected patrol, and a “pungent post-dinner garlic breath to ward off evil”.46 The climb starts at 10.34, so that the visitors can be at the fortress at midnight. In Children of the Night the interdiction comes from the vampiric authorities, who organize several road controls in order to block the access to the fortress. Kate and Lucian, who approach the fortress from Râmnicu Vâlcea, have to avoid the first control at Tigve‫܈‬ti, a village on the national road 73C, fourteen kilometres before the town of Curtea de Arge‫܈‬. They can go on only by driving the car through the river, in order to avoid the checkpoint on the bridge. Other controls are avoided by Lucian’s ability, but they cannot get rid of the last control, and Lucian is shot by the vampires’ agents. But Kate survives and continues to walk towards the fortress. After an hour’s walk, she arrives at the village Căpă‫܊‬âneni, and observes that it is

42

Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 196-197. Ibid., 197. 44 Ibid., 206 (italics in the original). 45 Ibid., 206-207. 46 Ibid., 207. 43



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“busy with military traffic, police, and spotlighted roadblocks”.47 The access is blocked again, and Kate has to look for other solutions. In Kostova’s novel, the inhabitants are very reluctant to help the historian to get to the fortress. When Mrs Getzi’s father hears about it, he crosses himself and spits in the dust, considering that going there means to answer the Devil’s invitation. When he hears that the Romanian historian is going there for the second time, he comments: “A fool never learns.”48 But the danger is counterbalanced by strong protection, and the young lady Getzi offers Bartholomew a little silver dagger for killing vampires, and a handful of garlic flowers.49 The young farmer who carries them to the fortress is not delighted at all to do this task. He shakes his head when hears their destination and wears a protective amulet during the whole journey. Bartholomew pities him for doing this task against his wish. When the historians require him to accompany them to the ruin, he refuses them categorically. As in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the reason for the necessity of avoiding the castle is the presence of evil spirits. Hillen’s hosts, Gheorghe and Maria protest vehemently when they hear that the journalist wants to climb to the fortress before midnight, and to remain there until sunrise, speaking about “the dangers of tempting evil spirits”.50 Before starting going to the fortress, Hillen listens to some villagers who tell “stories of vampires”, which describe morbid scenes from their grave searches.51 Even on his road to Arefu, Hillen has the impression that he is approaching a special realm and the driver has to take special care to avoid “horse-drawn wooden carts which moved ahead of us, silent, ghost-like, in the dark with nary a light to warn us of their presence”.52 The comparison with the ghost is suggestive in this context. Rosemary Ellen Guiley also indicates a connection with the supernatural. By relying on Hillyer’s account, she launches the theory that the fortress might be a paranormal magnet for evil.53 47

Dan Simmons, Children of the Night, New York: Warner Books, 1993, 424. Kostova, The Historian, 389. 49 Ibid., 395. 50 Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 196. 51 Ibid., 197. 52 Ibid., 199. 53 Guiley, Vampirii printre noi, 316. 48



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In Children of the Night, the reconstructed fortress of Poienari is the place of the vampires’ Sacrament. Her adopted child and her lover are prepared for the vampiric sacrifice, and four golden chalices sat on white linen on a table, while hundreds of strigoi are chanting softly and then very loud. The atmosphere is horrifying: Torchlights flickered there on hundreds of faces and silk robes. A space had been cleared on the highest area of the terrace, right where the battlements and south walls dropped a sheer thousand feet to the river and boulders below. In that lighted space, Kate could see Vernor Deacon Trent on a small throne near the battlement edge. The old man was dressed in an elaborate red and black robe and looked like a wisened mummy propped up for display.54

In The Historian the inhabitants of the region are depicted as superstitious. They rub the openings of their houses with garlic, the chimney, the door frame, the keyhole and the windows, in order “to keep out vampires”.55 The ruins were “full of evil spirits”.56 The existence of a hidden treasure among the ruins is also associated with evil spirits, as it had “a wicked spell on it”. Even when Mrs Getzi accepts Bartholomew’s proposal to marry him, she feels the presence of evil spirits and is afraid that something might keep him from coming back to her.57 Mrs Getzi refers to the fortress as “the castle of the pricolic”, and believes that there are many evil spirits in the forests which surround it.58 The villagers who gather at the pub also talk about the dangers of the forest: wolves, bears “and of course vampires – pricolici, they call them in their language”.59 A connection of the Poienari Fortress with mystery and the supernatural is suggested even in some literary criticism. For instance, Devendra Varma (1988) describes the ruin as follows: “In the spirithaunted wild Carpathian mountains still stand, gaunt and lonely, the ruins of Dracula’s castle, as if beckoning from the realm of death and oblivion through the dark passage of centuries. There is something

54

Simmons, Children of the Night, 429. Kostova, The Historian, 387. 56 Ibid., 390. 57 Ibid., 397. 58 Ibid., 400. 59 Ibid., 425. 55



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61

grandiose and plaintive in those sinister ruins perched upon a jagged mountain peak.”60 Another episode influenced by the reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the crossing of the mysterious woods, and in several Dracula sequels and travel memoirs the ascent to the fortress implies traversing the forest. As Hillen and his companion approach the forest, the road becomes progressively worse, but this compensated by the beauty of nature. The car runs through “heavily wooded mountains thick with beech, oak and fir”, under the strong light of the moon, which creates “a scene of a thousand burning street lamps”, while the village they left is made “invisible by a curtain of darkness”.61 Entering the forest entails leaving behind the familiar space of human habitation. For Steven P. Unger the forest under the ruins also has a special significance. The traveller recalls that he visited many “remote, forbidding places before entering the almost lightless forest at Poienari”, but never before or since has he felt “the apprehension and isolation I did while climbing to Vlad ‫܉‬epe‫ ’܈‬mountaintop fortress at Poienari”.62 In The Historian, Bartholomew is reminded of Stoker’s forest as soon as he enters the woods: As we entered the forest, I felt a distinctly unscholarly thrill. I remembered Bram Stoker’s hero setting off into the Transylvanian forests – a fictional version of them, in any case – by stagecoach, and almost wished we’d departed at evening, so that I too might have glimpses of mysterious fires in the woods, and hear the wolves howling.

Following Bram Stoker’s model, the forest which leads to the Poienari Fortress is depicted as a typical Gothic space: These forests are very deep, dim inside even at hottest noon, with the eerie coolness of a church interior. Riding through them, one is utterly surrounded by trees and by a fluttering hush; nothing is visible from 60

Devendra Varma, “The Genesis of Dracula: A Re-Visit”, in Dracula: The Vampire and the Critics, ed. Margaret L. Carter, Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1988, 42. 61 Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 206. 62 Unger, In the Footsteps of Dracula, 171.



62

Marius-Mircea CriЮan the wagon track for miles at a stretch, apart from the endless tree trunks and underbrush, a dense mix of spruce and varied hardwoods. The height of many of the trees is tremendous and their crowns block the sky. It is like riding among the pillars of a vast cathedral, but a dark one, a haunted cathedral where one expects glimpses of the Black Madonna or martyred saints in every niche. I noted at least a dozen tree species, among them soaring chestnuts and a type of oak I’d never seen before.63

It is an ascending journey through the forest, and, after a half day’s drive, the historians come out into a sunny open field, which offers them the best view of the heights where the fortress is located. The view is breathtaking, and the position of the fortress makes it unconquerable: We had risen quite high, I saw, from the village, and could look out over a dense vista of trees, sloping so steeply downwards from the edge of the field that to step off towards them would be to fall sharply. From there the forest plunged into a gorge and I saw the River Arge‫܈‬ for the first time, a vein of silver below. On the opposite bank rose enormous forested slopes, which looked unscalable. It was a region for eagles, not people, and I thought with awe of the many skirmishes fought here between Ottomans and Christians. That any empire, however daring, would try to penetrate this landscape seemed to me the height of folly. I understood more fully why Vlad Dracula had chosen this region for his stronghold; it hardly needed a fortress to make it less pregnable.64

The texts which describe the fortress emphasize the difficulty of the way up. Steven Unger writes that the ascent of the 1480 stairs is exhausting.65 This aspect is stressed in Hillen’s account. When Hillen starts the ascent, he feels the irresistible attraction for the ruin: “High above us stood the twisted rock and cracked, weather-beaten remains of castle walls that defied time.” His Romanian companion, Cristi, warns him that it will be a long climb, and it will become very dark as they go up because the trees will blot out the light of the moon. In these conditions, they hold tight to their bottle of аuică (in Dracula, Jonathan Harker was offered the same drink but with a different 63

Kostova, The Historian, 426-27. Ibid., 427. 65 Unger, In the Footsteps of Dracula, 172. 64



The Old and New Dracula Castle

63

name), which offers them the necessary courage to continue their climb through the darkness. The sensation of adventure is also suggested by a comparison to a computer game: the journalist feels like the hero in the Thief of Bagdad who walks along precarious stone steps in the Cave of Truth and avoids beautiful women and menacing beasts along the way. When he asks his companion about the distance left, the only answer is “Mai e mult”: “There’s more to come.” During the climb up the stairs, everything around is so dark that the journalist has the impression that his eyes are tightly closed: there is “nothing to hold on to for direction, or balance”, so that they have to walk on “as if blind”.66 The light of the moon breaks through the foliage of the forest only for short periods, and then the visitor is impressed by the height of their position and realizes that a small mistake could cost him his life: Suddenly, after about 100 steps, beams of moonlight momentarily broke out through the thick canopy of foliage above us. I looked quickly to my right and let out an astonished gasp, half cry, half scream. I stood an inch from the edge of the stone. My next move would have taken me on a fast, uninterrupted, and probably fatal, descent to the roof of a yellow Dacia conveniently parked far below. I pulled my leg back as if it was falling into a vat of bubbling lava. The moon disappeared again as my heart thumped frenetically against my chest wall.

The effort and the strong sensations make Hillen sweat, and he even has a feeling of regret that he made Cristi join him in such a risky adventure. But his Romanian companion becomes excited and expresses his delight for being involved in this enterprise: “I have lived here all my life but I never considered coming up to spend the night,” he said. “Superstition in my village forbids it. People are afraid. When I heard you first speak about this visit, I thought you were crazy. But then, I thought: Why not? Nothing happens around here much. It’s time to do something interesting.”67

66 67

Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 207-208. Ibid., 208.



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In Children of the Night the ascent is an almost impossible mission. Alone in front of the strigoi forces and their numerous patrols, Kate tries to steal a horse from a Gypsy camp, but she is caught by the Gypsy woman who recognizes her and helps her to get to the fortress in order to fulfil her mission against the vampires. The Gypsy woman allows Kate to ride her horse, and accompanies the American doctor on the old trail which leads her to the fortress, and leaves her when the fortress is near. The building looks extraordinary, and the ruined fortress is reconstructed and transformed into a fortified stronghold of the vampires: It was more impressive and fantastic than she could have imagined: two of the five tall towers had been completely rebuilt, the fortified crag was connected to the rest of the mountain only by a long bridgepossibly a drawbridge over a deep fissure, the center hall and the battlement terraces were ablaze with torchlight, people in black and red robes milled along the hundred yards of rocky crag, along the battlements, and filled the terrace at the farthest end of the citadel. Torches wound down along the steep stairway which zigzagged through the bare trees, south into the forest, then down to the meadows more than a thousand feet below.68

Kate has to clamber like an alpinist in order to get to the fortress, and continually has to hide from the numerous guards who watch all the entrances. She demonstrates an incredible courage and succeeds in liberating her lover and her adopted child from the vampires who were about to sacrifice them, and then to fly away with a helicopter. Kostova’s character, Bartholomew, finds the ascent less difficult: although the footpath slopes upwards, only the last part of it requires a steep climb. But the impressive scenery rewards the effort: Suddenly, we were on a windy ridge, a stony spine that broke out of the forest. At the very top of this spine, on a vertebra higher than all the rest, clung two ruined towers and a litter of walls, all that remained of Castle Dracula. The view was breathtaking, with the River Arge‫܈‬ barely twinkling in the gorge below and villages scattered here and there at a stone’s drop along it. Far to the south, I saw low hills that Georgescu said were the plains of Wallachia, and to the north

68

Simmons, Children of the Night, 428.



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65

towering mountains, some capped with snow. We had made our way to the perch of an eagle.69

A rediscovery of the self The efforts of the visitors who climb to the Poienari Fortress are perceived as a test for their inner force. Indeed, the ascent is associated with mystery and with the strength to overcome the possible lethal dangers. During Hillen’s climb to the fortress, the journalist makes Cristi aware of the touristic potential of this fortress, and tells him that “one day, there will be thousands of people dragging themselves up this path every summer” who will buy T-shirts with the following inscription: “I climbed the Dracula trail, and survived.” Beside the touristic aspect, this text shows a frequent attitude in Dracula sequels and travel memoirs: the climb to the fortress may cost the curious one his life. As indicated earlier, Hillen emphasizes the danger of falling off the precipice, or being eaten by the beasts of the forest. The peculiar silence accentuates the sensation of entering a different realm: “The silence was strong. It almost hurt my ears.”70 For Kostova’s character, the danger is even greater, because besides his life, he could also lose his soul: the ruins of Poienari are the place where he encounters the vampire in the form of a wolf. During the night he spends at the fortress, Bartholomew observes in the overgrown area of the chapel, “the red gleam” of the wolf’s eyes. The scene is narrated in a thrilling style: I would be lying, my friend, if I said my hair didn’t all stand on end. The eyes moved a little nearer and I couldn’t tell how close to the ground they were. For a long moment they regarded me, and I felt, irrationally, that they were full of a kind of recognition, that they knew who I was and were taking my measure. Then, with a scuffling in the underbrush, a great beast came half into view, turned its gaze this way and that, and trotted away into the darkness. It was a wolf of startling size; in the dim light I could see its shaggy fur and massive head for just a second before it slipped out of the ruin and vanished.71

69

Kostova, The Historian, 428-29. Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 209. 71 Kostova, The Historian, 432. 70



66

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But as soon as this danger is overcome, Bartholomew and Georgescu face another threat: they approach the camp of the members of the Legion of the Archangel Michael. In the middle of the night, Bartholomew sees a glimmering that seems to be from campfires, and the curious historians go there to see what is happening. But this curiosity may cost them their lives: the presence of a foreigner and a Gypsy (because Georgescu had Gypsy origins) would seem very suspect to members of the Iron Guard, and the historians have to hide carefully and return to the ruins on the top of the mountain. Up there, Georgescu explains to Bartholomew that that experience could have been their end: “They hate the Jews, in particular, and want to rid the world of them .… We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murdered, too. And then a lot of other people, usually.”72

One of the main features of Stoker’s Transylvanian castle is its extraordinary panoramic view.73 In Peter Tremayne’s Dracula Lives! the perspective is very similar to the one in the original novel, as Castle Dracula stands on the top of a mountain, with one side “right on the top of a precipice, falling vertically nearly one thousand feet into a valley through which ran the river Arge‫܈‬, beginning its tremendous descent to join the greater river of Dimbovita”. Seen from the window of the castle, the scenery is stunning: The steep gorge was breathtaking. I could see the tiny houses that made up the village, away beneath me like so many tiny dolls’ houses. In all directions were mountains covered in woods which seemed to contain every conceivable shade of green, and I could also see a tremendous amount of blossoms. Also, from my window, I could peer southwards and view the hills sinking away to the sun-scorched Wallachian plains. In the other direction were impenetrable mountain ranges, many snow-capped peaks, which separated Wallachia from Transylvania. I did not know how long I stood there, breathing in the beauties of the scenery. It was not until the sun reminded me of the lateness of the hour that I turned back into my room.74

72

Ibid., 434. Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin Books, 1994, 49. 74 Tremayne, Dracula Lives!, 96.

73



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67

When Hillen approaches the fortress, he has the impression that an image from a medieval painting is revealed to his eyes: “the ruins of the castle were captured in the glow of light hundreds of years old and millions of miles away”, as “the round white moon projected shadows all along the mountainside as the ruins of three towers and ancient battlements covered with yellow moss stood vividly against the velvet backdrop of impenetrable forest”.75 Although the travellers who approach the Poienari Fortress show a vivid interest for the historical Dracula, their real purpose is to find a way to themselves. For Bartholomew Rossi, the discovery of the fortress is associated with a spiritual experience. During the night he spends at the forest, he faces great dangers which could cost him his life, and down, in the valley he discovers the woman with whom he falls in love and asks to marry. For the real or imaginary visitors the climb to the fortress is a way to know themselves better. In Children of the Night, Kate discovers that love can give one the power to defeat supernatural forces: she risks her life several times when she clambers to the fortress armed only with a dagger, and then she is able to confront the hundreds of vampires who are gathered in the castle. Sometimes, the experience of climbing to the ruins is perceived as a test which has to be passed in order to live a spiritual satisfaction. The discussions Hillen has with some inhabitants of Arefu make him think of his childhood: “Now, sitting in the shadow of the rugged Carpathian Mountains ... I seemed to be reliving childhood again.”76 The scenery of Romania may determine deep feelings in the visitor who perceives its beauties: the “succulent, lush valleys and the hushed, bucolic meadows of Romania’s heartland” as well as “the rugged and majestic peaks of the Carpathians that inspire through their silent, solemn aura of eternity”. In the middle of nature, Hillen feels that “here was manna from Heaven”.77 When they arrive at the fortress in the middle of the night, Hillen and Cristi observe that the only sentinels who guard the fortress are their “silver shadows”, which walk “in silence across the ruins”. The perspective of the mountainous scenery lit by the moon makes him think of his inner self. Instead of thinking of voivode Vlad or of the 75

Hillen, Digging for Dracula, 209. Ibid., 197. 77 Ibid., 198. 76



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stereotypes connected to this fortress, Hillen remembers some of the most touching moments of his childhood and experiences the sense of identity. Now he knows who he is, and this spiritual adventure has a cathartic function: I placed my hand on the cold, ancient stone around what once had been an opened window. I sat down next to it and gazed out into the borderless wilderness spread around me. At first I could see nothing but a black void. Then images flooded my mind. Not of bloody battles, cruel deeds and torturous deaths. Not of Heaven and Hell and ghosts and vampires. The images were of a man, with a can of cold beer balanced on his head, swaggering happily along the crowded, jazz-filled streets of New Orleans on a humid Saturday evening. Of the majestic, murky waters of the Mississippi swirling slowly to and fro to the soft, silky sounds of a saxophone.78

The travel memoirs, as well as all the other texts which describe the quest for Dracula’s Castle, may after all be about a different kind of quest. Instead of looking for whatever we read in the books, this search may be nothing else than a search for ourselves. The real and fictional travellers who come from UK or USA in order to discover the Poienari Fortress are actually looking for a deeper reality, for a symbolic space which marks the borders between possibility and impossibility, dream and reality, history and fiction. The grownups still need to believe in tales and this medieval stronghold has become a main topos in Dracula sequels and in the travel memoirs which follow its trail. For the foreign visitors fond of the fictional Dracula, the fortress will probably continue to be a way of reliving Stoker’s story. For us, Romanians, it may have a different effect: that of making us reflect on our history and identity.

78

Ibid., 210.



DRACULA ORIENTALIZED RAPHAELLA DELORES GOMEZ Since Bram Stoker’s publication of his Gothic novel in 1897, Dracula has become the standard stereotyped precedence for vampire texts. The text has evolved into an iconic figure of Victorian anxiety and gothicity. Upon its entry into the cusp of fin de siècle literature in the nineteenth century, critics have scrutinized it and rendered polysemous readings, from psychoanalytic to Marxist analyses, and even to New Historical perspectives. However, I would like to locate my article in an Oriental reading framework, viewing the text as deep-seated into politics and as an example of the very tensions that affected Britain’s colonial enterprise in Eastern Europe. With continued territorial expansion came the dawning fear of a massive collapse of the British Empire and the infiltration of the very colonized which the empire had Othered, primarily from the East. This article will examine this Oriental dimension by investigating the ways of resisting the Other of Eastern Europe in the late 1800s. Through an exploration of the gothicity that preoccupied the Victorian mind, my article aims to reveal the power hierarchies between the West and the East within Europe, as well as the hidden politics that curtained and estranged these two landscapes at the dawn of a new century.

When reflecting upon the notion of Orientalism, it becomes almost impossible to dispense with the impact that Edward Said has formulated in his Oriental dialectics. Orientalism has not only shaped the cultural and socio-political framework of the colonial enterprise in the East, such as Africa and Asia, but has also played a key role in the socio-geographic expansion of the imperial culture, primarily embarked by Britain and France from the early nineteenth century. And more importantly, such geo-political expansion has had a strong influence on the social-cultural milieu and psyche of the Western European framework. As Lisa Hopkins argues, Orientalism could be noted as “the West’s construction of a reified and stereotyped East” and this is particularly so in Dracula, where the text “takes shape at that moment when widespread armed conflict among European nations over territorial possessions, must have appeared inevitable”.1 1

Lisa Hopkins, Bram Stoker: A Literary Life, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, 2.

70

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Adding to the reification of a Western prejudiced East, I also note the dominant role religion plays in disseminating cultural differences between the racially dominant and the Othered, particularly in the Gothic novel. As William Hughes states, “The horror novel … is but one amongst many cultural forms shaped by the language, imagery and assumptions of a Christian consciousness”2 and in Dracula, the text draws a distinction between the supernatural and the natural, between the very Eastern Dracula and the Western crusaders led by Harker. As in many Gothic fictions, this distinction seems at first glance to restore a semblance of moral order amidst the infiltration of an irreligious unchristian into the normalcy of a Christian life. Stoker confessed to W.E. Gladstone: The book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to ‘cleanse the mind of pity & terror’. At any rate there is nothing base in the book and though superstition is fought in it with the weakness of superstition I hope it is not Irreverent.

William Hughes reads Stoker’s correspondence as his unease at the “occult and the horrific” incorporating with religion.3 But such a dominant position could only be appropriated if that is seriously considered with the text’s primary colonial address. The gothic address found in the novel reworks the Victorian anxieties and the fear of counter-colonialism and any reference to religion and the supernatural is used to express the fundamental fear of the Occident. As Kelly Hurley asserts, “‘the Imperial Gothic’ describes dangerous encounters between Englishman and colonized subject”.4 The practice of Othering has become a predominant tool for Orientalists in creating a dichotomy between “we” and “they”. By creating differences and noting how the subject, “they”, deviates from norms and the accepted – how stereotyping is contrary to the universal perspective – stereotyping serves as a measure of control for bringing into safety the continued existence of the accepted norms, as in “us” 2

William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Contexts, Basingstoke and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000, 14. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Kelly Hurley, “British Gothic Fiction, 1885- 1930”, in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, 195.



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and “same together” through the creation of the “Otherness”. This results in an essentialized category created by the privileged category: “this same together.” Hence, according to Michael Pickering, stereotyping is a power perspective that is of one unified voice, rising to strengthen social beliefs. When the construction of the Other denies or refuses the presence of the past and culture, it poses a hindrance to progress. As Roland Barthes says, any signs of culture function as myths through their evacuation of history.5 When signs of culture are reduced to essential categories, any sense of difference or variables are removed. The possibilities for change are made void. Therefore, any chances of progress or evolution are denied. Such a stance serves to maintain a semblance of Western control, supported by current structures, which validates the maintenance of the existing power hierarchy. Orientalizing the East: fact to fiction The domain of the Transylvanian landscape is saturated in “the whirlpool of European races”.6 While Harker nonchalantly records Dracula’s conviction and too quickly brands the history of Dracula’s race and heritage and that of the landscape as a story, Dracula draws our attention to the carefully administered details of the Eastern European Empire and dominance in the eyes of its inhabitants. When Stoker’s text was written, Transylvania was geo-politically linked to Austria, therefore not only forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but also from the 1880s throughout the 90s rousing Victorian England’s continued foreign policy vexation over the “Eastern Question”. As Stephen D. Arata intimates: The region was first and foremost the site, not of superstition and Gothic romance, but of political turbulence and racial strife. Victorian readers knew the Carpathians largely for its endemic cultural upheaval and its fostering of a dizzying succession of empires. By moving Castle Dracula there, Stoker gives distinctly political overtones to his Gothic narrative.7

5 Michael Pickering, Stereotyping: The Politics of Representation, New York: Palgrave, 2001, 48. 6 Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin, 1994, 41. 7 Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation”, Victorian Studies, XXXIII/ 4 (Summer 1990), 627.



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I shall briefly explore the political landscape that bordered Europe in the 1800s, primarily which led to the racial identity Stoker researched to draw Dracula’s portrait, in order to effectively show the political strain between Western and Eastern Europe and the significance of the location in Dracula and its cultural implication on an Occidental representative, Harker. In William Wilkinson’s account of the political histories of Wallachia and Moldavia he observes that in the autumn of 600 ad invaders from the interior of Russia, essentially of Maesia (since called Bulgaria), namely Slaves and Bulgarians, traversed the Danube to settle in Dacia, where they came to be known as the Wallachs (see Jimmie E. Cain8). In his journal, Harker also records Dracula’s locale as being situated in “the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains”.9 Jimmie E. Cain further draws a useful geographical analysis that could help explain Britain’s vexation over Eastern Europe. The setting of Dracula’s lair alludes to Russia, especially to a disputed territory situated along Moldavia, Transylvania and Bessarabia. Russia conquered this area from the Turks in 1812, only forced by Britain and France to return it to Turkey after the Crimean War. However, Russia regained it after its war with Turkey in 1878, only to lose it again that very year when the Congress of Berlin (dominated by Britain, France and Germany) commanded Russia to hand it to the now independent Romania. The site of Castle Dracula attests to the once colonial dominance of Russia over the Turks, as well as its prized conquest falling under the colonial eye of Britain, hence erupting into an Anglo-Russian hostility.10 But what has the historic dominance of Russia over Eastern Europe got to do with the textual Dracula, and the text as a textual study of colonialism/Orientalism? Dracula, in one of his conversations with Harker, proudly remarks about his heritage that “to a boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate”.11 Cain enlightens us through Clive Leatherdale and Bernard Pares that 8

Jimmie E. Cain, “Dracula: Righting Old Wrongs and Displacing New Fears”, in Critical Insights: Dracula- Bram Stoker, ed. Jack Lynch, Pasadena, CA: Salem Press, 2010, 170. 9 Stoker, Dracula, 9-10. 10 Cain, “Dracula: Righting Old Wrongs”, 172. 11 Stoker, Dracula, 40.



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the boyar could refer to high Russian nobility, only below the rank of prince and that they had a long history, contributing much to the majesty of Moscow’s power from the dawn of the twelfth century.12 Thus, the textual Dracula not only comes to represent part of the rich Russian conquests and might of its culture but also poses a threat to the already well-formulated popularity of Britain as a dominant centre of West-European colonial enterprise. As Cain further explains from Stoker’s text bearing intentional references to Russia, we can deduce the shaken faith that the British Empire encountered within itself and in its ability to maintain an imperial centre in Western Europe. This idea of Russia, emerging as a foil to Britain’s dominance as a colonial super power, consequently hosted “Russophobia” within the “English consciousness”. This notion deepened especially with the losses and gains incurred during the Crimean War and with the “ongoing imperial struggle known as the ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia”. With the threat of Russia as a competitor to the imperial ambitions of Britain, and the wavering faith of its people in its political ambitions and the expansion of colonialism towards the peripheral East and beyond, one could conjecture Britain’s inherent fear of a rising super power from the East. However, what would be Stoker’s purpose in drawing Dracula within the bloodline of Russian ancestry? If Dracula is made a subject of Russian nobility, how would it impact on colonial Britain and tip the scale of power hierarchy between Western and Eastern Europe? Fear of reverse colonization: counter-imperialism During the Victorian Age, England was the world’s workshop, a formidable superpower. With its imperial enterprise and voracious territorial endeavour, it was a constant competitor to France, Germany and the Netherlands. By the late 1800s, no Western power had reached so widely into the far corners of Africa and Asia as Britain. Although Dutch control in the East Indies was failing, primarily in Indonesia, Britain’s colonial career was in full-swing. However, with the crippling blow to British morale in the Crimean War, where France, a long embittered adversary of England, had to assist Britain in defeating the Russian forces in Sebastopol,13 there rose a general doubt as to England’s imperial might. Russia had proven to be a 12 13

Cain, “Dracula: Righting Old Wrongs”, 177. Ibid., 178.



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formidable foe and had an equally valorous royal history. I propose that Stoker exploited the historic circumstances and current affairs of the British political concerns. Situating Dracula within the tension of Victorian vexed nerves helps exploit the consciousness of Western Europe and bring to the fore the inherent fear that lay dormant beneath its outer invulnerable exterior. Stoker is careful in not just introducing the political threat that Dracula poses to the Western eyes, but also in infusing such fear in the novel. The schooner that sails Dracula to Britain was called Demeter, a Russian vessel. What is more, the port where Dracula debarks is Varna, a significant area for the British navy during the Crimean War, and also a horrific reminder of countless Russian and Bulgarian abuses of the Turks in the past. As the historic elements further converge in the text, Jimmie E. Cain highlights the function of the Danube, which Dracula crosses to and fro during his journey. It was at the Danube that the historic Vlad Tsepesh, Prince of Wallachia from 1456-1462 and then again in 1476, defeated the Turks in 1462. As Cain also reminds us, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, the mouth of Danube from the Black Sea was also a contested region between Russia and Turkey. And, it should be added, the Danube also played a key role in the final peace negotiations after the Crimean War in 1856, and the Russo-Turkish War in 1878.14 It would be interesting to note how these facts work within the framework of the text in posing a threat to England. Firstly, I surmise that Dracula invokes British fin-de-siècle fears. Any empire that had reached far into the outer world would also run into a fear of eventual decline. With its near defeat by Russia in the Crimean War, England received a rude wake-up call. It had not only France and Germany as alternate Western imperial powers to contend with, but now, also another Imperial power from the East, that is Russia. Stoker was probably proposing the possible invasion of England by another foreign super power at the close of the century. The growing influence of America infringing upon Britain’s colonial politics could have also influenced Stoker to use the dominant Russia as a threat to an empire in decline. It is worth noting that Stoker chooses to dispense with Quincy Morris, the only non-European character within the Imperial Band (as I have re-named Christopher 14

Ibid., 190.



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Craft’s “The Crew of Light”15) – the novel destroys miscegenation at every possibility. As Hopkins notes, Stoker in his original draft named Quincy Morris “Brutus P. Morris” after the mythological figure of Brutus, the colonizer of Britain, a Trojan of a non-white origin.16 Franco Moretti adds, as Hopkins observes,17 that Morris is a highly suspect character, since Lucy dies as soon as she receives a blood transfusion from him. Morris is an American tainted with the blood of the New World, a threat to England. As Hopkins further notes, Arthur Holmwood is compared with Thor, the Norse god, an emblem of the Aryan race.18 And Stoker, himself, was an Irishman who was subjected to constant ridicule because of his accent, which is somewhat ironic considering Stoker’s racially prejudiced sentiments expressed through Morris and Dracula. I regard Stoker’s motivation as being based on his concerns about Scientific Racism, especially insofar as Britain’s falling might in its colonial endeavour added a further dread of a reverse-colonization by an Oriental power from Eastern Europe. As Edward Said states: The Orient that appears in Orientalism … is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later Western empire …. Orientalism was itself a product of certain political forces and activities.19

Therefore, we could decipher the very Boyar Dracula as a representation of the Eastern colonial power that seeks to, and could, succeed in reverse-colonizing Western Europe. With a bloodline from a “whirlpool” of Eastern European races, which include the Turks, Huns, Berserkers, Magyars, and Szekelys, the very polyracialized Dracula penetrating into fair England’s shores marks a threat of counter-colonization and de-racination of the Western blood. As Arata observes, “The ‘anticipated apprehension’ of deracination – of seeing 15

Christopher Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, in Dracula: Authoritative Text Contexts Reviews and Reactions Dramatic and Film Variations Criticism, eds Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 451. 16 Hopkins, Bram Stoker, 80. 17 Ibid., 63. 18 Ibid., 12. 19 Edward Said, Orientalism, New York: Vintage Books, 1979, 202-203.



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Britons ‘ultimately dissolving into Roumanians’ or vampires – is at the heart of the reverse colonization narrative”.20 I shall attempt to illustrate this inherent fear in Dracula’s plan to miscegenate the English with his blood. Dracula, upon “invading” London, invades the white bodies of the Englishmen, primarily of those in the higher rungs of society: Lucy, the fiancée of an English Lord, Arthur Godalming, and Mina, the wife of Harker, a bourgeois (a lawyer). In an attempt to deracinate the White and mix with his own Eastern blood, Dracula infiltrates and baptizes Mina by infusing his blood with her own, a stark allusion to the sexual fluids that are exchanged during copulation. He tells Mina: And you, their best beloved one, are now to me flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper… With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow …21

The sexual allusions in this passage are numerous, and the very notion of the aristocratic Dracula “penetrating” into Mina and infusing his fluid with hers, and thus making hers his, informs us of the fear of Oriental anxiety in Imperial England. As John Allen Stevenson remarks, “Dracula is … doubly frightening – he is the foreigner whose very strangeness renders him monstrous, and more dangerous, he is an imperialist whose invasion seeks a specifically sexual conquest”.22 In an attempt to de-racinate Mina, we note Dracula’s plan to physically conquer both her mind and her body. And Mina acknowledges this when she says, “I was bewildered, and, strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him”.23 Dracula has the power to both physically dominate the space of others as well as turn them against their kind into his own. He recreates his sexual conquests in his likeness and erases their former 20

Arata, “The Occidental Tourist”, 631. Stoker, Dracula, 343. 22 John Allen Stevenson, “A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula”, PMLA, CIII/ 2 (Summer 1988), 144. 23 Stoker, Dracula, 342. 21



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identity. I observe this enforced identity transformation in the physical change of Lucy when she transforms from “purity to voluptuous wantonness”.24 Lucy’s vampiric attempt to seduce and turn her fiancé, the very aristocratic Arthur, into one of her kind reveals the countercolonizing fear of Britain being de-raced, defiled and changed from a colonizer to the colonized, far removed from the centre, to becoming the Other. Britain might have won the Crimean War, but it still harboured fear amidst the still very imperially existing Russia just across the East. It is thus important to ask how England sought to quell such fear and override the power-politics inherent in the relationship between two dominant nations. Othering the East into primitivity: peering into a socio-political mirror The Victorian mind distinguished its White self from those it conquered on the basis of Science and Reason. And to this effect, England used the rationality of Social Darwinism and the concept of the Other to suit its political reasoning for both expansion and subordination of the conquered. Thus, the East had been a prime model for the purposes of marginalizing the race of its inhabitants and culture. In Dracula, England through Harker encounters an imperial Occident. Dracula is a Boyar, a descendent of warrior blood. Moreover, he is also the only Western individual whom we encounter from Eastern Europe. He is highly meticulous, polished in his manners, fastidious in all he does, from his planning of attack (in ancient battles) to his conquests (the bodies of his prey), his English is unadulterated and flawless, and admittedly, it is far superior to Harker’s mode of expression or the rambling broken language of the Dutchman, Van Helsing. His library is laden with books, maps, and charts, all of which are in English, and yet he humbly seeks the native Harker to guide him in his errors of the language. Even when endowed with aristocratic charm, Dracula can nevertheless show gracefulness, which is seen in his modesty. How then can he be Orientally challenging? The novel seeks to blacken the character and nature of Dracula from the dawn of Harker’s journey into Eastern Europe. As Harker, like Marlowe in his journey into Congo in Conrad’s Heart of 24

Ibid., 252-53.



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Darkness, ventures into the East, he seeks to fault all that he sees. He notes train delays, salty dishes (though he savours them anyway), and natives of so many mixed origins and blood and of “the strangest figures”, that he judges the East as “the centre of some imaginative whirlpool”.25 Said states in his Orientalism that the Orient to the West is “one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other”.26 Like an Occidental representative of the very Western Britain, Harker becomes the authoritative judge of both Dracula’s physique as well as that of his country’s. Dracula has eyebrows that meet at the centre, the back of his hands is “coarse” and “squat”,27 and strangely he has hair on his palms. He also possesses nauseating breath, a surprising discovery in someone who is supposedly aristocratic. His country is equally appalling to Harker. Despite the majesty of the towering Carpathians, Harker only notes the jagged rocks and pointed crags, demystifying the romantic notion of pantheism at the slightest hint of admiring “the glorious colours of this beautiful range”.28 And the natives, themselves, completely lack logic and reason for they dwell on superstitions such as believing in evil breaking loose on St George’s Day and pressing crucifixes into a stranger’s hands for safety at Castle Dracula. In short, the novel seeks to render both the interior of the Transylvanian landscape as well as the portrayal of Dracula as primitive. Harker is seen as the prime model of Victorian rationality and Puritanism as opposed to Dracula’s primitivity and supernaturalism. In such a contrast, Dracula reflects the very fear, the repressed model of the Id that Harker refuses to acknowledge. I note the doppelgänger effect this has on Harker, challenging his Occidental psyche and imbuing the fear of the colonizer in him. Reflecting on the tenet of Darwinism, the human model is the compressed form of animal and its evolution into a more refined (human) species. As Hurley notes: [Darwinism] posited that natural history (and by extension human history) progressed randomly, moving toward no particular climax, so that bodies, species, and cultures were as likely to move “backwards” as “forwards”, degenerating into less complex forms. It destroyed a 25

Ibid., 10-11. Said, Orientalism, 1. 27 Stoker, Dracula, 28. 28 Ibid., 16. 26



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comfortably anthropocentric worldview: human beings were just a species like any other, developed by chance rather than providential design, and given the mutability of species, humans might well devolve or otherwise metamorphose into some repulsive abhuman form.29

Harker’s anxiety for his “forward” self in a foreign terrain posits his fear within the realm of supernaturalism, as found in Dracula. As Hurley further asserts, the Gothic could “identify the genre’s monster as the ‘return of the repressed’: the embodiment of unbearable or unacceptable fears, wishes, and desires that are driven from consciousness and then transmuted into representations of monstrosity, just as the unconscious reshapes repressed material into dream images or hysterical symptoms”.30 Thus, the gothic dimension in Dracula reveals Harker’s struggle to disengage with the “primitiveness” found in him, while he seeks to encroach Dracula with the same “backwardness”. Harker often indulges in an Oriental evaluation of Eastern Europe, deeming it as the realm of an exotic, unchartered wild terrain, colourful and mysterious in its peasantry and in its beliefs in magic, superstition and folklores. As Pickering states, the Other is a mode of evaluation.31 When something is stereotyped and placed as the “Other”, the subject is objectively deemed inferior from a superior stance. Such a notion can be used as a tool to control differences or maintain differences, as well as to create distinctions, borders and peripheries. Hence, castigating Eastern Europe as the Other also marginalizes it as primitive. It promulgates the model that Western Europe is the idealized figure and the only civilized place in the world. The idea of such a construction of the Primitive was already prevalent since the Renaissance, such as in the conception of the “savage” in Shakespeare’s Tempest, where Caliban becomes the central figure for “barbarism and savagery”. However, as Michael Pickering points out, the nineteenth century became the dawn of a scientific thought that demarcated itself from previous perceptions of the “savage” in earlier times, such as in the Renaissance. Here the idea of the “Primitive”, rather than being rooted in ignorance, became 29

Hurley, “British Gothic Fiction”, 195. Ibid., 197. 31 Pickering, Stereotyping, 48. 30



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more scientific in reasoning. “Primitive” became explainable in terms of logic. The result was that “primitive” became accepted as the notion that it was the outcome of “progressive evolutionism”.32 In the nineteenth century, the idea of evolution from Darwin questioned the place of humankind in the world and Genesis itself. But this revolutionary scientific thesis resulted in uncertainty. The terms “traditional” and “primitive” required a definition, and scholars found themselves in need of a distinction between the idea of the “primitive” and an otherwise “civilized subject”. A “primitive” is firstly viewed as a nomad, a hunter-gatherer. He has no root, settlement or stability, and hence no lasting impression of an environment that might allow him to scrutinize and develop his mind. Dracula, though, claims to have an impressive line of ancestry and a stronghold in Castle Dracula, with the natives at his command. Nevertheless the text goes to great lengths to reveal his nomadic pattern of existence through his long journeys in search of prey (Lucy and Mina) and new habitation (Carfax), a place to repose, while he is in pursuit of his hunt. A “primitive” is also viewed as sexually promiscuous, not into monogamy and rather bent on debunking the sanctity of a family union. Dracula harbours at least three mistresses at Castle Dracula with no marriage to any of them, and his blood lust towards Mina and Lucy is devoid of any sustainability; rather, it expresses sexuality bordering on sexual violation. This is especially noticeable when he tells Mina, “You may as well be quiet; it is not the first time, or the second, that your veins have appeased my thirst”.33 The sexual allusion inherent in this instance can be construed as bestial, similar to what is found in animal courtship, where beings show a passion of the loins, a tendency towards barbarism and instant sexual gratification. A “primitive” is also viewed as delving into superstition, and taboo – a notion that indicates the absence of logic, reason, sense of judgment, prudence and evaluation. The text maintains Dracula’s native and imprisoning attachment to his roots by insisting on lying in a coffin that is floored with his native soil. Dracula, with all his learning and cultural development in the Occidental ways, still fears a simple talisman like the crucifix. He is eloquent in his speech and delivery, and yet sups like a hungry beast. Matthew J. Bolton observes 32 33

Ibid., 52. Stoker, Dracula, 342.



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Dracula’s “hard-won knowledge of English life” to merely “cloak his essential otherness; at heart, he is still a Transylvanian”.34 The fact that Van Helsing deems Dracula’s intellect to be a child-brain echoes Pickering, who notes the colonial culture indulging in the belief that the “primitive” needed an exemplary model to be followed, to be nurtured, tutored, guided, if necessary by force, for their own good since they were “child-like, intuitive and spontaneous”.35 Colonial practice reiterated such a prejudiced notion. Hence, if the “primitive” needs an exercise in guidance and control, the question that needs be asked is, by whom will he/she be controlled? The answer would be, by an “advanced” society which “has the fortune to evolve from such despairing stasis”. Such an evolutionary thought hinges on Darwinism which constructs hierarchies of human evolution. It racializes the development of the human genome across continents. But according to Pickering, this thought actually precipitated a debate in the nineteenth century over the idea of the “descent of man”, that not all developed equally at the same time. In this sense, the non-white “primitives” of Eastern Europe are at a disadvantage and “need to be reasoned with” by the racially and evolutionary wise and progressive “white” civilization of Harker’s. So, Harker inherently justifies such prejudice towards the natives and, primarily, Dracula, the chief of them all. Pickering states that “race” governed intelligence and inventiveness and the struggle between “different races” led to the backwardness and the eventual elimination of those who were lacking in the capacity to evolve.36 The notion of Social Darwinism thus removes the differences in races from a geographical locale to a more historic timeline: if people from different geographical regions look, seem and live differently from one another, it is not because of time and evolution. People are different because not all those who are capable of developing into the human species do so relatively at the same time. In this sense, the Western European model gratified itself (the Occident centred) with the belief that it was the proto-model of civilized and contemporary thought. Dracula, hence, could be viewed as the under-developed model of the human species; in other words, a backward race. As Bolton aptly observes: 34

Matthew J. Bolton, “Dracula and Victorian Anxieties”, in Critical Insights, 65. Pickering, Stereotyping, 53. 36 Pickering, Stereotyping, 53-54. 35



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In Social Darwinism, the idea that the “primitive” of the present exemplifies the past of the non-civilized European, and therefore holds a promise of greater rationality and refinement for the European thought, becomes anthropology’s pet interest. And so, Dracula, regardless of his polished etiquette, could never match up to the Whiteness of the dominant culture of the British Empire. I shall illustrate the European consciousness of the “primitive” using the Pears advertisement which was predominant during the late Victorian Age. As Anne McClintock explains: A black boy sits in the bath, gazing wide-eyed into the water as if into a foreign element. A white boy clothed in a white apron – the familiar fetish of domestic purity – bends benevolently over his “lesser” brother, bestowing upon him the precious talisman of racial progress. In the second frame of the ad, the black child is out of the bath and the white boy shows him his startled visage in the mirror. The black boy’s body has become magically white, but his face – for Victorian the set of rational individuality and self consciousness – remains stubbornly black. The white child is thereby figured as the agent of history and the male heir to progress, reflecting his lesser brother in the European mirror of self consciousness.38

In the state of under-development which we can note in the Black child, the “primitive” lacks any firmness a stabilized historic reflection of his progress and of his kind. They are into societies lacking any sense of history – a study that catalogues human progress. However, the “primitive” construed as the Other is most importantly constructed “as an object for the benefit of the subject who stands in need of an objectified Other in order to achieve a masterly definition”.39 I would like to point out that when Harker looks at his shaving-glass for the Count’s reflection, he sees the 37

Bolton, “Dracula and Victorian Anxieties”, 66. Anne McClintock, “Soft-soaping Empire: Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising”, in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, London and New York: Routledge, 1966, 273. 39 Pickering, Stereotyping, 71. 38



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reflection of the entire room behind him, except for the Count’s. Jonathan exclaims: “The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself.”40 He hears Dracula’s greeting in crisp English. Yet, he fails to see his image in his glass. At another time, Harker is shocked to see Dracula in his Victorian clothes, “the suit of clothes I had worn whilst travelling here”.41 Here, I observe the Victorians’ fear of accepting any rationality that works against Darwinian thought on racial categories. Dracula could be a foil to Harker in his English manners and he does perform his role rather well. To acknowledge his reflection completely would be likened to the Black child being given a “white” face, that is, an Occidental identity. I juxtapose Dracula’s voice to the Black child appearing white only from the neck down. He has no face in Harker’s Imperial mirror to show the reflection of an enlightened mind, an image befitting of an equal stature with that of the invading colonial Harker. The intellect of Dracula must remain masked and his attempts to overpower the constrictions borne on him to gain a foothold must be steadfastly quashed at every turn. Despite his learning and capabilities and extraordinary powers, Dracula is “only a child”. Van Helsing denigrates Dracula’s otherwise superiority over his assailants with a simple, essentialized, Darwinian explanation: “Well, for us, it is, as yet, a child-brain; for had he dared, at the first, to attempt certain things he would long ago have been beyond our power.”42 As Arata points out, Van Helsing’s child development metaphor may seem a simple way to comprehend Dracula’s evolution. However, Van Helsing’s portrayal of Dracula’s intellect is devoid of his racial development, from which derives the counter-colonizer’s threat to a Western European further development and exclusive recognition.43 Hence, Dracula must be continually projected with a diminished stature; the Russian Other must be withheld from proclaiming his superiority. Dracula muted Stoker’s novel moves from an epistolary novel form to that of journal entries while hinging on a rudely written travelogue. The novel boasts 40

Stoker, Dracula, 37. Ibid., 59. 42 Ibid., 360. 43 Arata, “The Occidental Tourist”, 640. 41



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multiple entries that also cleverly highlight the rising use and popularity of technology at the crack of modernity. Seward’s use of the phonograph, Van Helsing’s telegrams, Mina’s typewriter and Harker’s devout use of shorthand writing all pose a stark contrast to the dull-drudgery of Dracula’s ink pen and paper. However, what is startling about Stoker’s text is the Otherness that the Imperial Band (made up of Harker, Mina, Van Helsing, Holmwood, Morris and Seward) strives to impose on Dracula. In order to quash Dracula’s counter-colonialism, the Otherness is not only exhibited at a contextual level, but also at a textual level, where we can observe the political demarcation of this outsider by the Imperial West. Dracula, like Crusoe’s Friday, has no voice. The reader knows him by his name; Count Dracula. Yet, the text and the Imperial Band cleverly hide his full identity. He has no first name to begin with, unlike every other individual we meet in the Imperial Band. Historically, he could be likened to or could be the very Vlad Tsepesh. However, in Dracula, he is merely Dracula. And the stark irony that any reader will first observe in the novel is that although the title bears the name Dracula, the character Dracula is devoid of a voice. The novel refuses to allow England’s colonial counterpart an entry. The only time Dracula “speaks” with his independent voice is through the letter which he pens and sends to Harker at the beginning of Harker’s first journal entry. Even then, his voice is amplified to the reader through a member of the Imperial Band. In the midst of British political endeavour to render a very colonial dominant Dracula as a threat to its empire (as we have seen so far), how credible can one assume Dracula’s only correspondence to be, devoid of any possible Imperial censor? Since it is the Imperial Band’s voice which pervades the text, it would only be child’s play to mute the voice of the Othered and bring the reader into the narrators’ confidence even at a textual level. Amidst Harker’s quip on the backwardness of Transylvanian landscape, we encounter a Count who is completely dissonant with the very space he inhabits. Dracula’s language is impeccable from the very first introduction he offers us of himself via Harker: My friend, Welcome to the Carpathians. I am anxiously expecting you. Sleep well tonight. At three tomorrow the diligence will start for Bukovina; a place on it is kept for you. At the Borgo Pass my carriage will await



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you and will bring you to me. I trust that your journey from London has been a happy one, and that you will enjoy your stay in my beautiful land. Your friend, Dracula44

We note the courtesy in his manners, his hospitality towards a stranger to his land, and his care towards the well-being of his guest. In short, we are introduced to a cultured individual, who beyond any reasonable doubt reveals the knowledge and delivery of his Western learning and language. He is neither a primitive of the dark and foreboding landscape which the Imperial Band paints Transylvania to be, nor is he a peasant. If Transylvania is a place of dark and uninformed primitiveness, then, the only logic we could fathom here is Dracula’s struggle to demonstrate his superiority as an East European. On the contrary, if he is to be seen as an Eastern trying to be Western, then he is an individual who has staged a struggle against his own environment to capture and hold what he has come to admire: the West European model. However, I suppose the Victorian colonial authority ought to be maintained here and this is, after all, a “White-man’s” text, composed of White narrators. Dracula’s supposed defiance, his colonial stance and his Russian imperial presence ought to be understood at a textual level as his attempt to mimic British Imperial power. The text seeks to make the reader believe that Dracula is “almost the same but not white”, as Homi Bhabha puts it. The crux of mimicry is that it repeats the colonial culture, rather than representing it.45 And by “repeating” I mean that the impression of Dracula’s culturedness and resemblance of the Western model is nothing more than the Eastern dissatisfaction, the Other’s desire to be White, like that of the Black boy in the Pear advertisement. Hence, Dracula’s disavowal of his Otherness, his geographical separation from his roots, through his departure from the East to the West, is his attempt to break free from a model he does not identify with. Nevertheless, at the end he is strongly reconnected to his Otherness by being forcefully dragged back to his peripheral environment. 44

Stoker, Dracula, 12. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, 89. 45



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Elsewhere, the text displays the censorship of the Othered characters through the political might of the western narrative. Dracula’s territory is constructed into silence right from the beginning. When Harker questions the landlord and his wife about Dracula, they “refuse to speak further”.46 He hears “a lot of words often repeated” while he shares the coach with the locals, but he does not know their language, so he cannot decipher their meaning. Their language sounds “queer”. The people, “the many nationalities in the crowd” are reduced to mere “sign” and “fingers”.47 Even at Dracula’s own home, the might of the West European colonial power hammers down the Othered subjects into silence. In refusing Dracula a narrative voice on the page, he is denied an individual identity. He is to be seen as a representation of his dark environment. Said describes the passivity which the text imposes onto Dracula very aptly: The Orient and the Orientals [are considered by Orientalism] as an ‘object’ of study, stamped with an otherness – as all that is different, whether it be ‘subject’ or ‘object’ – but of a constitutive otherness, of an essential character .… This ‘object’ of study will be, as is customary, passive, non-participating, endowed with a ‘historical’ subjectivity, above all, non-active, non-autonomous, non-sovereign with regard to itself; the only Orient or Oriental or ‘subject’ which could be admitted, at the extreme limit, is the alienated being, philosophically that is, other than itself in relationship to itself, posed, understood, defined- and acted – by others.48

Dracula, therefore, is to be maintained as an exotic specimen for Van Helsing’s study, a savage for Mina’s gentle gaze of pity and salvation, a scrutiny for Harker’s prudent Victorian intellect, a primitive indigenous hunt for the American Morris, a psychological experimentation for Seward, and a subdued threat to Holmwood’s “colonial empire”. And to authenticate the general collective voice of the Imperial Band against the resisting voice of Dracula’s, the text presents a narrative form that is composed of materials of authority and truth telling. The Imperial Band, itself, is made up of authoritative figures. 46

Stoker, Dracula, 13. Ibid., 14-15. 48 Edward Said, “Crisis in Orientalism”, in Modern Criticism and Theory, eds David Lodge and Nigel Wood, Harlow: Pearson Education, 2008, 371. 47



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We encounter one scientist, a doctor, a solicitor, a man from New World, and an English aristocrat. If a text is to gain credibility, it has to seek an authoritative voice. Dracula starts with individual narrations of multiple figures and gradually by the end of the text accumulates the knowledge gained from multiple single-person narratives into a collective voice. Through the separate accounts of the Imperial Band, the text charters a dialogue with the reader to promote believability. As Said states, “A text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual … is not easily dismissed”. We are not merely shown the Imperial Band’s encounter with a vampire, a primitive of the East, a nefarious character of the Western thought, a countercolonial threat of the British Empire. The text, rather, leads the reader to understand the monstrosity of this parasite of the East and how it bears a live threat to the superior English identity, if left unchecked. Dracula, therefore, is written in a mode to “create not only knowledge but also the very reality [it] appear[s] to describe”.49 To quote a term from Arjun Appadurai, one can view and rate Dracula within the confines of his “spatially incarcerated” domain:50 However, what is startling right at the end is when Harker, the judicial voice in the text states, … all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document. Nothing but a mass of typewriting, except the later notebooks of Mina and Seward and myself, and Van Helsing’s memorandum. We could hardly ask anyone, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.51

Why would the Coloniality of the textual narrative lead itself towards self-destruction when it has taken all measures to debunk the voice, identity and authority of its marginalized Dracula? And what does Harker mean by “there is hardly one authentic document”? If those typewritten texts and notes make up the factual account of the narrative, why debunk its very factuality? And right at the beginning, before his first entry, Harker makes an introduction to the text when he states: 49

Ibid., 369. Arjun Appadurai, “Putting Hierarchy in its Place”, Cultural Anthropology, III/1 (1998), 36. 51 Stoker, Dracula, 449. 50



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Raphaella Delores Gomez How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of latter-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.52

Why does Harker provide a warning about the believability of the account before the narration commences? And what does he mean by “needless matters”? We are introduced to doubt; we note a possible fabrication and discrepancy in the narrative authority of the Imperial Band here. Harker’s declaration that “all records chosen” highlights the fact that the narrators have sifted facts and re-presented them. One could question the authenticity of the “factual” account of the narrative, but what one notes is the colonial attempt at quashing all possible doubts regarding an account so highly improbable, farfetched and supernatural. The reader is gently coerced to believe the unbelievable. The parasitic existence of the East represents a strong threat to the West. If we do not believe in the factual accuracy of the misplaced papers and the carefully chosen records, we ought to believe in the supposedly credible members of the British high rung society. Dracula begs the reader to acknowledge that what is read is not a personal testimony, which can be countermanded, but rather a set of facts, in themselves. The threat of Dracula, the very fear of a reversecolonial presence that would verily lead to the British imperial decline, is factual and true, and it would have been more accountable if more evidence had been made available. However, the text places the authenticity of the narrative in the technological accuracy of the Victorian Age. Amidst Oriental wilderness and bats and superstition, it must have seemed more prudent for the average colonial reader to trust the technological expression of the narrative, which ought to be believed. In short, this article has posited that Imperialism and colonial dominance have shaped and defined the conquered as well as the conquerors, in terms of colonial power and its anthropological 52

Ibid., 8.



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relations to the location culture of those colonized. Therefore, it claims the existence of a colonial institutional knowledge and of a colonial identity through which the discourse of the imperial power of Western Europe has been disseminated to the rest of the globe. The colonial dominance over the Orient has helped shape the cultural worth and materiality of the Western European civilization, primarily in its definition of Western European intellectuality, morality, religiosity, political viability and cultural factuality. This has been done in comparison with landscapes that could be ascertained as prime Oriental candidates. And the Oriental subject, itself, has been scrutinized and established as such on the basis of the scientific reasoning of biological determinism. Any civilization that appears far removed from the Western European ideals (note the difference between Western and Eastern Europe), even in remote aspects such as the social utterance of language in terms of speaking and elocution, could be viewed as a degenerate, a simpleton, in need of parenting and guidance and as an Oriental enterprise. Such a civilization ought to be demarcated, studied and understood as the Other. And in Dracula, interestingly though, the text allows us to identify a marriage between the “Othering” found in the Gothic with the “Other” in postcolonial discourse.



EMPIRE, MONSTERS AND BARBARIANS: UNCANNY ECHOES AND RECONFIGURATIONS OF STOKER’S DRACULA IN COETZEE’S WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS ROGERS ASEMPASAH While Dracula has been examined as figuring anxieties about reverse colonization, the reworking and re-contextualization of ideas such as civilization, barbarism, and transgressing boundaries into postcolonial geographies has received scant attention. This article examines Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as a reconfiguration of Dracula by explicitly interrogating the complex interplay of history, geography, gender, the body, Self and Other as defining Empire and its periphery. In Coetzee’s text the monster is not a figure from the periphery seeking a diabolical and violent entry into the heart of civilization; rather the monster is a product and agent of Empire who travels to the frontier to maintain the status quo but ironically destabilizes the categorical imperative of Empire. Also of interest is how Coetzee rewrites the threefold structure of Dracula, redefines monstrosity, foregrounds ethical consideration, reconsiders the crisis of the liberal imagination and articulates a utopian vision.

Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) occupies a seminal place in postcolonial studies. It explores, from the perspective of the strategic positionality of the narrator as a colonial administrator, the colonizer/colonized, or civilized/barbarian trope through interlocking narratives of Empire, history, torture, and the crisis of the liberal subject with an intensity of self-reflexivity that has rarely been achieved in postcolonial writing. It is therefore not surprising that writing, torture and the body have featured prominently in the scholarship on this text.1 Coetzee himself has said that the novel is “about the impact of the torture chamber on the life of a man of

1

See, for example, Susan Van Zanten Gallagher, “Torture and the Novel: Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”, Contemporary Literature XXIX, I (Spring 1988), 22785; Barbara Eckstein, “The Body, the Word, and the State: J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”, NOVEL: A Forum on Fictions XXII/II (Summer 1989), 175-98; Michael Valdez Moses, “The Masks of Empire: Writing, History, and Torture in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”, The Kenyon Review New Series, XV/I (Spring 1993), 115-27.

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conscience”.2 David Attwell observes that Waiting for the Barbarians marks a “pivotal” stage in Coetzee’s oeuvre because “history emerges not as a priori structure but as an object in itself, objectified History … as a discursive field”.3 Beyond the explicit reference to Cavafy’s poem “Waiting for the Barbarians” (1904) from which the novel takes its title,4 critics have examined how the text redeploys themes and motifs from Franz Kafka’s The Penal Colony (1919) and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953) and Waiting for Godot (1956) in order to weave a complex interplay of semiotic polysemy and radical intertextuality. David Attwell has also convincingly shown that in addition to eighteenth-century prose, to which Coetzee himself has acknowledged his indebtedness, eighteenth-century historiography, particularly Edward Gibbon’s The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire “provided the essential distinction between civilization and barbarism used by Coetzee – and no doubt by Cavafy before him … – in his fictive displacement of the dominant forms of contemporary South African thinking”.5 Furthermore, the Gothic elements in the novel have also been commented upon. For instance, pointing to repression, terror and torture as standard Gothic motifs, Dominic Head argues that “the treatment of torture in Barbarians reveals the extent or limit of Coetzee’s Gothicism”.6 While the focus on the Gothic dimension of Waiting for the Barbarians has yielded valuable insights into the recirculation of the Gothic genre in postcolonial imaginary, it has done little, in my view, to address the more complex comparative task of how Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in particular may be said to be reconfigured in Coetzee’s novel. 2

J.M. Coetzee, “Into the Dark Chamber: The Writer and the South African State”, in Doubling the Point: Essays and Interviews, ed. David Attwell, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1992, 362. 3 David Attwell, J.M.Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 72. 4 See, for example, Maria Boletsi, “Barbaric Encounters: Rethinking Barbarism in C.P. Cavafy’s and J.M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians”, Comparative Literature Studies, XLIV/1-2 (Spring-Summer 2007), 67-96. 5 Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 75. 6 Dominic Head, “Coetzee and the Animals: the Quest for Postcolonial Grace”, in Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of Genre, eds Andrew Smith and William Hughes, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 230.



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This article addresses this lacuna by focusing on Stoker’s Dracula as an uncanny intertext in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. The article does not seek to demonstrate that Coetzee consciously engaged Stoker’s Dracula but to suggest that at the level of themes, motifs and structure, Dracula serves as a profound comparative text from which we can approach and appreciate Coetzee’s differentiating treatment of the trope of barbarian invasion and torture. The article argues that in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians the vampire is not a demonic figure from the margins seeking a diabolical and violent incursion into the heart of civilization; rather the vampire is the Janus face of Empire who travels to the frontier to maintain the status quo but ironically ends up subverting the legitimacy of Empire by exposing its inherent contradictions. The discussion is limited to how Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians redeploys the frontier motif on which hinge the notions of boundaries, transgression and the policing of those boundaries; how it suspends or makes impossible the realization of a barbarian invasion; how it redefines barbarism or monstrosity; how it foregrounds ethical dilemmas as seen through the crisis of the liberal subject, and makes problematic not only the narrative teleology in Dracula but reconceives a utopia that is radically different from that envisioned by the vampire slayers in Dracula. We conclude by drawing attention to how this reading strategy sheds light on the ongoing scholarship on the “transhistorical adaptability”7 and circulation of Stoker’s Dracula. Preliminary notes: the importance of Dracula to the postcolonial writer Perhaps it is expedient to proceed by first engaging the crucial question: why would Stoker’s Dracula be important to the postcolonial writer and to a reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in particular? There are two possible answers. Firstly, Stoker’s text revolves around the trope of barbarian “invasion”. Stephen Arata’s perspective on Dracula as enacting anxieties over reverse colonization indirectly addresses the trope of barbarian invasion of the Empire.8 Arata is not alone; others have seen Dracula 7

Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking Through the Century 1897-1997, ed. Carol Margaret Davidson, Toronto and Oxford: Dundurn Press, 1997, 23. 8 Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”, Victorian Studies, XXXIII/4 (Winter 1990), 623.



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as contributing to British imperial discourses9 and as an allegory of colonization.10 William Hughes, however, has challenged the validity of reading Dracula as an allegory of colonization by insisting that, “Harker is no colonialist, Count Dracula no subaltern subject ready for exploitation”.11 Debunking the “invasion script” as a myth of postcolonial criticism, Hughes contends that Dracula is about the “celebration of single-minded individualism … the identity of the exceptional individual, rather than the broader racial context of origins”.12 We need to heed Hughes’ criticism especially as he argues against the tendency to view Dracula as “a race synecdoche” which belies the historical fact that Transylvania was “outside the political sphere of British national or imperial presence, a component not of formal or informal Empire but of geographical generalization interest”.13 But, as Hughes’ analysis shows, this disjunction between historical fact and textual or fictional representation does not necessarily preclude Stoker from meditating on the relation between Empire and its Other especially as Britain was an imperial power. So, while the Dracula as “a race synecdoche” can be discarded, Dracula as representative of a certain fictional Transylvania geography which is the antipodes of England cannot be quickly dismissed. It is not surprising therefore that Hughes returns to the imperial script in Dracula as he concludes that the celebration of individualism is central to the imperial project. While Hughes’ analysis is persuasive, it does not adequately address why at the end of Dracula, it is not individualism that is triumphant but a community of individuals who would go to any length to maintain the purity and stability of their “imagined community”. It is 9

See, in particular, Neda Atanasoski Neda, “Dracula as Ethnic Conflict: The Technologies ‘Humanitarian Intervention’ in the Balkans during the 1999 NATO Bombing of Serbia and Kosovo”, in Monster and the Monstrous: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Niall Scott, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007, 65-66. 10 See, for example, Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, 227-54; Jules Zanger, “A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews”, English Literature in Transition, XXXIV/1 ( 1991), 32-43; Christopher Frayling, Nightmare: The Birth of Horror, London: BBC Books, 1996. 11 William Hughes, “A Singular Invasion: Revisiting the Postcoloniality of Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, in Empire and the Gothic, 92. 12 Ibid., 99, 97. 13 Ibid., 91.



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important to note that the vampire slayers, for example Van Helsing, view Dracula’s presence in London as an invasion.14 The second reason Dracula is important for the postcolonial writer and reader of Waiting for the Barbarians is that it constructs a rather problematic opposition (whatever subversive tendency there is, it is peripheral and subordinated to the dominant telos of the triumph of rationality over barbarism) between the civilized/barbarian dichotomy; between Self and Other. The result of this epistemic and rhetorical move in Dracula is that the reader is unconsciously coopted into the dominant project of the vampire slayers who draw on the conventional fear of evil in order to recast themselves as agents of legitimation whose battle against Count Dracula constitutes a vital part of the eternal struggle between good and evil. This accounts for the salvific trope and the motif of exorcism in the novel. However, once we critically interrogate how space and spatialization become carefully constructed metonymies for differences between England and the fictional Transylvania, then the ethical dimensions of the barbarian/civilization dichotomy and the salvific rhetoric which, in fact, drives the modern exorcism we find in the text, is open to interrogation. The more we scrutinize the vampires slayers’ techniques of containing Count Dracula’s audacious act of “invasion”, the more urgent the question Derrida asked of Jean Rousset’s book Form et Signification becomes for the reader of Stoker’s Dracula. In “Force and Signification”, an essay in which he attacks structuralism, Derrida asks the crucial question of Rousset’s book: “But what does this opening hide? And hide, not by virtue of what it leaves aside and out of sight, but by virtue of its very power to illuminate.”15 In relation to Dracula one is tempted to ask: what does the triumphalism at the end of the text hide? I suggest that a nuanced reading of Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians in the context of Stoker’s Dracula reveals how Waiting for the Barbarians makes visible what Stoker’s text “leaves aside and out of sight”: that the barbarian/civilization “consciousness is a catastrophic consciousness”.16

14

Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin, 1994, 406. Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification”, in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978, 5. 16 Ibid., 4. 15



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Coetzee’s reconfiguration of the frontier motif The first indication of how Coetzee’s novel reconfigures Stoker’s Dracula is the deployment of the frontier motif. While in Dracula the frontier motif forms a vital part of the narrative machinery that strengthens the civilized/barbarian binary, in Waiting for the Barbarians the frontier motif is deployed in order to destabilize that structuring logic. In Dracula, the frontier is Transylvania, Eastern Europe. Stoker highlights three issues in this frontier space: the frontier as a place of superstition; home of the vampire, Count Dracula; and the frontier as representing an archaic history. It is the site where rationality confronts its antithesis – irrationality. This image of the frontier as a barbarian territory has occupied a central place in Western European and American intellectual and historical discourse.17 According to Umberto Eco, Imperial Roman Empire was constructed on “a precise definition of boundaries: the force of the empire is knowing on which borderline, between which limen or threshold, the defensive line should be set up”.18 This emphasis on boundaries was also a potent cartographic paradigm that effectively demarcated the Self and the Other. For, as Eco has argued, the construction and continued survival of Empire (the centre) as civitas depends on containing the threat from the barbarians who constitute the frontier: “if the time ever comes when there is no longer a clear definition of boundaries, and the barbarians (nomads who have abandoned their original territory and who move on any territory as if it were their own, ready to abandon that too) succeed in imposing their nomadic view, then Rome will be finished and the capital of the empire could just as well be somewhere else.”19 Thus the fear of barbarian invasion was a central part of not only the politics of Empire but also formed the basis for the construction of the subjectivity of the colonizer. Increased industrialization and colonial domination of less powerful people and geographies entrenched of the idea of the frontier both as a regulative concept and a territory that needs to be modernized. In 1893, four years before the publication of Stoker’s Dracula, the American historian Frederick 17

Mark B. Salter, Barbarians and Civilization in International Relations, London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2002, 20. 18 Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, 28. 19 Ibid., 29.



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James Turner, in his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”, writes: … the frontier is the outer edge – the meeting point between savagery and civilization .… The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin .… Before long … he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes or perish.20

For Turner, the frontier is another name for “wilderness”: a threatening zone populated by primitives, barbarians, or monsters that the civilized must transform, police, dominate, eliminate or perish. This conception of the frontier is telling especially as in Stoker’s text, Quincey Morris, the American plays a crucial role in eliminating Count Dracula. Stoker’s extraordinary achievement in Dracula is that he turns this long extra-literary tradition of the frontier into a narrative that combines elements of adventure, exotic, exorcism and salvation narratives within a larger framework of a barbarian invasion of England. Spatial politics or representation of space thus constitutes a formidable aspect of the oppositional thinking that structure Stoker’s Dracula. Spatial opposition between England and Transylvania corresponds to normative values such good vs. evil, rationality vs. irrationality, modernity vs. pre-modern or decadence, etc. Count Dracula’s Castle is located in “one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe [and] every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians”.21 For Dracula, the difference between Transylvania and England is that Transylvania is the domain of “many strange things”.22 The frontier is also a preindustrial territory wherein the modern man is forced to strip off the garments of civilization. Hence, the further Harker moves from the 20 Frederick Jackson Turner, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), in History, Frontier and Section: Three Essays, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993, 60. 21 Stoker, Dracula, 10. 22 Ibid., 32.



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West and thus deeper into Transylvania the more he is forced to abandon trains and depend on coaches and calèches driven by horses and enigmatic characters.23 Consequently, Haker’s journey to Count Dracula’s Castle is a form of crossing the boundary or threshold into the domain of uncontrollable or monopolistic primeval forces: the modern man’s return to the infancy of humanity where he confronts demoniacal forces, epitomized by Count Dracula, bereft of ethical values. Franz Fanon aptly describes colonial spatial politics as a Manichean world wherein the native in the frontier is constructed as “a sort of quintessence of evil, insensible to ethics, the negation of values … the corrosive element destroying all that comes near him … the deforming element, disfiguring all that has to do with beauty and morality, the depository of malevolent powers, the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces”.24 Van Helsing succinctly captures this image when he expounds on the implications of Count Dracula’s escape; “he is brute, and more than brute; he is devil in callous .… But to fail here is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him – without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best.”25 This fear of becoming Other which drives the vampire slayers is undermined in Waiting for the Barbarians: which suggests that this fear misplaced as civitas is always already barbarian. Although Count Dracula recounts with pride a collective history of persistent warfare and his singular role as an aristocratic boyar, the overall image that emerges is that he is a hangover of a decadent past, the antithesis of a civilized and modernized England. Harker’s conclusion on discovering Count Dracula in “the great box” is that, in London, Count Dracula will not only “satiate his lust for blood among the teeming millions” but more horrifyingly will “create a new and ever-widening circle of semidemons”.26 Count Dracula then is the relic of a decadent history – “the old centuries” which modernity must kill.27 Ironically, part of the reason Count Dracula decides to relocate to England is his awareness that “The warlike days are over. Blood is too precious a thing in these 23

Ibid., 19. Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, London: Penguin, 1967, 32. 25 Stoker, Dracula, 283-84. 26 Ibid., 67. 27 Ibid., 49. 24



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days of dishonourable peace, and the glories of the great races are as a tale that is told.”28 But as it turns out, Dracula’s self-fashioning project is actually a pretence for revenge: to found a female colony in England where “Your girls that you love are mine … and through them you and others shall yet be mine – my creatures to do my bidding, and to be my jackals when I want to feed”.29 It is this deviation from the economics of goods and services to the economics of blood and the body that makes Dracula a dangerous barbarian in England. Like Dracula, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is constructed around the trope of the frontier and barbarian invasion. However, Coetzee displaces the geographical specificity we find in Dracula: events in Waiting for the Barbarians take place in a historically and geographically unspecified outpost of Empire. More than that, Waiting for the Barbarians radically reframes Count Dracula, his Castle, Jonathan Harker, and the vampire hunters. Both novels begin with arrivals at the frontier (albeit driven by different motivations) and trace the turbulent ramifications of the encounter. At the heart of both of texts, then, is an encounter with the Other. In Dracula, Jonathan Harker arrives in Count Dracula’s Castle as a mercantile agent but it turns out that the Castle is a veritable prison and he is taken captive by Dracula. Harker’s journey to the Carpathians therefore is a carefully constructed ploy by Count Dracula to relocate to England. But in Waiting for the Barbarians Col. Joll of the Third Bureau arrives from the capital to put down a rumoured barbarian invasion which increasingly turns out to lack substance. Count Dracula occupies the margins, a place of darkness, superstition and barbarism; Jonathan Harker and the vampire slayers are from England, the centre, and represent rationality, power and the authority to define, track and exterminate the threatening Dracula. Waiting for the Barbarians provides an alternative plot configuration of Stoker’s Dracula that yields a powerful critique. Coetzee’s text seems to ask the question: “what might happen if Jonathan Harker, the liberal subject, is transformed into a colonial administrator and the threat he faces turns out, ironically, to come not from Dracula, the monstrous Other, but from Van Helsing and his crew of vampire slayers?” In other words, from the Empire he serves? 28 29

Ibid., 42. Ibid., 365.



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In this rearrangement, Jonathan Harker is reconfigured as the Magistrate, the colonial administrator of the small frontier town, who is also the narrator in Coetzee’s novel; Dracula’s Castle that dominates the Carpathian topography becomes, in Coetzee’s postcolonial imaginary, the walled colonial outpost with a population of three-thousand “souls” that dominates the barbarian landscape; Van Helsing and his vampire slayers are reframed as Col. Joll of the Third Bureau and his expeditionary force who travel to the frontier to put down a barbarian invasion. Like Dracula who “invades” England, Col. Joll and his men invade the frontier and terrorize the “barbarians”. Unlike Stoker’s vampire slayers whose actions strengthen England’s position at the end text, the expeditionary force led by Joll end up exposing Empire itself as barbaric and monstrous. Col. Joll and Warrant Officer Mandel are the vampires but a different kind; they are not literal bloodsucking vampires but, like Dracula, they invade the body and spill blood. Just as Van Helsing and his team deploy modern scientific methods of inquiry to track down Count Dracula, Coetzee’s Col. Joll and his team appear on the frontier as “guardians of the State, specialists in the obscure motions of sedition, devotees of truth, and doctors of interrogation”.30 The irony in Coetzee’s text is that Col. Joll and his military men are no vampire slayers in the traditional sense. At this point we need to take Nina Auerbach’s assertion that “There is no such creature as ‘The Vampire’; there are only vampires”31 seriously in order to understand the subtle ways Stoker’s text has been reimagined in Coetzee’s postcolonial novel. The point to be emphasized here is that different historical and cultural crises generate their own vampires or the monsters. While Stoker’s Dracula insists on not only the materiality of the barbarian or monster but more importantly on the facticity of Dracula’s invasion, Coetzee’s novel suggests that the supposed barbarian invasion is an invention, “an episode of hysteria” which is part and parcel of colonial mentality: There is no woman living along the frontier who has not dreamed of a dark barbarian hand coming from under the bed to grip her ankle, no man who has not frightened himself with visions of the barbarians 30

J.M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, London: Vintage Books, 2004, 9. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 5.

31



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carousing in his home, breaking the plates, setting fire to the curtains, raping his daughters. These dreams are the consequence of too much ease. Show me a barbarian army and I will believe.32

This difference between actuality of the invasion in Dracula and the poetics of doubt and waiting in Waiting for the Barbarians is that while most of the action in the former takes place in England, in the later text they are confined to the frontier. This shift corresponds to differences in emphasis. The frontier in Waiting for the Barbarians becomes the site where categories are subjected to consistent destabilization. Rather than emphasize barbarian depravity that frames the imperial civilized/barbarian discourse, Coetzee’s frontier becomes the place where the contradictions of Empire (the civilized) are played out. This reversal or reconfiguration of the setting, existents, happenings and what constitutes eventfulness in Stoker’s Dracula by Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians heightens the political implications of Coetzee’s aesthetics. As Jacques Rancière argues, “aesthetics politics always defines itself by a certain recasting of the distribution of the sensible, a reconfiguration of the given perceptual forms”.33 What we find in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians as it engages Stoker’s Dracula is a redistribution or a perspectival shift in the fundamental issues of engagement that subjects the vampire slayers to the humanistic values that form the ideological basis of imperialism. They fail this litmus test. It is in this context that Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians gives credence to Walter Benjamin’s contention that “there is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another”.34 Production of knowledge and power One of the central issues in Stoker’s Dracula is the relationship between the production of knowledge and power. This dimension of 32

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 9. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill, New York: Continuum, 2011, 63. 34 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 256. 33



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the novel is shown in the diverse strategies the vampire slayers, led by Van Helsing, deploy in order to know, gather, preserve and transmit knowledge in their war against Dracula. They have access to a variety of technologies of writing and discursive frames. Count Dracula’s monologic perspective proves inadequate to the dialogic or collaborative character of the vampire slayers. Count Dracula is unable to read Harker’s letter written in shorthand. He describes it as “a vile thing, an outrage upon friendship and hospitality”.35 Van Helsing and his men are driven by the positivist conviction that there is an essence or entity out there that their representational and interpretive strategies would uncover and eliminate. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians subverts the Van Helsingian confidence in the power or claims of absolute knowledge of the Other. This is accomplished in two ways: exploring the ethical dimensions of the procedures or techniques deployed in pursuit of the truth and the reification of aporia. In the figure of Professor Van Helsing, we are confronted with the emergence and lionization of the cult of the expert who deploys a wealth of knowledge and “metarepresentational skills” in order to diagnose a crisis and articulate “the truth”.36 It is Van Helsing who provides the appropriate discourse for constituting the subjectivity of Count Dracula as the Un-Dead, and the “man-eater”.37 Similarly, in Waiting for the Barbarians we see the emergence of a military expert at the colonial outpost in the figure of Col. Joll. For Col. Joll there is “a tone of truth” that only training and experience can recognize. Hence to the Magistrate’s question, “How do you ever know when a man has told you the truth? Can you ever hear whether I am telling you the truth?” Col. Joll responds: I am speaking of a situation in which I am probing for the truth, in which I have to exert pressure to find it. First I get lies, you see – this is what happens. First lies, then pressure, then more lies, then more pressure, then the break, then more pressure, then the truth. This is how you get the truth.38

35

Stoker, Dracula, 56. Benson Saler and Charles A. Zigier, “Dracula and Carmilla: Mythmaking and the Mind”, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Carlo J. Kungl, Oxford: Inter-disciplinary Press, 2003, 18. 37 Stoker, Dracula, 381. 38 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 5. 36



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It is this false metaphysical presupposition of the expert – that the complexity of life can be reduced to a graspable essence – that Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians seems to criticize by drawing attention to the ethical issues that are usually suppressed. Van Helsing claims that there is a tone of truth. Reacting confidently to Dracula’s avowed threat of revenge, Val Helsing tells his colleagues: We have learnt something – much! Notwithstanding his brave words, he fears us, he fears time, he fears want …. His very tone betrays him or my ears deceive me.39

Van Helsing and his crew also “read” the bodies of Lucy and Mina in order to identify the modus operandi of Dracula. In Dracula, Transylvania topography and history become transparent and readable sites for Harker’s exotic construction of and rumination on otherness and difference. But what does this hide? What are the consequences of this pretence to know or read the Other absolutely? This is an issue that Stoker’s text does not overtly address but which Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians insistently foregrounds. Thus transparency in Dracula is replaced by impenetrability in Waiting for the Barbarians. In Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, both Col. Joll and the Magistrate fail in their quest to read the topography, history and bodies of the barbarians. What Waiting for the Barbarians foregrounds, therefore, is a crisis of representation, knowledge and meaning. Two incidents illustrate this state of affairs. The first spectacular incident related to the subversion of the expert’s claim to representation and knowledge is the contest over the meaning of the “slips of white poplar-wood”. Although the Magistrate had on several occasions failed to decipher his archaeological finds, he invents an interpretation when he is forced by Col. Joll and his “vampire slayers” to read it: … there is only a single character. It is the barbarian character war, but it has other senses too. It can stand for vengeance, and, if you turn it upside down like this, it can be made to read justice. There is no knowing which sense is intended. That is part of barbarian cunning. They form an allegory. They can be read in many orders …. Together they can be read as a domestic journal, or they can be read as a plan of 39

Stoker, Dracula, 365.



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Rogers Asempasah war, or they can be turned on their sides and read as a history of the last years of the Empire the old Empire, I mean. There is no – agreement among scholars about how to interpret these relics of the ancient barbarians. Allegorical sets like this are open to many interpretations.40

As David Attwell has rightly noted, this strategic interpretation of the slips by the Magistrate is aimed at “undermining the Joll’s terroristic drive for certainty, for truth”.41 The scene also marks the failure of Empire’s power to dominate through its power to interpret. In light of the dialogic connections between Waiting for the Barbarians and Dracula, the Magistrate’s interpretation transcends intratextual critique: it has an intertextual dimension. It subverts Van Helsing’s praxis, which is driven by a metaphysics of presence. In fact, in Stoker’s Dracula there is agreement among scholars on the identity of Dracula – Van Helsing receives corroborative information from another scholar, Arminius of Buda-Pesth University. The second example is the Magistrate’s failure to read the body of the barbarian girl. Unlike the other girls with whom the Magistrate has had a sexual liaison, the body of the barbarian presents him with an enigma. Her body is “blank, closed, ponderous, beyond comprehension … incomplete, … without aperture, without entry .… But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry.”42 As the “civilized” is supposedly the embodiment of knowledge, the ability to define and interpret constitutes a powerful imperial weapon. One is reminded of the power play scene in Morrison’s Beloved involving the slave Sixo and his master, Schoolteacher. No rationalization Sixo proffers for taking Schoolteacher’s shoat is deemed satisfactory. In the end Schoolteacher beats Sixo anyway “to show him that definitions belonged to the definer – not the defined”.43 The relationship between the civilized and the barbarian is one of the definer and the defined. Under such a hierarchical arrangement, there is no greater instance of existential crisis than the civilized’s (Empire’s) inability to define or interpret a barbarian situation or event. If that ever happens, as in Waiting for the Barbarians, the 40

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 122-23. Attwell, J.M. Coetzee, 78. 42 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 45. 43 Toni Morrison, Beloved, New York: Plume, 1987, 191. 41



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ideological terra firma of the civilized, “cogito, ergo sum”, is in crisis. By denying Empire that singular advantage at the colonial outpost, Coetzee mounts a fundamental attack on one of the defining master narratives of the civilized/barbarian discourse that undergirds Stoker’s Dracula. The hunting motif Another aspect of Stoker’s Dracula that finds echoes in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is the hunting motif, a dominant structural metaphor in Dracula that frames the battle between the civilized and the barbarian. In Dracula, Van Helsing first introduces it when the vampire slayers are considering examining Count Dracula’s house in Piccadilly: “We shall go there and search that house; and when we learn what it holds, then we do what our friend Arthur call, in his phrases of hunt ‘stop the earths’ and so we run down our old fox – so? Is it not?”44 Later when he learns of Dracula’s escape, Van Helsing again invokes the hunting motif: “He saw that with but one earth-box left, and a pack of men following like dogs after a fox…Our old fox is willy.”45 Mina Harker also draws on the hunting motif when she poses the question, “But will not the Count take his rebuff wisely? .... will he not avoid it as a tiger does the village from which he been hunted?” Once again, Van Helsing says, “This that we hunt from our village is a tiger, too, a man-eater, and he never cease to prowl”.46 Van Helsing characterizes the vampire slayers as “hunters of the wild beast”.47 Hughes argues that the hunting motif scripts Count Dracula as a predator and the references to “fox” and “tiger” position him as a solitary individual. Hughes is emphatic that “The defining image here is not bestiality, nor exoticism which may be translated into foreignness, nor indeed a simple motif of invasion: it is, rather, the perception of a solitary, individualistic and often ingenious predator who holds the potential to defeat the forces of collectivity”.48 Hughes’ interpretation is problematic as it does not provide a complete picture of the workings of the hunting motif he invokes for his analysis. Firstly, the hunting motif constructs a predator-prey 44

Stoker, Dracula, 348. Ibid., 173. 46 Ibid., 381 (my emphases). 47 Ibid., 365. 48 Hughes, “A Singular Invasion”, 95. 45



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dichotomy: the prey inhabits the frontier of civilization. The motif further constructs unequal power relations. This dynamics constitutes a vital part of Dracula’s construction of the civilized/vampire relationship. But the fundamental question is: who in Dracula is invoking the hunting motif? When the vampire slayers invoke the hunting motif, they are not only tapping into a powerful structure of feeling, “quintessentially English folkway”,49 they are simultaneously exploiting a traditional discourse to define who/what constitutes evil, foreignness, bestiality or barbarian. At the same time, the vampire slayers are foregrounding the unequal power dynamics wherein the hunters will eventually triumph because they have power of combination, the freedom to act and think, skills and knowledge to outwit the prey.50 How the vampire slayers’ invocation of the hunting motif can be turned around to constitute a celebration of individuality is difficult to justify. Furthermore, that Dracula is alone or an individual does not invalidate or disrupt the invasion script as Hughes contends. Rather, his individuality is an indication of Dracula’s misreading or underestimation of English individuality and power of combination. Dracula’s incursion into England subverts the traditional English hunting discourse where it is the band of hunters who go to the frontier to hunt the fox, deer, or lion. Dracula is at once predator and prey. Either way he is at a disadvantage both in terms of numbers and intellectual development. As Van Helsing tells his friends, Count Dracula has “the child-brain”.51 There are references to the hunting motif in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. However, the mechanism for the introduction of the hunting motif is different. In Dracula there is an explicit indication of the referential scope of the hunting motif. In Waiting for the Barbarians the relationship is subtle and left to the reader to activate. Narrating his first conversation with Col. Joll, the Magistrate writes: We do not discuss the reason for his being here .… Instead we talk about hunting. He tells me about the last great drive he rode in, when thousands of deer, pigs, bears were slain, so many that a mountain of carcasses had to be left to rot (“Which was a pity”). I tell him about 49

Eric A. Eliason, “Foxhunting Folkways under Fire and the Crisis of Traditional Moral Knowledge”, Western Folklore, LXIII/1/2 (Spring/Summer 2004), 124. 50 Stoker, Dracula, 285. 51 Ibid., 357.



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the great flocks of geese and ducks that descend on the lake every year in their migrations and about native ways of trapping them.52

It is significant that in this passage Coetzee emphasizes the multiple (thousands) rather than the solitary individual in Dracula. Not only does the Joll construct the barbarians as prey, but he also considers his presence at the frontier town as another hunting expedition. He is on a mission to hunt down barbarians. Again, in the granary, Col. Joll and the Magistrate talk about “rats and ways of controlling their numbers”. His expedition against the nomads is framed by the binary predator/prey. There is also a subtle contrast between Joll’s violent and unethical hunting methods (why kill thousands and live them to rot?) and the “native ways” as suggested by the Magistrate. The rats have become a threat to the agricultural productivity of Empire just as the barbarians who are “fighting” for their land constitute a threat: We think of the country here as ours, part of our Empire – our outpost, our settlement, our market centre. But these people, these barbarians don’t think of it like that at all. We have been here more than a hundred years, we have reclaimed land from the desert and built irrigation works and planted fields and built solid homes and put a wall around our town, but they still think of us as visitors, transients.53

By framing the barbarians as prey, Colonel Joll and his team of “vampire slayers” have no qualms subjecting or torturing the barbarian body. While it is true that these passages resonate with Coetzee’s exploration of animal rights, and human-animal relationship that runs through many of his novels, in this particular context the deployment of the hunting motif becomes an extended metaphor whose ethical ramifications in relation to the self and barbarian otherness are played out in the novel. In the context of the intertextual reading we are pursuing here, M.M Bakhtin’s notion of hybrid speech becomes relevant in explaining the discourse of hunting in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. “Hybrid speech” according to Bakhtin is “a mixture of two social languages within the limits of a single utterance, an encounter, within the arena of a single utterance between 52 53

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 1 (my emphases). Ibid., 2.



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two different linguistic consciousness”.54 The hunting motif in Waiting for the Barbarians goes back to Dracula, which invokes this aspect of English folkways as a metaphor for the confrontation between the vampire slayers and Dracula. The traditional English discourse of fox or deer hunting is predicated on the inevitable triumph of the hunters over the prey. However, in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, the hunting motif is invoked but deviates from the reader’s expectations as what we are confronted with is not the defeat of the quarry (barbarians) but the hunters. Embedded therefore in the hunting discourse in Waiting for the Barbarians is the language of the vampire hunters in Stoker’s Dracula and the interrogation of that discourse. According to Bakhtin, in hybridity we are confronted with the co-existence of “two linguistic consciousness … the one being represented and the other representing, with each belonging to a different system of language”.55 Our reading so far leads to the conclusion that each of the two passages on hunting in Waiting for the Barbarians really belong to three language systems: first, literally to the language of cultural hunting; figuratively to the language of the unequal power dynamics between Empire and its barbarians; and intertextually to the language of Stoker’s Dracula. The fate of the body Yet another area we see Dracula as intertext in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians can be located in the fate of the body. In both texts corporeality is subjected to intense and repeated violations and torture. Just as Dracula’s Castle becomes the place for the confinement of Harker, and England the site for the torture of the female body, so does the fort in Waiting for the Barbarians become the dark torture chamber for Joll, Warrant Officer Mandel and the expeditionary force. For example, Joll tortures the barbarian old man from the countryside to death. Dracula’s first victim is Lucy; Joll blinds the barbarian girl. Her body becomes the site on which Empire writes its barbarity. Empire’s subjection of the body can also be seen in Joll’s torture and dehumanization of the twelve miserable barbarian captives who are brought from the desert, displayed at the public square and flogged to 54

M.M. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”, in The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin: Texas University Press, 1981, 358. 55 Ibid., 359.



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prove to the civilized people and their children in the walled camp “that the barbarians are real” and for their pleasure.56 The bodies of the barbarians become the template on which Joll inscribes their identity “enemy… enemy… enemy… enemy...”.57 What is emphasized here is the relationship between violence and writing. As Claude Levi-Strauss argues, written communication seemed to have “favoured the exploitation of human beings rather than their enlightenment. My hypothesis, if correct, would oblige us to recognize the fact that the primary function of written communication is to facilitate slavery.”58 In the violent semiotics of Empire, the barbarian is transformed into “enemy”. This violent performance has its equivalent in the representation of voice wherein, as we see in both Dracula and Waiting for the Barbarians, the barbarian can be talked about but not given voice. Van Helsing also describes Count Dracula as the enemy: “Our enemy has gone away.”59 For the vampire hunters in Stoker’s Dracula and the expeditionary force in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, barbarians are a threat to the stability, order and superiority of Empire. However, Coetzee’s text operates under a profound reversal: not only is the barbarian invasion cast in doubt, but the agents of light also turn against their own, the colonial administrator, and impose a reign of terror in the fort, the bastion of civilization. When the Magistrate returns from escorting the barbarian girl to her people in the forest, he is flogged and humiliated in the public square of the fort for “treasonously consorting” with barbarians.60 He is saved when he begins “roaring and shouting”, which is interpreted as the barbarian language: “He is calling his barbarian friends .… That is barbarian language you hear.” By speaking the language of the barbarians,61 the Magistrate’s evolution is complete. As Barbara Eckstein rightly puts it, “barbarian language [is] a salvation”.62 But if one becomes a 56

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 113. Ibid., 115. 58 Claude Levi Strauss, “A Writing Lesson”, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, eds Vincent B. Leitch, William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John J. McGowan, and Jeffrey J. Williams, New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, 1423. 59 Stoker, Dracula, 374. 60 Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 85. 61 Ibid., 133. 62 Eckstein, “The Body, the Word, and the State”, 194. 57



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barbarian and one is not a barbarian, then the very foundation of the civilized vs. barbarian logic collapses. It is significant to identify who the target of the irony in the mock execution scene are: the barbarians are Warrant Officer Mandel and his men who subject the Magistrate to such torture and humiliation. Through this inversion, Waiting for the Barbarians denies the essentialism involved in categorizing the colonized as barbarians and Empire as civilized. Coetzee’s novel thus shifts the argument from monstrous or barbarian presences to monstrous or barbarian acts. As the Magistrate rightly tells Joll “we have no enemies. Unless I make a mistake, unless we are the enemy.”63 This is in stark contrast to Stoker’s emphasis on barbarian or monstrous presences. There is an important scene in Stoker’s Dracula which I suggest also finds echoes in Waiting for the Barbarians. In Chapter Three of Dracula, Harker reports on his encounter with the three vampire ladies (“those awful women”) who attempt to seduce him. The scene is crucial in the manner it simultaneously succeeds in constructing Harker’s subliminal sexual desire and his fear of the dangers of crossing the sexual boundary. While Harker constructs the vampire ladies as seducers, his description of his own ambiguous response overflows with sexual reciprocity that breaks the boundary of masculine self-control he constructs about himself: There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips .… I lay quite, looking out under my eyelashes in an agony of delightful anticipation. The fair girl advanced and bent over me till I could feel the movement of her breath upon me. Sweet it was in one sense, honey-sweet .… There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.64

Ironically, Count Dracula dramatically interrupts this wait for the female barbarian invasion of the male body from the centre. While the scene is meant to portray the female vampire and more importantly

63 64

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 85. Ibid., 51-52 (my emphases).



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Count Dracula’s control over the female body, Dracula’s intervention preserves the inviolability of the masculine body in Stoker’s Dracula. The reconfiguration of this Dracula scene in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians is the Magistrate’s relationship with the barbarian girl, which explores the potential transgression that Harker embodies but cannot actualize. The barbarian girl was picked by the Magistrate after Joll’s interrogatory activities had left her partially blind. Unlike the vampire ladies, the barbarian girl does not seek to seduce the Magistrate. Rather, she is the double victim of Empire: Joll’s brutality and the Magistrate’s sexual exploitation. Through the maltreatment of the barbarian girl, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians offers a potent indictment of the Janus face of Empire. Her body becomes cartography on which is inscribed the tragic ambiguity of colonial duplicity, dehumanization and rape of the barbarians and their landscape. Elahe Yekani has argued that “the barbarian girl became a sexualized object of knowledge that the magistrate tries to decode”.65 The Magistrate, unlike Harker, eventually transgresses the sexual boundary. However, the sexual act does not take place at the fort, the locus of torture, but in the bush on the way to returning the girl to her people. While in Stoker’s Dracula the vampire ladies make only a slight appearance and are dismissed from the rest of the narrative as “devils of the Pit”, the barbarian girl haunts Coetzee’s Magistrate. Coetzee’s reconfiguration of Dracula’s structure Beyond the thematic and motific connections that we have examined, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians also reconfigures the tripartite structure of Stoker’s Dracula. According to David Gilmore, regardless of the cultural setting, monster tales like Stoker’s Dracula exhibit the following tripartite structure: the monster materializes from a mysterious region to the surprise of the human community; the monster attacks and kills people as attempts by the community to defend themselves prove futile; and the community is saved by a culture hero who through wit and strength succeeds in eliminating the monster.66 In Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, we see that the 65

Elahe Haschemi Yekani, The Privilege of Crisis: Narrative of Masculinities in Colonial and Postcolonial Literature, Photography and Film, Frankfurt am Main and New York: Campus Verlag, 2011, 242. 66 David Gilmore, Monsters, Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and Manner of Imaginary Terrors, Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003, 174-89.



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Magistrate is surprised at the sudden arrival of Col. Joll and his men at the frontier with claims of a barbarian invasion against Empire. Secondly, Joll’s reign of terror at the colonial outpost is reminiscent of Dracula’s terror in England. However, Coetzee’s novel departs from the third stage. While Dracula’s heroes are the monster or vampire slayers, in Waiting for the Barbarians Joll and his group, the supposed “vampire slayers”, are defeated by the terrible weather conditions and their lack of knowledge of the terrain. The barbarians are shown to be too impoverished and technologically incapable of confronting Empire. It is this realization that any wait for a barbarian invasion is illusory that makes Coetzee’s novel a critique of Stoker’s Dracula. Also, while Stoker’s Dracula ends on a triumphant note, “Now God be thanked that all has not been in vain! See! The curse has passed away!”,67 Coetzee’s Barbarians ends with the narrator “feeling stupid, like a man who lost his way long ago but presses on along a road that may lead nowhere”.68 While in Dracula the defeat of Count Dracula by the vampire slayers is inevitable, Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians sustains the dissolution of the moral authority of Empire to the end. Dracula seems to envision a utopia in which the monstrous Other has no place in the centre. On the contrary, Waiting for the Barbarians looks forward to a human community in which the civilized vs. barbarian logic has no part. Coetzee’s foregrounding of ethical considerations Finally, Waiting for the Barbarians reconfigures Stoker’s Dracula by foregrounding ethical considerations in Dracula. Dracula does not explicitly make the issue of ethics one of its prime concerns. The initial crisis that Harker faces is a physical one and only arises when Dracula imprisons him. The crisis that Dracula’s presence in England engenders must be stopped by violent measures. Two reasons account for the fact that the vampire slayers do not reflect on the ethical dimension of their treatment of Dracula, the Other. First, Van Helsing’s characterization of Dracula as the Un-Dead allows them to view their mission as partly doing Dracula a favour, freeing his soul from the tragic situation of being un-dead. Framing Dracula in this manner excuses Van Helsing’s butchery and also allows Mina to 67 68

Stoker, Dracula, 448. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 169.



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express joy at the final dissolution of Dracula. For as Mina writes “there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there”.69 The other reason is the religious or salvific perspective from which the vampire slayers perceive their project. Van Helsing elevates their battle to cosmic proportions. Their fight against Dracula is not only “for the sake of humanity” but they are “ministers of God’s own wish: that the world, and the men for whom His Son die, will not be given over to monsters, whose very existence would defame Him … we go as knights of the Cross to redeem more”.70 They are modern crusaders with powers to exorcize monsters parading the corridors of modernity. So powerful is Van Helsing’s framing of the battle against Dracula that no moment is spared to reflect on the violence of their project. It is Mina who warns the vampire slayers of the dangers of allowing hate to inform their pursuit of Dracula: I know that you must fight – that you must destroy … but it is not a work of hate. That poor soul who has wrought all this misery is the saddest case of all. Just think what will be his joy when he too is destroyed in his worser part that his better part may have spiritual immortality. You must be pitiful to him.71

Mina’s show of sympathy is tempered by her understanding of Dracula as an evil: a pitiful creature who must be saved from an extended miserable life. The killing of Dracula is therefore a righteous and benevolent act of granting him spiritual immortality. This is one of the crucial ways the vampire slayers elicit our sympathy for their course. However, as Bruce McClelland argues, Mina’s show of sympathy toward the hunted Count Dracula has absolutely nothing to do with any sense of injustice. Her sympathy does not stem from the fact that Dracula would be “mercilessly executed at the hands of a genteel lynch mob without ever having been brought to a fair trial”.72 The dimension of salvation constitutes one of the most worrying aspects of Dracula for the modern reader. This is because it is undergirded by a 69

Stoker, Dracula, 447 (my emphases). Ibid., 381. 71 Ibid., 367. 72 Bruce McClelland, Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006, 153. 70



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certain fundamentalism that works in collusion with Van Helsing’s scientific rationalization in order to provide a justification for killing Dracula. Dracula provides a telling insight into how Religion and Science emerged as powerful discourses for containing the Other both within England (Renfield) and without (Dracula). Religion constructs Dracula as someone who needs to be saved and Van Helsing, the scientist, depends on the philosophy of crime, the study of insanity to classify him as a criminal. To strengthen his interpretation, Van Helsing argues that Nordau and Lombroso would classify the Count as “a criminal and criminal type … of imperfectly formed mind”.73 Under these circumstances, genuine ethical or intersubjective understanding is sacrificed on the altar of pursuing God’s project. Perhaps this is Stoker’s prime insight. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians however makes torture and ethics a focal point of its narrative. This is achieved through the crisis of the liberal subject, the Magistrate. Unlike Harker who does not reflect on how his mercantile dealings with Dracula could have contributed to shaping Dracula’s revenge, the Magistrate reflects on his complicity in the crisis at the frontier. In fact, it takes Dracula to suggest that his revenge has a long historical connection: “whilst they (the vampire slayers) played wits against me who commanded nations, and intrigued for them, and fought for them, hundreds of years before they were born”.74 As the Magistrate witnesses with horror the increasing barbarous activities of Joll and his men, his faith in the civilizing mission of Empire begins to crumble. The Magistrate is caught between articulating noble universal values and his inability to extend the practical implications of those humanistic values to the barbarians. For example, while he is emphatic that he is opposed to a civilization that entails the corruption of barbarian virtues and the creation of a dependent people, he fails to abandon stereotyping the barbarians. He also continues to describe the colonized as barbarians even though he insists that the people are not barbarians but nomads. Do I really look forward to the triumph of the barbarian way: intellectual torpor, slovenliness, tolerance of disease and death? .... Is my indignation at the course that Empire takes anything more than the peevishness of an old man who does not want the ease of his last years 73 74

Stoker, Dracula, 406. Ibid., 343.



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on the frontier to be disturbed? I try to turn the conversation to more suitable subjects, to horses, hunting, the weather.75

It is during moments of acute moral dilemmas like this that Coetzee exposes the contradictions in the liberal consciousness. The Magistrate is able to make an accurate diagnosis of the crisis but is caught within the prison house of the representational regime of Empire. In an answer to his own question “What has made it impossible for us to live in time like fish in water, like birds in air, like children?”, the Magistrate has a ready answer: … it is the fault of Empire! .... By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, the rape of populations, pyramids of bones, acres of desolation. A mad vision yet a virulent one.76

But that is half the truth. Repeatedly, he himself is apprehensive about stretching his liberal arguments to their logical conclusions. For example, when Joll and his men are engaged in torturing the barbarian captives, the horrified Magistrate exclaims, “We are the great miracle of creation”. However, it immediately dawns on him that “we crush insects beneath our feet, miracles of creation too, beetles, worms, cockroaches, ants, in their various ways”. He is also afraid to demand justice for the barbarians: Justice: once that word is uttered, where will it end? No! Easier to be beaten and made a martyr …. For where can that argument lead but laying down our arms and opening the gates of the town to the people whose land we have raped.77

In the end the Magistrate is redeemed by three things: his clear insight into the Janus face of Empire, that it is always already barbarian; his recognition of his own complicity in spite of his liberal views; and his clean break with Empire.

75

Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians, 56. Ibid., 146. 77 Ibid., 118. 76



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This article has argued that Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians can be read as a reconfiguration of Stoker’s Dracula. Specifically, the article has demonstrated this by focusing on the continuities and discontinuities in motifs, themes and structure. Our analysis has shown that despite the different historical and cultural milieus that separate both texts, they are united by an intense interrogation of the politics of the Empire and its relationship with its barbarian Other(s). It is particularly on the future of that relationship that Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians establishes a critical dialogue with Stoker’s Dracula. In Waiting for the Barbarians the present is a disaster, a dystopia. This accounts for the utopian desire underlying the Magistrate’s narrative: a yearning for a new organizing discourse that promotes community or inclusiveness. What is desired is a paradise on earth where all peoples would make any concession in order to make it possible “to live in the time of the seasons, of the harvests, of the migrations of the waterbirds … with nothing between us and the stars”.78 This is a radical vision, for it suggests a desire to live outside history, especially the history that Empire imposes on its subjects. Reading Waiting for the Barbarians as a text that uncannily echoes, reconfigures and dialogically engages Stoker’s Dracula opens up alternate possibilities to understanding crucial passages, themes, and motifs in Waiting for the Barbarians. In light of the desire for a possible future in Waiting for the Barbarians, one is tempted to ask whether the triumphalism at the end of Dracula is not premature. In fact, in Dracula, the monstrous Other is eliminated; Transylvania becomes a tourist destination where Harker and Mina can return to relive their travails and accomplishments. Except for Dracula’s Castle that stands high above a waste of desolation, memory of the terrible events are all blotted out, and above all there is the birth of a boy who will celebrate the gallantry of the men and woman who saved England. Dracula, ironically, reinstates a history and powerful discourse that maintains the centre as powerful. The community envisaged in Dracula is painfully limited in its vision. In many ways Waiting for the Barbarians reconceives an alternate approach to the civilized/frontier relationship that is more challenging in its

78

Ibid., 168-69.



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conception, more demanding in its actualization and speaks to a realignment of global structures and powers. Clearly, the impact of Stoker’s Dracula is more profound than is currently imagined. The emphasis in the scholarship on the transhistorical dimension of Dracula seems to dwell on the presence of a literal bloodsucking vampire. However, as has been demonstrated, especially in the postcolonial context, Dracula’s influence on the literary imagination lies in the continuing relevance of the motifs and thematics Stoker deploys to address issues as diverse as alterity, the body, history, and the power of discourses such as religion and science. These are fundamental issues in the postcolony. As Coetzee’s text has shown, the triumphalism of modernity will have to be interrogated. This transhistorical dimension of Dracula will have to be delicately explored. Reading Dracula and Waiting for the Barbarians as texts in dialogue sheds new light on both texts. There is no doubt, however, in place of Dracula’s triumphalism, Waiting for the Barbarians counts on the possibility of a “paradise” that is constructed on the common humanity of Empire and its Other(s). The only alternative to the “paradise” envisaged by the Magistrate is the civilized/barbarian logic which both Dracula and Waiting for the Barbarians have shown to be a catastrophic consciousness.



FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S WISE BLOOD: AN ANATOMY OF THE AMERICAN GOTHIC CARLOS AZEVEDO Taking as its starting point the genre of anatomy (or “Menippean satire”) as defined by Northrop Frye, this article seeks to re-examine Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, especially in relation to her first novel. To read Wise Blood (1952) as a Gothic anatomy affords a middle course between the historically characteristic paradigms of much O’Connor’s criticism to date: the theological and secular strains. The novel is revealed as a biting satire on American religion in its various forms, of the culture of southern womanhood, and of the modern consumer culture. The novelist’s attraction to polarities and for a rhetoric of excess implies an anagogical vision of the sacred and an affinity to the unsavoury, the domestication of the grotesque and the deformation of the real. O’Connor’s “aesthetics of torture” depends ultimately on the extremity of the rendered experience and the control of a compelling formal structure – the novelist’s obedience to a New Critical formative context in which she developed her craftsmanship and her legacy for anatomies to come, Gothic or otherwise, of the postmodern condition and of postmodernist and contemporary American literature.

Flannery O’Connor’s private library does not contain works by Bram Stoker1 and she may never have read Dracula or been familiar with the author’s use of Gothic imagery and bizarre characters to create a sense of horror, along with recurring motifs that appear throughout the novel: icons of Christian, and particularly Catholic, worship – crucifixes, crosses and Communion wafers – or blood and its many functions and meanings, echoing Christian mythology and Roman Catholic beliefs (among others, the symbolism of drinking Christ’s blood in the Eucharist). Furthermore, O’Connor certainly was not familiar with A Glimpse of America, given as a lecture in London in 1885 and subsequently published as a pamphlet in 1886, in which Bram Stoker touches upon what he had learned from the work of and relationship to and with Walt Whitman. Stoker was attracted to America (though, over the years, his opinions about the country and 1

See Arthur F. Kinney, Flannery O’Connor’s Library: Resources of Being, Athens, The University of Georgia Press, 2008.

GA:

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its ideology became more ambivalent), and, as his letters clearly reveal, he was fascinated by the American poet. The point here, though, is not to dissect Stoker’s longstanding attachment to the bard of the New World, or to subscribe to the view that Dracula can be read as an allegory of the poet’s life and writings, or even to admit that the character of the Count is modelled on Whitman, the man, and that the American character, Quincey Morris, “is the most charismatic figure in the imagined world of Stoker’s novel, central to a Whitmanic geography of personal desire and sociopolitical vision”.2 Nor is it to provide a critical reading of the vampiric imagery that we find in certain lines of “Song of Myself”: “The grave of rock multiplies what has been confided to it or to any graves, / Corpses rise, gashes heal, fastenings roll from me.”3 Nevertheless, it is relevant to the purpose of this essay, focused on O’Connor’s writing, vision, and imagination, to introduce, albeit briefly, another foundation of the Whitman-Stoker relationship, and that is, as Robert J. Havlik put it, “the Lincoln connection”.4 The Civil War, Abraham Lincoln’s death and the public ceremony of his funeral led Whitman on to a multifaceted process of integration: of a state hero with his country and people, of the poet himself with the presidential figure, of death with life. Whitman’s lecture “Death of Abraham Lincoln”, his elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, and the poet’s Drum-Taps intensified Stoker’s identification with his American soulmate and influenced his view of the presidential figure, on the War of the Union, and on the US Southern states. Before presenting his own lecture on Lincoln, Stoker, in A Glimpse of America, said: “We [the British] never knew much of that war – the War of the Union – and now that the graves are hidden with ‘the sweet oblivion of flowers’ we can only know or guess what it was from the dry page of books and statistics of the ruin which it caused.”5

2

David Thiele, “Dracula and Whitmania: ‘the pass-word primeval’”, English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, XLVIII/2 (January 2005), 192. 3 Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose, New York: The Library of America, 1982, 231. 4 Robert J. Havlik, “Walt Whitman and the Lincoln Connection”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, IV/4 (Spring 1987), 9-16. 5 Bram Stoker, A Glimpse of America: A Lecture Given at the London Institution, 28 December 1855, London: S. Low, Marston and Co, 1886, 39-40 (emphases added).

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O’Connor’s fallen American South: a Gothic locus Flannery O’Connor’ sensibility – in Harold Bloom’s words, “an extraordinary blend of Southern Gothic and severe Roman Catholicism”6 – was stimulated by her awareness of living among graves and ruins, in the fallen world of an insular South, far from past grandeur. As a matter of fact, her critically acclaimed novels and short-story collections firmly fixed O’Connor’s reputation as a major exponent of Southern Gothic, a twentieth-century subgenre of Gothic fiction, focusing on Southern settings and concerns, making use of grotesque and disturbing situations, registering the disruptions and contradictions of Southern history and culture. In “The Regional Writer”, a segment of her “occasional prose”,7 she postulates that “the writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.”8 As David J. Knauer observes, she is defining the writer’s task “as the conscious positioning of oneself within history and locale to discover and, presumably, to narrate their timelessly signifying intersection”.9 And, reading her early essay “The Fiction Writer and His Country” confirms that O’Connor was faithful to her own dictum that “to know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world.”10 Growing up white in post-Civil War times, and believing that “the novelist is bound by the reasonable possibilities, not the probabilities of his culture”,11 O’Connor, a female Georgian Catholic at odds with the Protestant and alienated South – and with her secular, reading audience – was often asked to comment on her own specific condition of being a Southerner. In “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South”, an essay originating in two of her informal public talks, she offers us a glimpse of her territory:

6

Harold Bloom, How to Read and Why, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, 51. Flannery O’Connor, Collected Works, New York: The Library of America, 1988, 801-64. 8 Ibid., 848. 9 David J. Knauer, “Flannery O’ Connor: ‘A Late Encounter’ with Poststructuralism”, Mississippi Quarterly, XLVIII/2 (Spring 1995), 277. 10 O’Connor, Collected Works, 806. 11 Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, eds Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969, 164-65. 7

 

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This is a decaying landscape invested with evil, a world from which God apparently had absented Himself, to be saved only, in the last analysis, by His grace. But she also suggests that it was her contact with mystery that saved her from being a stereotypical Southerner. Although she notes the inconsistencies of terminology and of categories such as “grotesque”, “gothic” and “realistic” – “Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the Northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic”13 – the power of her fiction lies in her Gothic modality: strange scenarios, bizarre violence, and unsavoury characters. As O’Connor herself noted, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures”; “Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”14 And, as Michael Valdez Moses admits, in his analysis of Dracula, the power of Gothic writing “depends upon the polyvalent significance and indeterminate identity of its monstrous protagonists”.15 It is a fact that O’Connor “always bristled at the term Gothic” and later “would happily embrace grotesque”,16 although she would often prefer a not so common concept – realism of distances – where she 12

O’Connor, Collected Works, 861-2. In a 1963 interview, O’Connor claims that the “South has survived in the past because its manners, however lopsided or inadequate they may have been, provided enough social discipline to hold us together and give us identity”. And she adds: “ In practice, the Southerner seldom underestimates his own capacity for evil.” See C. Ross Mullins, Jr., “Flannery O’Connor: An Interview”, in Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, ed. Rosemary M. Magee, Jackson and London: University Press of Mississippi, 1987, 104. 13 O’Connor, Collected Works, 815. 14 Ibid., 806, 861. 15 Michael Valdez Moses, “The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Irish Nationhood”, Journal X: A Journal of Culture and Criticism, II/1 (Autumn 1997), 68. 16 Frederick Asals, Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2007, 25.

 

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believed the reader would find the best modern expressions of the grotesque:17 not a flight from reality, or a disengaged view of it, but a destabilizing revelation of the distortions and monstrosities inherent in human practices and manners. Yet in reading O’Connor’s stories and novels, we are dealing with a host of characters beyond the ordinary whose world is steeped in paradox, nihilism and violence – a bleak version of the South out of Gothic lore. In addition, when O’Connor’s discusses Southern writing and the literary label “Southern School” – she ironically calls it “the School of Southern Degeneracy”18 – she admits that the term “conjures up an image of Gothic monstrosities and the idea of a preoccupation with everything deformed and grotesque”.19 A look at the author’s fiction reveals a constellation of misfits who, in some way or another, project that very image and a reality beyond the ordinary, a deviance from the norm, to shock the reader into recognizing the distortions of modern life and the vast, spiritual emptiness of the times. O’Connor’s faith and craftsmanship was not solely fixed on transworldy values and man’s Redemption by Christ. She protested against bourgeois self-congratulation and the rampant commodification of American life in the post-World War II context. For O’Connor, “Catholicism is opposed to the bourgeois mind”, and the grotesque is “a true anti-bourgeois style”,20 which includes macabre images of Gothic monstrosities and distortions. As a transgressive genre that signifies a writing of excess, that intertwines death, horror and ruin, aberrant experiences and disturbed states of mind, the Gothic is well suited to depict the conflicts of Southern culture. Wise Blood as a Gothic satire of religion and southern culture Wise Blood (1952), O’Connor’s first novel, is an anatomy, a critique of the American religion, the South and modern American culture in the tradition of Thomas Nash’s The Anatomy of Absurdity, John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy or, most fruitfully, Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of 17 See “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction”, in O’Connor, Collected Works, 813-21. 18 Ibid., 814. 19 Ibid., 802. 20 Ibid., 862.

 

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Criticism. In the chapter entitled “Theory of Genres”, Frye asserts that the word “anatomy” in Burton’s title means a dissection or analysis, “a comprehensive survey of the human life in one book”, expressing “very accurately the intellectualized approach of his form”.21 Frye notes that the Menippean satire – or an “anatomy” – “deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes. Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds” – O’Connor’s gallery of unlikeable characters comes to mind – “are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behaviour”.22 And he adds that “It is the anatomy in particular that has baffled critics, and there is hardly any fiction writer deeply influenced by it who has not been accused of disorderly conduct”.23 O’Connor concurs with T.S. Eliot’s diagnosis of modern culture and the sense that there are deep forces at work in modern society. As Sarah Gordon has pointed out, “Poe, Nathanael West, and T.S. Eliot are the three writers most central to O’Connor’s vision of the modern waste land in Wise Blood”. From the writings of Poe, West, and William Faulkner she derived her conception of the grotesque and the Gothic in literature. Yet, as Sally Fitzgerald – O’Connor’s friend, editor and literary steward – has also observed, “O’Connor at first intended to base her novel and the encounters of her then bewildered hero on those of the speaker in The Waste Land”, describing a “fragmented and mobile world [filled with] many spiritual casualties … [and] wandering refugees”.24 It was O’Connor’s view that the commodifications of religion and the deifications of capital were hollowing out the values of Christianity and the spiritual foundations of the past: “the moral sense has been bred out of certain sections of the population, like the wings have been bred off certain chickens to produce more white meat on them. This a generation of wingless

21

Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973, 311. 22 Ibid., 309. 23 Ibid., 313. 24 See Sarah Gordon, Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination, Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2003, 89; Sally Fitzgerald, “Introduction”, in Three by Flannery O’Connor, New York: Signet Classic and New American Library, 1983, ix, x; Jolly Kay Sharp, Between the House and the Chicken Yard: The Masks of Flannery O’Connor, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2011, 47.

 

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chickens, which I suppose is what Nietzsche meant when he said God was dead.”25 Wise Blood, a novel in which deviations from the norm and Gothic vignettes are the vehicle of critique, is a Gothic anatomy, a satire directed against the materialist word and consumption excess, “against this Protestant world or against the society that reads the Bible and the Sears Roebuck catalogue wrong”.26 The plot includes the commercial and the sacral, episodes of murder and violence, maimed bodies, distorted characters, macabre self-lacerations. An “aesthetics of torture”27 holds sway, enabling the reader to look into a narrative complexity far beyond the theological structure and the religious message usually associated with the presence of O’Connor’s Catholicism in her work. A mixture of faith and mastery of the narrative allows her to draw on religious themes while challenging her own convictions and putting them to critical and subversive uses in a social frame where, as she laments in a 1958 letter, “religious substitutes for religion”28 proliferate. In the opening chapter of Wise Blood, the description of the protagonist’s appearance highlights not only the conflation of spiritual leadership and commerce, but also the many-sided Gothic imagery that permeates the entire novel. Hazel Motes (also called Haze), a character struggling to find his faith, even as he declares his rejection of the religion in which he was raised, a prophet of nihilism and of “a new church – the church of truth without Jesus Christ crucified” – had “a hat that an elderly country preacher would wear. His suit was a glaring blue and the price tag was still stapled on the sleeve of it.”29 Hat and price tag signify the persistent fight of someone looking like a preacher-for-purchase with his secular and religious visions. Concurrently, O’Connor’s use of Gothic motifs throughout the novel 25

O’Connor, Collected Works, 942. Ibid., 921. For an insightful analysis of O’Connor’s critique of modern American culture, see Steve Pinkerton, “Profaning the American Religion: Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood”, Studies in the Novel, XLIII/4 (Winter 2011), 449-69. However, the purpose of this essay is to frame the severity of O’Connor’s vision in the explicit Gothic registers. 27 Patricia Yaeger, “Flannery O’Connor: The Aesthetics of Torture”, in Flannery O’Connor: New Perspectives, eds Sura P. Rath and Mary Neff Shaw, Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1996, 183-206. 28 O’Connor, Collected Works, 1077. 29 Ibid., 31, 3. 26

 

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reveal Haze’s altered state and prepares the reader for his violent and self-destructive behaviour. As Sonya Freeman Loftis has rightly observed “in the novel’s first chapter, he seems far more concerned with death than with religion”.30 In the world of Wise Blood there is little evidence of Christian values. Despite Haze’s religious dilemmas and inside quest, O’Connor’s vision, through characters like the protagonist, involves a descent into dark nihilism. In the first sentence of the book, on the train, Haze, “looking one minute at the window as if he might want to jump out of it”,31 looks as if he might be thinking of committing suicide. A few pages later, he is described “as if he were held by a rope caught in the middle of his back and attached to the train ceiling”.32 Haze’s claustrophobic train berth, however, reminds him of his dead relatives in their coffins: his grandfather, his father, his seven-year-old brother. Thinking of his “terrible, like a huge bat” mother, he remembers seeing “her face through the crack of the coffin”, looking “as if she wasn’t any more satisfied dead than alive, as if she were going to spring up and shove the lid back and fly out and satisfy herself”.33 While sleeping in his battered car, the Essex, Haze even anticipates his own death, in line with previous coffin hallucinations: … he dreamed he was not dead but only buried. He was not waiting on the Judgement because there was no Judgement, he was waiting on nothing .… All this time Haze was bent on getting out but since there was no use to try, he didn’t make any move one way or the other.34

From the very beginning of the novel, it is fairly obvious “that Hazel’s primary obsession is his overwhelming fear of his own mortality”.35 In the secular city of Taulkinham, where a salesman demonstrating a potato peeler acts like a pseudo-priest in front of a pile of cardboard boxes, each containing machines, described as an altar, Haze’s Essex 30 Sonya Freeman Loftis, “Death, Horror, and Darkness: O’Connor’s Gothic Novel on the Screen”, in Wise Blood: A Re-Consideration, ed. John J. Han, Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 1986, 391. 31 O’Connor, Collected Works, 3. 32 Ibid., 5. 33 Ibid., 14. 34 Ibid., 91. 35 Loftis, “Death, Horror, and Darkness”, 393.

 

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is an emblem of the modern American machine and symbol of the gospel of his modernist faith. Claiming that “Nobody with a good car needs to be justified” by Jesus,36 his vehicle becomes his singular divinity, a false god, and “serves as the single sacrament of his nihilistic religion”, his “only sacred space,… both pulpit and residence, enabling him to incarnate his message in a life of perpetual isolation and vagabondage”.37 The Essex, though embodying the sense of Haze’s home, is a moving, provisional, house, while he is imbued with the sense of the unhoused prophet on the road, the preacher not at home in the world. Other cars looked like mobile houses: A black pick-up truck turned off a side road in front of him. On the back of it, an iron bed and a chair and table were tied, and on top of them, a crate of barred-rock chickens.38

This is the path of the wandering, of the lost, in search of some notion of meaning, a landscape buttoned together with 666 posts, the number of the beast, of the devil. This is the kind of description that stands out as one of O’Connor’s most scathing indictments of the modern belief in progress, of the nation’s substitutes for the concept of home, of America’s spiritual homelessness. It also functions as a weapon of death when Haze runs down a false prophet, a charlatan and figure of parody and satire, who had been hired to impersonate him and to become a sales instrument of the Church Without Christ. On the other hand, looking at the corpse of his double, Haze is looking at himself, watching his own death. In O’Connor’s words, the protagonist’s car “is his pulpit and his coffin as well as something he thinks of as a means of escape …. The car is a kind of death-in-life symbol ….”39 It is not hard to read into Haze’s fascination with the Essex that the automobile is a tool of the author’s critique of the modern, cheapened faith, and of the fact that material objects are external denotations of one’s social position. But Haze’s car in particular is clearly projected in the narrative as an extension of his own fantasy, of his self, 36

O’Connor, Collected Works, 64. Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, Grand Rapids, MI and Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2004, 168-69. 38 O’Connor, Collected Works, 42. 39 O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 72. 37

 

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representing his body, not his spirit. Before his death in the last chapter of the novel, Haze begins to die when a police officer shoves his other body over a cliff: With his Essex gone, he can at last see that there is a more habitable place than the suffocating confines of his sinful ego. Looking away from himself for the first time, he beholds the infinite space … of the sky …. And having preached the counter-gospel that nothing is true but one’s own body and place, Motes must work out his salvation precisely there, by mutilating the flesh that he had once deified .…40

When Mrs Flood, his landlady, asks why he sacrifices himself, putting pieces of broken glass in his shoes and wrapping barbed wire around his chest, Haze declares that the purpose of his mortifications is “To pay”: “It don’t make any difference for what… I’m paying.”41 For Mrs Flood, who had witnessed Haze’s act of violence, blinding himself with quicklime, her boarder’s abnormal self-punishment constitutes a gruesome story: “It’s like one of them gore stories, it’s something that people have quit doing – like boiling in oil or being a saint or walling up cats,” she said. “There is no reason for it. People have quit doing it.” “They ain’t quit doing it as long as I’m doing it,” he said.42

As Frederick Asals indicates, Poe, a practitioner of Gothic conventions, is “the American master of gory stories … who holds the patent on walling up cats” and, one might add, on people buried alive.43 It is what lies behind this nightmarish horror that the landlady fails to grasp, unable to associate the boarder’s self-inflicted wounds with his payment prospects. This issue of religious cost is introduced in Chapter Three of the novel, when Haze announces “a new church”: “It won’t cost you nothing to join my church.”44 Yet, the final cost of his salvation will be unexpectedly high: money will not purchase redemption, and he will sacrifice body and sight on the temporal altar of his recovered faith. Part of O’Connor’s literary power can be 40

Wood, Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South, 169. O’Connor, Collected Works, 125. 42 Ibid., 127. 43 Asals, Flannery O’Connor: The Imagination of Extremity, 24 44 O’Connor, Collected Works, 31. 41

 

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detected in the way her writing is concerned with recurrent symbols and tropes (here, the trope of sight), thus heightening the various themes within Wise Blood. The name Haze Motes is itself relevant with its biblical connotations,45 suggesting a sense of occluded sight. The character “lives in a visual ‘haze’”, while “The dominant eye imagery” in the novel “serves to show us that Haze is the seeing unbeliever who, at the novel’s end, ironically becomes the blind seer”.46 Hazel Motes’ obstructed vision, focused on a disruptive horizon, prevents him from contemplating anyone or anything else. In the presence of Enoch Emery, a lunatic zookeeper, “Haze looked straight ahead, with his face set”47 – what he sees is a mystery. Later, Sabbath Lily, the daughter of a supposedly blind preacher, Asa Hawks, will notice that his eyes “don’t look like they see what he’s looking at but they keep on looking”.48 The partially sighted Haze is one the elements at O’Connor’s disposal to combat and satirize the deformed values she observed in her 1950s American context, a world imbued with a sense of debasement and distortion of vision. In Wise Blood, with its “repeated episodes of ersatz religion”,49 violence rules and characters are dismembered or described in a fragmentary perspective. What Haze first sees, when looking at Leora Watts, the prostitute he initially lives with in Taulkinham, is not a human being but a body part, “a large white knee”.50 The Eye, a scientist, “steals body parts from unsuspecting victims”:51 “You would wake up in the morning and find a slit in your chest or head or stomach and something you couldn’t do without would be gone.”52 Asa Hawks, who promises to blind himself in front of two hundred 45

St Matthew 7: 3-5; St Luke 6:42: “why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye“; “Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother’s eye.” 46 George A. Kilcourse Jr., Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001, 51. 47 O’Connor, Collected Works, 32. 48 Ibid., 61. 49 Kilcourse Jr., Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination, 57. 50 O’Connor, Collected Works, 17. 51 Jon Lance Bacon, “Gory Stories: O’Connor and American Horror”, in Flannery O’Connor in the Age of Terrorism: Essays on Violence and Grace, eds Avis Hewitt and Robert Donahoo, Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2011, 92. 52 O’Connor, Collected Works, 79.

 

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people to justify his belief in Christ, is described as “a tall cadaverous man with a black suit and a black hat on. He had on dark glasses and his cheeks were streaked with lines that looked as if they had been painted on and had faded.”53 Significantly, this masked preacher dressed in black foreshadows Haze’s outward appearance at the end of his ordeal. O’Connor’s Gothic bodies, or, the poetics of torture However, the author’s use of Gothic emblems is mainly fixed on female bodies. According to Patricia Yaeger’s persuasive view, O’Connor’s best work is informed by a “poetics of torture”54 that has its roots in the violence and deformations of southern culture and, more specifically in the culture of southern womanhood (of being a woman in the South), as well as in the violent practices of a culture of beauty (of the body) that is required by social decorum. Enoch’s oppressive foster mother “was forty year old, but she sho was ugly. She had theseyer brown glasses and her hair was so thin it looked like ham gravy trickling over her skull.”55 Besides ugliness, there is a proliferation of body segments acting on their own in O’Connor’s fictional landscape, as in the following passage from Wise Blood: The woman was climbing out of the pool, chinning herself up on the side. First her face appeared, long and cadaverous, with a bandage-like bathing cap coming down almost to her eyes, and sharp teeth protruding from her mouth. Then she rose on her hands, until a large foot and leg came up from behind her, and another on the other side, and she was out, squatting there, panting. She stood up loosely and shook herself and stamped in the water dripping off her. She was facing them and she grinned. Enoch could see part of Hazel Motes’s face watching the woman. It didn’t grin in return but it kept on watching her as she padded over to a spot of sun almost directly under where they were sitting. Enoch had to move a little closer to see. The woman sat down in the spot of the sun and took off her bathing cap. Her hair was short and matted and all colors, from deep rust to a greenish yellow. She shook her head and then she looked up at Hazel Motes again, grinning through her pointed teeth. She

53

Ibid., 20. Yaeger, Flannery O’Connor: The Aesthetics of Torture, 187. 55 O’Connor, Collected Works, 25. 54

 

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stretched herself out in the spot of sun, raising her knees and setting her backbone down against the concrete.56

What they watch is a catalogue of body parts: face, eyes, teeth, mouth, hands, foot, leg, hair, head, knees, backbone. There is a split between the movements of the body and the workings of the mind, allowing for O’Connor’s sharp focus on Gothic effects. In the novel, body parts are frequently referred to with the pronoun “it”. The same principle applies to neglected, murdered children, victims of a mind-numbing violence injected into the novel as an accepted part of Southern reality. If children are female, they are usually “it”, as in a story told by Sabbath Lilly: “There was this child once,” she said, turning over on her stomach, “that nobody cared if it lived or died. Its kin sent it around from one to another of them and finally to its grandmother who was a very evil woman and she couldn’t stand to have it around because the least good thing made her break out in these welps. She would get all itching and swoll. Even her eyes would itch her and swell up and there wasn’t nothing she could do but run up and down the road, shaking her hands and cursing and it was twicet as bad when this child was there so she kept the child locked up in a chicken crate. It seen its granny in hell-fire, swoll and burning, and it told her everything it seen and she got so swoll until finally she went to the well and wrapped the well rope around her neck and let down the bucket and broke her neck.”57

In the spiritually blind world of Wise Blood, anyone or anything runs the risk of being treated as an “It”, an object to be used for some purpose. Additionally, Sabbath’s tale of a child “locked up in a chicken crate” participates in the novel’s coffin-like imagery of imprisonment, entrapment, and incarceration: from zoo cages and caged animals to Haze’s heart (compared to a caged ape) and Mrs Flood’s heart (compared to a bird cage) and to Haze’s fascination with and experiences in confined spaces – coffins, car, the toilet stall at the train station, Leora Watt’s tiny room, the museum with a mummy in his glass “coffin”.

56 57

Ibid., 47-48. Ibid., 69.

 

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Enoch Emery, the helpless wanderer between profane temples – potato-peeler altars, supermarkets, movie theatres – drags a reluctant Haze to one of those sanctuaries, a museum, envisioned in his mind with a distorted spelling – “Muvseevum”58 – that turns it into a mysterious building in a world parted from everyday reality. Because he feels that he has wise blood – a belief that he harbours as innate knowledge, inherited from his father, of how to lead his life without the need of spiritual or secular advice –, Enoch interprets a miniature mummified man in a coffin-like glass case as a sanctified relic, the “new jesus” he, and he thinks, Haze are looking for. The latter refuses to conform to the commodification of the little, shrunken man that Enoch and, later, Sabbath Hawks want to impose. As a matter of fact, Enoch transforms this mysterious symbol that he steals from the museum into an icon to be worshipped at his home. The place inhabited by this maniac with an obsession with blood – wise blood, anyway – may not smell vilely, as in the case of Dracula’s house, but it seems to fit Jonathan Harker’s description of “the effects which might belong to the Count”: “They lay in a sort of orderly disorder.”59 “There was a mummified look and feel to this residence”, where a washstand modelled after a bird of prey – only the legs are visible, with “clawed feet that were each one gripped around a small cannon ball” 60 – becomes the tabernacle for the new idol. On closer examination, Haze’s destruction of what had been reduced to the condition of an unholy doll is a meaningful gesture in a novel where bodies literally fall apart: [Haze’s] hand lunged and snatched the shrivelled body and threw it against the wall. The head popped and the trash inside sprayed out in a little cloud of dust.61

What Haze wants cannot be found in a museum. His is a rebellious act against idolatry, against consumerist faith, against a world of spiritual vacuity that Wise Blood anatomizes and rejects. It serves to support

58

Ibid., 55. Bram Stoker, Dracula, Westminster: Archibald Constable and Company, 1897, 309. 60 O’Connor, Collected Works, 73-74. 61 Ibid., 106. 59

 

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the novel’s anatomy of Hazel Motes’ enigmatic, sometimes shocking, pilgrimage in the book. Going back to Harold Bloom and borrowing his comments on Whitman, we may say that we need to read Flannery O’Connor for the shock of the new perspectives she affords us, but also because her fiction still focuses on the unresolved enigmas of the American consciousness. A world that becomes always more American also needs to read O’Connor, not only to understand America, but to apprehend better exactly what it is in the process of becoming.62 In any age, humans wrestle with apparently inexorable forces. In the aftermath of September 11, we face the threat of global terrorism, and few could miss sensing that a great evil was at work in the world. In Flannery O’Connor’s time, the threats came from different sources but they were just as real. She, too, lived through a time of terror: issues of violence, evil, and terror are themes that were never far from O’Connor’s reach and that seem particularly relevant to our presentday setting. Our changing views of horror in a post-9/11 world inform our understanding of a writer whose fiction abounds in violence. While continuing to speak fresh truths about her own time, O’Connor’s fiction also resonates deeply with the postmodern sensibilities of audiences increasingly distant from her era – readers absorbed in their own terrors and sense of looming, ineffable threats. Her own literary tastes preferring Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying and Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts to all other works of modern American fiction, O’Connor would have admired Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, had she survived to read it, or perhaps even Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. A student at the internationally acclaimed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, embedded within the University of Iowa, where she went to study journalism and creative writing, O’Connor became an author trained to do readings of her work, and to write books that would first be read and discussed, and sometimes promoted, inside the walls of academia. She was also well aware of the sometimes “gothic” vagaries of university life and of the literary world, and she was able to voice the shrewd wisdom in her blood:

62

Bloom, How to Read and Why, 94.

 

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Carlos Azevedo Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.63

Good teachers need to read Flannery O’Connor and to help prevent the damaging effects of the consumer book industry and of the serial production lines of fast books that the market cultures advertize and put at our disposal – as though offering a false preacher, a mummified idol, or a magically peeled potato. Wise Blood achieved only a modest reception, and O’Connor would only gain critical acclaim and popular success with the 1955 publication of A Good Man Is Hard to Find. But her first novel “retains its rhetorical bite – and will, so long as its targets remain as relevant, and so sacrosanct, as they were in the 1950s”.64 It remains a powerful anatomy of post-World War II America and of our own time, a touchstone for understanding where our culture has been and where we are now.

63 64

O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 127. Pinkerton, “Profaning the American Religion”, 466.

 

PART II0XOWLPRGDO5HSUHVHQWDWLRQVRIWKH*RWKLF±)URP WKH6FUHHQWRWKH6WDJHDQGWKH$UWV

TOD BROWNING’S DRACULA (1931): THE VAMPIRE WEARS A DRESS COAT DOROTA BABILAS Tod Browning’s Dracula film (1931), based on the 1927 stage version of Bram Stoker’s novel, has often been regarded as a disappointment by modern horror audiences accustomed to eroticism, violence and special effects. Still, the importance of this early adaptation for the history of the horror genre and its influence on successive works is undeniable: its many elements (e.g. sets, props, costumes) returned obsessively in later film versions of Dracula, and the actors working on the roles of the demonic Count and his nemesis, Professor Van Helsing, constructed their interpretations with the performances of Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan in mind. Lugosi’s arch-vampire was a seductive foreigner, rather than a typical monstrous villain. In American cinema, Dracula’s disturbing elegance alluded also to another of Universal’s popular thrillers, The Phantom of the Opera (1925). The monstrously deformed Phantom was, like Lugosi’s Dracula, a combination of a ruthless killer and a connoisseur with sophisticated taste in clothes. In this article I intend to explore the implications of the sartorial shift of the character of Dracula from a repulsive corpse (like F.W. Murnau’s Orlock) to an elegant aesthete, and the persistence of this new convention in subsequent film adaptations of Stoker’s novel.

For a spectator accustomed to modern horror films, full of eroticism, violence and special effects, Tod Browning’s Dracula of 1931 may come as a disappointment. The famous vampire does not attack the throats of his victims, he does not turn into a wolf or a bat before the audience’s eyes, and his evil brides do not shock the viewer with their sexual debauchery. There is not even a lot of blood, merely a single drop on the cut finger of an English estate agent, Mr Renfield. Moreover, if anyone hoped for a faithful adaptation of Bram Stoker’s famous horror novel, they did not get that either. Compared with the book, some important characters (such as Quincey Morris or Arthur Holmwood) are missing, Dr Jack Seward has grown older and turned into the father of the main heroine Mina, and Mina’s best friend Lucy Westenra (here called Weston) becomes an object of an autopsy just five minutes after she has first appeared on the screen.

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Still, the importance of this version of Dracula for the history of cinema and its influence on subsequent movies is undeniable. The very word “horror” had not been used with reference to films before 1931, when Universal studios released Tod Browning’s Dracula and James Whale’s Frankenstein.1 Many elements, such as the sets, props and costumes, recurred with near obsessive frequency in later adaptations of Dracula, and subsequent actors in the roles of the demonic Count and his nemesis, Professor Van Helsing, constructed their interpretations with the performances of Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan in mind. The interest taken by the Hollywood movie industry in the Gothic helped not only to consolidate the horror genre, but also to popularize the character of the vampire as one of the cult figures of popular culture. Ever since the 1930s, even the people who have never read Stoker’s novel or seen Browning’s film have been well aware of who Dracula is, and his appearance has often been unconsciously identified for them with the face of Bela Lugosi.2 In this article I try to explore the implications of the sartorial shift of the character of Dracula from a repulsive corpse (like F.W. Murnau’s Orlock) to an elegant aesthete, and the persistence of this new convention in subsequent adaptations of Stoker’s novel. To analyse the sartorial habits of Lugosi’s Count, I start by examining the early theatrical adaptations of Dracula and vampire movies preceding Browning. I focus on the new dynamics between the scientific and the fantastic, linking Browning’s Dracula to other classic cinematic villains, such as Svangali and the Phantom of the Opera. The connection to the figures of a menacing hypnotist and a freakish opera lover allows us to situate Lugosi’s vampire in a new context and helps explain the ensuing romanticization of Dracula as a dark, clothesconscious Don Juan. Earlier film versions and theatre productions of Dracula Tod Browning’s movie was not the first attempt at bringing Dracula to the big screen, but it can safely be called the first “legitimate

1

Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas, and John Brunas, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films 1931-1946, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007, 5. 2 The Oxford World’s Classics edition of Bram Stoker’s novel (see n.21) has a picture of Bela Lugosi as Dracula on the cover.



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offspring of Bram Stoker’s imagination”.3 Two of the earlier, “illegitimate” cinematic children of the most famous vampire of all time are F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu of 1922, and a Hungarian film, Dracula’s Death (Drakula halála, dir. Károly Lajthay), made in 1921 and now presumed lost. In the latter case, known solely by the surviving reviews, only the villain’s name in the title was borrowed from Stoker, and the plot concentrated on nightmares troubling a young woman after her meeting with a deranged musician.4 However, Nosferatu, created in the style of German Expressionism, aimed at exposing the supernatural terror present in Stoker’s novel. Count Orlock (the equivalent of Dracula, played by Max Schreck) was a pestilence-spreading monster with a repulsive, rat-like appearance. Stoker’s widow, Florence, sued the German production and obtained the court ruling ordering the destruction of all copies of the film. Luckily for us, some of the recordings of this fascinating movie have survived.5 Dracula reached Hollywood through the theatres of the West End and Broadway. The screenwriter Garrett Fort used the stage adaptation made by Hamilton Deane in 1924 for the London production, revized in 1927 by John L. Balderston for the American market. This time everything was done with the permission of Florence Stoker.6 The play was a commercial success making around 2 million dollars.7 In the New York staging, the roles of Dracula and Van Helsing were played by Bela Lugosi and Edward Van Sloan who reprized them later in the movie. The nineteenth-century convention of adapting popular novels for the theatre was taken up wholesale by the developing movie industry; in the 1930s the technological progress enabled the recording of the sound, but more sophisticated special effects were still unavailable. Therefore Dracula, belonging to 3

James Craig Holte, Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations, Westport, Greenwood Press, 1997, 35. 4 David J. Skal, Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen, New York: Faber and Faber, 2004, 91. 5 Ibid., 87-107. 6 Anne Marie Finn, “Whose Dracula is it Anyway? Deane, Balderston and the World Famous Vampire Play”, Journal of Dracula Studies, 1 (1999): http://www. blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies#Number_1_.28199 9.29 (accessed 10 June 2012). 7 Kendall R. Phillips, Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2005, 12. CT:



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the first generation of “talkies”, seems to be plagued by lengthy dialogues and rigid acting typical of the theatre. However, especially regarding the role of the Count himself, these faults were turned into assets, which helped to guarantee the eternal life to the prince of cinematic vampires. The role was also a breakthrough in Lugosi’s career. Bela Lugosi was born on 20 October 1882 as Béla Ferenc DezsĘ Blaskó in the town of Lugos in real-life Transylvania.8 He had an extensive theatrical experience, including work for the National Theatre in Budapest. Unfortunately, after his politically motivated emigration to the United States in 1920, the fact that he was not fluent in the English language created serious problems. If Lugosi was able to find acting jobs at all, he was typecast in roles of foreigners, usually dangerous criminals. Still, being a very handsome man – actress Carol Borland remembered him as “probably the most sexually attractive male [she had] ever met in [her] life”9 – he managed to imbue the roles of villains with considerable erotic magnetism. Many women viewers perceived his foreign accent, which he never got rid of, as intriguing and attractive. His stylized, melodramatic acting invited comparisons with Rudolph Valentino who had died in 1926. As David J. Skal notes, Lugosi as Dracula was “a Latin lover from beyond the grave – Valentino gone slightly rancid, but still palatable”.10 If matrimony can serve as a means to measure a man’s popularity, the fact that Lugosi was married five times further confirms his status as a major star. Despite his success at the theatre, Bela Lugosi was not the first candidate considered for playing the vampire in the movie. Carl Laemmle Jr., the film’s producer and a great enthusiast of Dracula, wanted to secure the title role for the “Man of Thousand Faces”, Lon Chaney. In the silent movie era, Chaney specialized in the roles of villains, especially if working on them allowed experiments with characterization. The ability to transform his looks beyond recognition became his professional trademark. Chaney starred in title roles in such Universal hits as The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923, dir. 8

Arthur Lennig, The Immortal Count: The Life and Films of Bela Lugosi, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2003; Gary Don Rhodes, Lugosi: His Life in Films, on Stage, and in the Hearts of Horror Lovers, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1997. 9 Weaver, Brunas, and Brunas, Universal Horrors, 26. 10 Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 129.



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Wallace Worsley) and The Phantom of the Opera (1925, dir. Rupert Julian); he also appeared in ten movies directed by Tod Browning, including the (now lost) vampire thriller London After Midnight in 1927. His portrayal of negative characters was always multi-faceted and often elicited sympathy from the audience, even if the roles he played were outsiders and criminals. Unfortunately, on 26 August 1930, a month before the filming of Dracula started, Lon Chaney died of throat cancer. As far as choosing the right director was concerned, Tod Browning seemed to be the perfect man for Dracula. By 1931 he had had considerable experience both as a director and as a performer. At the age of sixteen, Browning – born as Charles Albert and only later changing his name to Tod – ran away from his wealthy middle-class Kentucky home to join the circus. The world of sideshows, cabarets and carnivals fascinated him. He travelled extensively working as a talker for the “Wild Man of Borneo”, a clown for the Ringling Brothers Circus, a vaudeville dancer and a magician. His most terrifying stunt was a live-burial act billed as “The Living Corpse”.11 In New York, Browning met director D.W. Griffith and started working as a comic actor. When Griffith moved to California in 1913, Browning followed him. He began directing short films for RelianceMajestic Studios, but his acting career continued until 1915, when he was seriously injured in a car accident. In 1919, Browning made an acquaintance with Lon Chaney. In collaboration, with Browning directing and Chaney starring, they started working on thrillers and crime stories. The movies they made together were often set in the world of circus performers – a theme that Browning was later to return to in his controversial masterpiece Freaks (1932). An interesting exception was the thriller mentioned above, London After Midnight, which featured Chaney in a double role: as an assumed vampire and as a detective investigating a series of suspicious murders. At the end, the two roles are reintegrated and it is revealed that the vampire (with his frightening sharpened teeth and bulging eyes) is no other than the detective in disguise, trying to force a confession from the real murderer.

11

David J. Skal, The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror, London: Plexus, 1994, 34-35.



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Reason versus terror – science and the supernatural Regarding the cinematic presentation of evil and terror, Dracula was a groundbreaking film. It showed supernatural evil without any attempt at rationalization for the first time – at least in the usa, as in Europe it had been done by German Expressionists, for instance, in Nosferatu. David J. Skal12 and Stacey Abbott13 note that earlier thrillers always offered some explanation: the assumed demonic attacks eventually turned out either to be committed by cunning, yet wholly human perpetrators (The Phantom of the Opera, London After Midnight), or they were purely subjective effects of hallucination (Dracula’s Death, The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari). The vampire Dracula was an unashamedly supernatural character, yet he was brought right into the middle of rational-minded modernity. To emphasize this juxtaposition, Browning replaced the original Victorian setting of Bram Stoker’s novel by the up-to-date style of the late 1920s. The contrast between tradition and modernity is visible from the very first scenes of the movie, set in Transylvania; they seem like a journey not only in space, but also in time. Mr Renfield (Dwight Frye) travels by an old-fashioned stagecoach and stays in an inn devoid of modern luxuries, greeted by local people dressed in folk costumes. It is the modern clothes worn by Renfield and two female tourists who happen to accompany him on the coach that appear out of place – they seem to draw the viewers’ attention to arrogant and imperialistic attitudes of the English and their lack of respect for foreign customs. The young girl (played by Carla Laemmle, the producer’s cousin) rather than enjoy the beautiful view, relies on the stereotypical descriptions from an English guidebook; an older lady wearing a male hat, looking like an emancipated “new woman” of the West, scornfully dismisses the warnings against vampires offered by wellmeaning peasants. Even before Count Dracula appears onscreen, the conflict between the traditional, rural East and the urbanized, rational West is drawn. The division lines signalled by differences in costumes extend to the questions of religious faith and gender roles. The pair of Transylvanian passengers on the stagecoach pray to the Virgin; in the next shot, a peasant woman prays before a holy icon on the wall while 12

Ibid., 113. Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, 62.

13



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another, younger one minds a baby in a cradle. Shortly afterwards, when Renfield goes to Castle Dracula at night despite all warnings, it becomes clear that piety and family values practised by the country folk stand in stark contrast with the behaviour of the vampiric brides of the Count who, if Dracula does not stop them, spend time attacking men, eating small babies and, quite importantly, wearing elegant evening gowns in the Western style. The ethnic background of these ladies is never made clear, but in terms of their outfits and behaviour they seem to be more closely related to the disturbing incomers from the West than to the God-fearing locals. As Kendall R. Phillips notes, the themes of rivalry between the religious and scientific worldviews, beside the question of sexual norms, were especially relevant for the United States of the 1930s. Tod Browning’s Dracula was produced twelve years after the end of the First World War, in which many American soldiers died on European battlefields, and only two years after the great stock market crash.14 America was facing one of the bleakest moments in its history. Consequently, filmmakers, if they were not busy producing mere escapist entertainment, often addressed spiritual questions in their work. There was a noticeable renewal of religious faith in American society, and sometimes it was understood in a very traditionalist way (for example in 1925 a school teacher in Tennessee was brought to court for teaching the theory of evolution). In popular culture, there appeared many portrayals of mad, disturbed scientists believing themselves to be gods – the spectacular success of Universal’s film adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was no coincidence. Professor Van Helsing, the only character in Tod Browning’s movie that can stand up to Dracula is, like him, a foreigner. As an outsider, Van Helsing is untainted by the vices of the English; he is also a man of deep faith even though he represents the world of science. As he solemnly declares: “The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him.” This statement seems to liken him to a Christian inquisitor preaching about the existence of the devil. The vampire, like the devil, is a creature of the world of rituals and superstitions – a world that refuses to move from the past. Quite on the contrary, the vampire chooses a modern metropolis for his new 14

Phillips, Projected Fears, 15.



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hunting ground. Therefore, to defeat him science must assume some aspect of ritual (visible for example in the scene of Lucy’s autopsy). However, whereas in Murnau’s Nosferatu the vampire posed a threat to the public sphere of life, in Browning’s Dracula he threatens the private sphere. His unholy bite spreads madness, not pestilence.15 For Van Helsing “yesterday’s superstitions may become today’s scientific facts”, and belief in demonic possession is compatible with rational study and treatment of mental diseases practised by Dr Seward in his sanatorium. Interestingly, belief in the power of the supernatural exceeded the boundaries of the world presented in the film. In the original version of the movie, Tod Browning’s Dracula ended with an epilogue in which the fictitious character of Professor Van Helsing (rather than the actor Edward Van Sloan who played him) addressed the audience directly as they were about to leave the cinema: Please! One moment! (Looks out into the audience and says, with a smile) Just a word before you go. We hope the memories of Dracula won’t give you bad dreams – so just a word of reassurance! When you get home tonight and lights have been turned out and you’re afraid to look behind the curtains – and you dread to see a face appear at the window – why, just pull yourselves together and remember – that, after all, there are such things!16

This passage, omitted from editions of the movie and restored only in the 1999 dvd edition basing on half-destroyed early copies of Tod Browning’s Dracula, was the original ending of Deane and Balderston’s stage play. In a Shakespearean tone, recalling the epilogues of The Tempest and Midsummer Night’s Dream and quoting directly from Hamlet, it blurred the lines between the diegetic and the extradiegetic, the role and the actor who played it, the narrative on the screen and the real lives of the viewers. Van Helsing’s monologue not only did nothing to provide the promised reassuring rationalization, but in fact deepened the audience’s doubts, or even created the expected uneasiness in case there were still some viewers unmoved by

15

Jörg Waltje, Blood Obsession: Vampires, Serial Murder, and the Popular Imagination, New York: Peter Lang, 2005, 73. 16 Lennig, The Immortal Count, 121.



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the story. Thus the cinematic art usurped the role of a hypnotist, much like Count Dracula himself. The surprising original ending only confirmed the assumption that Dracula was a hypnotist. In the movie the vampire took control over his victims without resorting to any violence or special effects, using only his magnetic stare and his hand outstretched in the gesture of the master of puppets. The presentation of the Count’s hypnotic power resembles a similar theme in Archie Mayo’s film Svengali, which premiered in May 1931, three months after Browning’s Dracula. Svengali, based on the bestselling novel Trilby (1894) by George Du Maurier, was a story of a malevolent Jewish musician hypnotizing a beautiful young singer to isolate her from her English lover. AntiSemitic overtones can be found also in Browning’s Dracula: when Renfield meets him for the first time, the Count is wearing an order in the form of the Star of David. The fear of the exotic-looking foreigner coming from Eastern Europe might therefore be perceived as emblematic of the more realistic fear of the stereotyped scheming Jew who allegedly posed a threat to the Christian civilization. The monologue of the mad Renfield, in which he refers to Dracula showing him a vision of rats, brings to mind Fascist propaganda, according to which Europe was threatened by the flood of rat-like, repulsive and dangerous Jews: A red mist spread over the lawn, coming out of the flame of fire. And then he parted it and I could see that there were thousands of rats, with eyes blazing red, like his only smaller. And then he held up his hand and they all stopped and I thought he seemed to be saying, “Rats, rats, rats, thousands, millions of them, all red blood, all these will I give you if you obey me.”17

Notably, Svengali is not a well-assimilated Jew of Western Europe (Du Maurier’s novel was set in Paris), but a newcomer “out of the mysterious East; the poisonous East – birthplace and home of an ill wind that blows nobody good”.18 Even after he manages to enrich himself, he still continues to speak Polish at home with his crude housekeeper-aunt. Unlike other Jewish characters in Trilby, who all 17 Ina Rae Hark, Patricia Erickson, and Steven Erickson, American Cinema of the 1930s: Themes and Variations, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers State University, 2007, 55. 18 George Du Maurier, Trilby, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, 271.



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come from the Sephardic background and are thus shown as more refined, Svengali never succeeds in becoming fully integrated with the assumedly superior Western culture and remains a scorned outsider until the end. Shunned by his former English acquaintances who continue to mock him despite his elegant carriages and clothes, living a sham marriage with the frigid diva who never reciprocated his love, he dies embittered and alone, never fitting in. The vampire fits in smoothly, but this makes him even more dangerous. As Kendall R. Phillips observes, Dracula, who mastered the skill of mingling with the crowd in the modern city, is more horrifying than the animal-like Nosferatu, or the visibly different Semite.19 Dracula’s sophisticated looks serve as the perfect camouflage of a killer. Just after having arrived in London, he kills a poor flower seller (who is apparently also an immigrant speaking Polish). Then he swiftly vanishes in the crowd in a way resembling Jack the Ripper, whose unpunished and gruesome crimes had terrorized the city just a generation before. Part of the vampire’s camouflage seems to be the positive associations a wealthy and welldressed man inspires in England. In democratic America where Browning’s Dracula was filmed, the image of an Old World gentleman was met with a dose of ambiguity. At least since the nineteenth century, newly-enriched American industrialists longed for the chic and charm of the old titled families and willingly allowed their daughters to be married into European nobility, even impoverished. At the same time, the American middle class treated the exotic European visitors with mistrust, as assumed dowry hunters or anachronistic relics of the past. Bela Lugosi as Dracula played out all these nuances with great benefit to the role. American misgivings towards the Europeans were emphasized also by the way London was presented in Browning’s movie. As Stacey Abbott observes, the city was neither the Victorian London of Stoker’s novel, nor the modern one of 1931, but rather something in between. It was a “studio-built facsimile of the city”,20 combining disturbing aspects of the old and the new – Dickensian heavy fog and busy modern motor traffic. As the setting of the narrative, it seemed already quite remote and exotic to the American viewer who most likely had no immediate experience of old urban spaces, evolving 19 20

Phillips, Projected Fears, 23. Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 63.



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gradually over a long time rather than being rationally planned. Indeed, on a lighter note, even the fact that Dracula owned a house with a cellar – a luxury unknown to most Americans – could mark him out as suspicious, secretive and eccentric. Dracula’s looks and costume – the construction of a dandy vampire Count Dracula was never viewed as an attractive man in Bram Stoker’s novel, even though he was able to restore his youth by drinking fresh blood. Jonathan Harker, Mina’s fiancé who visited him in Transylvania (in the movie this character was largely replaced by Renfield) described him: His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth. These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.21

This description from the novel seems to fit more closely Max Schreck’s Orlock (even though he was bald-headed and had no facial hair) than the character played by Bela Lugosi. According to Nina Auerbach,22 Lugosi’s Dracula recreates “the old Byronic fellowship between the dandy and the vampire”, that is, it refers to the times before Stoker’s novel, to vampires created in the mode of the fascinating Lord Ruthven, the villain of J.W. Polidori’s short story The Vampire (1816). He is well groomed, clothes-conscious and he is the only male character in the film to wear make-up – all this in the 1931 America “whispered of perversity”. Moreover, the early scenes 21

Bram Stoker, Dracula, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983, 17-18. 22 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 77.



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of the movie located in Castle Dracula seem to point to a strange attraction between the vampire and Renfield. However, soon after leaving Transylvania, Dracula’s disturbing quasi-homoerotic relation to his estate agent is replaced with the traditional discourse of power and domination. Eventually, the main interest of the movie is shifted to the duel of patriarchs between the domineering Dracula and the even more authoritarian Professor Van Helsing. The costume that became permanently associated with Dracula – the top hat, the cape, the black dress coat with a white waistcoat, and the starched shirt – was borrowed by the filmmakers from Deane and Balderston’s theatrical production. This was a costume bringing to mind a figure of a circus magician who amused the audience with tricks and illusions. David J. Skal points out that one of the important props in the stage version of Dracula was a “magic” coffin allowing the actor to “disappear”.23 This kind of association could serve to familiarize the vampire as a trickster, perhaps pointing to the metanarration of the film as spectacle aiming to please the audience by providing excitement and mock fear in safe environment. In the context of Hollywood movies, the image of an illusionist could be related also to the title character of Rupert Julian’s silent thriller The Phantom of the Opera that preceded Browning’s Dracula by six years. This was another literary adaptation, this time of a French penny dreadful written by Gaston Leroux (1910). The role of Erik the “Phantom”, a half-mad musical genius with a deformed face of a “living corpse”, was one of the greatest creations of Lon Chaney. Tod Browning’s own experience as a variety show magician and a “Living Corpse”, as well as his personal friendship with Lon Chaney may have been of vital importance here. Chaney’s appearance in the role of Erik was horrifying, but at the same time he managed to convey a suspiciously elegant demeanour. The Phantom who lived in the underground beneath the Paris Opera wore evening clothes all day long, as if he were always ready to take his seat in the “haunted” box. As a character, Erik was a combination of a ruthless murderer and a sophisticated aesthete dreaming of romantic love. Like a vampire (and actress Sarah Bernhardt who died in 1923), Erik slept in a coffin. Like the mesmerist Svengali, he charmed his beloved Christine with a hypnotizing voice in order to distance her from her more conventional 23

Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 108.



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aristocratic suitor. The Phantom, despite all his otherworldly reputation, was devoid of any supernatural powers; however in the interpretation of Lon Chaney he was characterized by a certain rigidity of posture, which might bring to mind a dead body. Some critics went as far as to propose a fetishist reading of both Dracula and The Phantom of the Opera, the stiff poses of Lugosi and Chaney used consciously to inspire allusions not only to death, but also to sexual arousal.24 In both cases, despite their differences, the horror of the corpse would in the end overcome the erotic temptation and inspire terror in the audience. The similarities between the Phantom and Dracula reach beyond the superficial resemblance in costume. Notably, Dracula’s first destination in London is the opera house (where Richard Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is being played); he goes there just after having killed the flower seller. The vampire’s intention seems to be to meet Dr Seward (Herbert Bunston) whom Dracula may recall as the psychiatrist taking care of the mad Renfield. Eventually, the Count ends up making an acquaintance also with Seward’s daughter Mina (Helen Chandler), her fiancé John Harker (David Manners), and her best friend Lucy (Frances Dade) who all share the same box. Dracula’s melancholy sigh, “To die – to be really dead – that must be glorious …”, makes a great impression on the naïve, romantic Lucy and inspires Mina to jokingly call her friend a “future Countess” when they return home, in a prefiguration of Lucy’s imminent demise. Classical music provides the only accompaniment in Tod Browning’s movie. Apart from the scene at the opera and a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake played in the opening sequence, there are long sections of the movie happening in complete silence or with just sounds of nature or city traffic heard. In Transylvania music is apparently made by the wind and the howling of the wolves; Dracula, using a memorable quotation from Stoker’s novel, encourages his guest: “Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” The vampire’s characteristic is fully developed already in the early scenes of the film, when Renfield arrives at the Count’s castle. Great empty spaces, Gothic arches, magnificent staircases, and props such as large candelabras and cobwebs were to return in many subsequent 24

Roger Dadoun, “Fetishism in Horror Film”, in Fantasy and the Cinema, ed. James Donald, London: British Film Institute, 1989, 54.



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vampire productions. In 1931 the audience took seriously even the strange (and now genuinely amusing) additions of exotic animals that inhabit the castle: limp fake bats hanging on ropes, or live possums and armadillos completely out of place in Eastern Europe. Bela Lugosi, with his cunning, but still charming smile uttered the nowcanonical phrases: “I am… Dracula”, “I never drink… wine”, which generations of horror film directors went on to treat with the seriousness of fin-de-siècle spiritualists. Lugosi’s distinctive hard r’s suggested, as critic Jörg Waltje posits, a wild beast hidden behind the mask of a sophisticated aristocratic host.25 In the scene of the final confrontation in the ruins of Carfax Abbey the story seems to have gone full circle, as if the vampire has managed to infect England not only with his horrifying and sensuous bloodlust, but also with the taste for sombre, Gothicizing interiors. On the lascivious nature of vampirism The construction of the film’s mood through sets and costumes can be fully appreciated if we compare the English-language version of Dracula with the Spanish-language one, which was made at the same time. In the early days of “talkies”, this was a relatively popular arrangement in large American film studios, such as Universal, which hoped for extra profits from the Latin-American market. So, when Tod Browning’s crew left the studio in the evening, the team of director George Melford and the cast of Spanish-language actors immediately replaced them. The Hispanic version, almost thirty minutes longer than the English-language one, is highly regarded for its cinematography.26 However, as far as actors are concerned, Carlos Villarias could not rival Lugosi’s performance as Count Dracula. Critic Arthur Lennig complains: “despite the dress suit, he has more the aura of a proletarian than a suave, exotic count, entirely lacking the Hungarian’s mystique and physical presence.”27 Still, the role of Eva (the equivalent of Mina) played by the temperamental Lupita Tovar was a tour de force. The beautiful 25

Waltje, Blood Obsession, 70. Robert Harland, “Quiero Chupar Tu Sangre: A Comparison of the Spanish- and English-language Versions of Universal Studio’s Dracula (1931)”, Journal of Dracula Studies, 9 (2007): http://www.blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal _of_Dracula_Studies#Number_9_.282007.29 (accessed 10 June 2012). 27 Lennig, The Immortal Count, 125. 26



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brunette dressed in low-cut gowns and negligées arguably appealed to male viewers of the Spanish Dracula more intensely than the pale ladies of the English-language cast, always clad in conservative attires. As Robert Harland observes, the use of modern and somewhat provocative costumes in the Hispanic version was not an insignificant detail, but a way to “frame the protagonist, all the more important in an age when special effects were sparse”.28 Tovar’s interpretation of the role of Dracula’s most important victim drew attention to the lascivious nature of vampirism itself. Compared with the later exploits of vampire women in the movies, even the Spanish-language Dracula of 1931 seems rather tame today. Nonetheless, for the public of the 1930s any allusion to sexuality, however vague, was regarded as daring. The role of Eva Seward was styled as a temptress: the transformation was suggested already by the change of her name that, unlike meek Mina, inspired Biblical associations. We should not forget, however, that according to the rules of the Motion Picture Production Code forbidding any presentation of nudity and sensuality, much of the erotic allure of the actresses involved in the making of Dracula was left to the audience’s imagination. Thus in either the English- or the Spanish-language version no onscreen biting was shown, not even the vampire’s fangs – the take was always cut just as the Count was approaching his victims, but without touching them. In this way, the belief in onscreen eroticism resembled the belief in the supernatural terror of vampires. Compared with Dracula, the righteous heroes of Browning’s movie appear sexless, and John Harker (the equivalent of Stoker’s Jonathan) seems especially unpleasant. In the scene when Dracula suggests that he had already met Mina and told her “some rather grim tales of [his] far-off country”, evidently without the permission from her fiancé, Harker behaves impolitely, smokes a cigarette with ostentation, and eventually ignores the guest’s greeting. It is interesting to pay closer attention to his costume. In contrast with the elegant Count, the Englishman wears a tweed jacket and knickerbockers – in the 1930s (and even more so with the passing time) this costume having associations with the Nazi movement that was developing in Germany at the time. Thus, Harker (especially for today’s audience) appears to be a fascist macho, so deeply assured of his right of property towards 28

Harland, “Quiero Chupar Tu Sangre”.



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a woman that he spares himself the trouble of wooing her. The dangerous Other does it, in a way, also for the benefit of Mina’s human suitor. It is quite symptomatic that when Mina, transformed by her secret meetings with the vampire, becomes more aroused, Harker enjoys her metamorphosis and only Van Helsing’s timely intervention makes him aware of the danger involved. Therefore, ultimately, these are men who profit from the cinematic encounter with the vampire; their partners, stimulated by the fantasies they had observed onscreen, leave the cinema each resting on the arm of her own “John” – much like Mina emerging from the darkness into the light of day to the sound of wedding bells that seem to prefigure the re-establishment of the patriarchal status quo. The role of Dracula proved to be the greatest triumph for Bela Lugosi, but at the same time it was also a curse. The actor was never given the chance to show the diversity of his craft to the American audience. He wanted to avoid being typecast in roles of diabolical villains, but as he refused to play the nearly mute role of Frankenstein’s monster, his place at Universal Studios was swiftly taken over by the new horror star, Boris Karloff. Lugosi descended into B-class productions, addiction and despair. Yet, when he died of heart attack on 16 August 1956, his only son honoured him by putting a vampire cape in his coffin. Dracula, as an antihero, was in no mood for dying despite the gloomy longings expressed in Tod Browning’s movie. According to the Internet Movie Database, the character of this name appeared in no less than 300 films.29 Back in 1927, Horace Liveright, the producer of Deane and Balderston’s play on Broadway, had to instruct the audience how to pronounce the name “Dracula” correctly, with the stress on the first syllable.30 Today, such an idea would only provoke laughter. Even though it is a well known paradox of vampirism that the immortality of the bloodsuckers is usually over before the ending credits of the film – the Count resurrected every time, the same yet different, more suited to the changing world.

29

The Internet Movie Database: Dracula: http://www.imdb.com/character/ch000 2561/ (accessed 10 June 2012). 30 Skal, Hollywood Gothic, 129.



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Conclusion – a shift towards a romanticized Don Juan figure As we have seen, Universal’s Dracula was a complex character adding new interesting layers of meaning to the vampiric villain of Bram Stoker’s novel. He was an Eastern European with detectable Semitic characteristics, yet his skill at becoming “invisible” in the London crowd outbalanced his exoticism and made him all the more deadly. He combined the features of an illusionist, a hypnotist, and a supernatural ghost. Not being a madman himself, he was nevertheless able to infect those around him with a kind of sexual and murderous insanity. His attacks on women situated him between a cunning seducer and a ruthless rapist. We may agree with Robert Harland, that it was the erotic subtext of Dracula that has kept him going. Horror movies that merely rely on special effects and shock value are most likely to lose their power over time. Dracula removed the theme of sexual danger to the titillating realm of “the marvellous, mesmeric and seductive” whereas, if approached literally, the vision of vampirism might end up “disgusting and repellent” to the audience.31 The shift in the presentations of the character of Dracula away from the undead monster and towards the romanticized Don Juan figure seems to be very enduring. As Donald Rottenbucher observes, Francis Ford Coppola’s spectacular and controversial Bram Stoker’s Dracula of 1992 can be seen as an apex of such a portrayal,32 but this revision of the presentation of the vampire definitely predates contemporary cinema and harks back to Tod Browning’s movie and its source material, Deane and Balderston’s theatrical play. After 1931, most subsequent presentations of vampirism engaged in intertextual play with Universal’s Dracula and Bela Lugosi’s interpretation of the Count. In 1935 Tod Browning ventured to remake his London After Midnight as Mark of the Vampire (originally titled Vampires of Prague) for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer with sound technology and some names and circumstances altered. The role originally played by Lon Chaney was divided between Lionel Barrymore (brother of John Barrymore, who played Svengali in 1931) as the Van Helsing-styled Professor Zelen, and Bela Lugosi as the 31

Harland, “Quiero Chupar Tu Sangre”, n.p. Donald Rottenbucher, “From Undead Monster to Sexy Seducer: Physical Sex Appeal in Contemporary Dracula Films”, Journal of Dracula Studies, 6 (2004): http://www.blooferland.com/drc/index.php?title=Journal_of_Dracula_Studies#Num ber_9_.282007.29 (accessed 10 June 2012). 32



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supposed vampire. In the film’s finale, in a way similar to London After Midnight, the assumed vampires were revealed to be actors hired by the professor to help expose a human culprit. Still, Mark of the Vampire functions as a clever parody of the conventions of the fledgling genre of the fantastic horror film, and especially Browning’s own Dracula. The opening satirically mimics the Transylvanian scenes with a pair of sceptical, fashionably dressed travellers confronting the superstitious peasants, this time in the Czech Carpathian Mountains. Bela Lugosi as Count Mora delivers a cunning spoof of Dracula, partnered by Carol Borland (who was so smitten by the actor’s physique) as his daughter (or possibly bride), Luna. There are familiar Gothic interiors, bats, cobwebs, candles and coffins, down to a ridiculous possum in the castle vaults. Additionally, the vampires’ castle is equipped with an organ – absent from Dracula, but featuring prominently in The Phantom of the Opera as Erik’s favourite musical instrument. This may have been Tod Browning’s conscious homage to Lon Chaney and another way to link Dracula with the character of the Phantom. Universal Studio’s authorized sequel, Son of Dracula (1943, dir. Robert Siodmak), featured Lon Chaney Jr., the son of the man who was supposed to play the Count in the first place, as the son of the arch-villain himself. In the movie, Dracula Junior, hiding behind the anagrammed name of Count Alucard, infiltrated the United States to marry and vampirize a willing and co-operative American heiress (Louise Allbritton). Like his father before him, the younger Dracula perished, killed by the girl’s rejected mortal fiancé (Robert Paige) who engaged the help of a wise foreign professor (J. Edward Bromberg). Similarly to Bela Lugosi’s Count, the vampire played by Chaney Jr. was suave, well dressed and enticing – arguably to provide a discernable cinematic link between the old-world Gothic tradition and the Gothic legacy of America, centred on New Orleans (the home of Dracula Junior’s bride-cum-progeny who was also destroyed by the vampire hunters). Even taking into account the disputable skill of Chaney Jr. as an actor, derided by critics as a poor, “well-fed, middleAmerican”33 imitation of his great father, the sequel was a proof of the lasting impression Browning’s (and Lugosi’s) Dracula made on American horror cinema. 33

Weaver, Brunas, Brunas, Universal Horrors, 24.



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As regards vampire movies, Hammer Film Productions and their series of Dracula pictures starring Christopher Lee dominated the period between the late 1950s and early 1970s. The gore-laden films presented Dracula as sexually menacing, but still predominantly monstrous. Universal Studios poured some fresh blood into Dracula in 1979, shortly after Broadway had taken interest in Deane and Balderston’s play once again. Frank Langella who, like Bela Lugosi before him, began by performing the role of the Count onstage played it. Compared with Tod Browning’s movie, the major change in this version, directed by John Badham, was to reverse the characters of Mina and Lucy. Mina became an insignificant prey and Lucy, here Dr Seward’s daughter, was an object not only of the Count’s bloodlust, but also his amorous attention. Similarly to the 1931 movie, Dracula did not bare his fangs or appear dirty with blood, neither did he lose the composure of a perfect gentleman. The 1979 film emphasized the role of the vampire as a darkly romantic lover, rather than as a ruthless and inhuman killer. Even though the forces of law and order triumphed again (Laurence Olivier appeared in the role of Van Helsing), the audience’s sympathy was visibly directed towards the outsider. Frank Langella’s Dracula was a victim as much as a victimizer.34 The year 1979 saw two more interesting vampire movies: the beautiful remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu (Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht, dir. Werner Herzog) with Klaus Kinsky as the Count, and Stan Dragoti’s vampire comedy Love at First Bite in which Dracula, played by George Hamilton, was looking for true love in modern day New York City. In the end the vampire lovers escape the pursuit by transforming themselves into bats, leaving behind the puzzled human suitor (a descendant of Professor Van Helsing) and his friend, a detective, wondering “how he did it”. After having pondered for a while over the allure of Dracula’s foreign accent, they decided that the secret of the Count’s popularity with women must have been his cape. In the last scene of the film, the cuckolded mortals decide to try their luck with the ladies and take turns to wear the vampire costume. Like a true vampire should, Bela Lugosi’s Dracula survived all the adversities, even the decline of the actor who had immortalized him. It may be said that Lugosi also received some kind of recognition from 34

Holte, Dracula in the Dark, 81.



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the movie industry who had, metaphorically speaking, sucked him dry and left him for dead. In 1995 actor Martin Landau received the Academy Award for his role of the old and ailing Lugosi in Tim Burton’s movie Ed Wood. As he recalled with both pride and humility, the news of his award was met by one of the critics with the exclamation: “The Oscar goes to Martin Landau. Its shadow goes to Bela Lugosi.”35

35

Making Bela, documentary film accompanying the DVD edition of Ed Wood.



AURALLY BLOODCURDLING: REPRESENTING DRACULA AND HIS BRETHREN IN BBC RADIO DRAMA LESLIE MCMURTRY The most hideous aspects of Dracula and his vampire brethren are visual ones – pallor, dark hirsute hands, piercing eyes, razor-sharp fangs. The settings, too, in Dracula are integral to creating mood: for example, Harker’s journey into Transylvania includes descriptions that “are so thrilling and visual that they have acquired a permanent place in the popular imagination”.1 How could adaptors dramatizing Dracula possibly bring that kind of menace to a genre that relies entirely on one sense – the aural one – thereby giving the audience of radio drama the appropriate chills? In this article, I propose to examine the way the fearful aspects of Dracula and his brethren, as described in the original source material of novel or short story, such as Le Fanu’s “Carmilla”, Stevenson’s “Olalla”, and Forrest’s The Voyage of the Demeter, have been adapted for audio purposes, what techniques are used, whether they be in terms of writing or sound effects, and how successful the adaptations have been in maintaining a mood of terror and menace and in representing the memorable settings.

Bram Stoker may have had “a brilliant talent for fluid, naturalsounding, visually descriptive prose”,2 but as is so often the case, this does not necessarily translate well into other adaptive media. This article focuses on contemporary BBC radio adaptations, not only of Dracula the novel but “spin offs” which follow various strands introduced in the novel (Voyage of the Demeter and Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula), and other nineteenth-century vampire stories (“Carmilla” and “Olalla”), between 1998 and 2011. In particular, it looks at the ways the intensely sensual (often visual) elements of the novel have been adapted and translated for radio and how the medium manages to convey emotions like fear and horror through the aural. The organization of this article is structured on the plays’ dependence 1

Stijn Reijnders, “Stalking the Count: Dracula, Fandom and Tourism”, Annals of Tourism Research, XXXVIII/1 (2011), 231. 2 Bram Dijkstra, “Dracula’s Backlash”, in Dracula: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Reviews and Reactions, Dramatic and Film Adaptations, Criticism (1987), eds Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal, New York: W.W. Norton, 1997, 460.

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on the original Stoker text. It proceeds outward from adaptations like Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula and Voyage of the Demeter, as “spin off” pieces which have roots in the Bram Stoker text. “Carmilla” and “Olalla” share themes but are not directly related to Bram Stoker’s text. As is now well known, the leap from novel to stage was one considered at the outset by Stoker himself. Dracula on stage, after Henry Irving had laughed at the title role in a “shilling shocker”, was originally conceived as a five-hour dramatic reading with fifteen actors in May 1897. Problems inherent in adapting Dracula crop up here: certain scenes during the reading would have made no sense unless the action was somehow described or acted out. The “vast geographical sweep”3 was obviously problematic for the stage, and as Picard points out, by failing to gain access to Dracula’s psychology, problems of narrative and identification arise. Nevertheless, by the 1920s, the Hamilton Deane stage version had morphed in to the John L. Balderston/Deane version, which was a “surprise hit” on Broadway, demonstrating, in David J. Skal’s view, “an essential dichotomy … which served practical, dramatic, and commercial considerations while working against Stoker’s vision”.4 The Balderston/Deane version has been particularly successful given its worldwide predominance, as well as having contributed many of the visual markers associated with Dracula. “Hungry expatriate” Béla Lugosi jumped to stardom in the role on Broadway, and then in the 1930 Tod Browning film, his “patent-leather hair, patent leather shoes, a continental accent, and bilious green makeup”5 creating an excellent transition between Rudolph Valentino and the grave. Dracula (1998) – aural ambiguity Because the lack of American copyright puts Dracula into the public domain, adaptations into various media have proliferated. The best known radio adaptation of Dracula is probably that by John Houseman and Orson Welles for The Mercury Theater On the Air in 1938 for the American CBS radio network: it starred Welles as Dracula and Seward and paved the way for War of the Worlds later that year. 3

David J. Skal, “‘His Hour Upon the Stage’: Theatrical Adaptations of Dracula”, in ibid., 374. 4 Ibid., 377. 5 Ibid., 378.



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The 1998 BBC Dracula adaptation6 uses an exceptionally large and distinguished cast, sound effects and music to broadcast the story over three hours. Even at this phenomenal length – to put it in perspective, an Afternoon Drama7 is forty-five minutes, and the Classic Serial is two hours, usually broken into episodes of one hour – this version of Dracula (hereafter known as Drac1998), must leave some incidents out. I will focus on a number of key scenes of sensual/horrific content and examine how and why they are adapted in Drac1998. Necessarily there is the question of narrative technique, which in the novel “resembles a vast jigsaw puzzle of isolated and frequently trivial facts”.8 Carol A. Senf has raised questions of the reliability of the narrators in Dracula, given the fact that “the narrators appear to speak with one voice”.9 Any scope for this kind of ambiguity10 can be eliminated in radio, for the voice speaking is always identifiable by the mechanics of sound tonality. However, for brevity’s sake and for the promotion of drama to an epistolary tale, much of the framing in the novel has been eliminated or simplified. For example, John Seward reveals much in dialogue to other characters that would have been gleaned in the novel from his phonograph entries. In the sound medium of this radio adaptation the phonograph device has been completely abandoned. Harker’s experiences during the first seventy pages, as recorded in his journal in shorthand, are compressed into about twelve scenes. The phantasmagorical scene during which Harker is driven to the “vast ruined castle”11 has been eliminated. An interesting framing device has been introduced, in which the maddened Harker relates in flashback his experiences to the sympathetic Mother Superior and 6

Bram Stoker and Nick McCarty, Dracula, BBC Radio, dir. Hamish Wilson, perf. Frederick Jaegar, Phyllis Logan, Bernard Holley, Peter Blythe, Paul Birchard, Sharon Maharaj, Finlay Welsh, David McKail, Stella Forge, Wendy Seager, Monica Gibb, John Shedden, Crawford Logan, John Buick, Mark Coleman, Peter Lincoln, 1998. 7 Until recently called the Afternoon Play. 8 Carol A. Senf, “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror”, in Dracula: Authoritative Text, 422. 9 Ibid., 423. 10 Except when the actors in the adaptation sound too much alike. This is a potential problem with Drac1998 since the actors playing Harker and Holmwood (“aristocratic leftover”: Fred Botting, Gothic, London: Routledge, 1999, 147) sound too much alike and makes it difficult to identify who is speaking when the two are in a scene together. 11 Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin, 1993, 17-23.



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Sister Agnes of the convent in Budapest. As the flashbacks, scenes in the convent, and scenes between Mina and Lucy in Whitby are intercut, the sound cue of singing nuns always signals aurally to the listeners that the scene taking place is in the convent. Sometimes the process of adaptation leads to ambiguity, such as in the scene of Harker shaving. The Count’s actions have to be conveyed in real-time by Harker and reinterpreted by him when he describes the scene to Sister Agnes: HARKER: Oh, Count, I didn’t see you in my shaving mirror. A-a-are you unwell, sir? SFX: a series of slavering and salivating noises HARKER: Count, Count, please, what are you – I need a plaster, I’ve cut my face, I’m bleeding. Count, let me go! No … No! SFX: a wolf howls

The success of this scene12 hinges on the use of sound effects, eerie music, and Bernard Holley’s performance as Harker. The ambiguity of the aural is most effective in scenes where sensuality and horror are intermingled, particularly in the presentation of the “Brides”. In flashback, Harker describes to Sister Agnes how he found and entered the room in Dracula’s castle. Effects give a sense of the wind carrying women’s voices, followed by the sound of women laughing softly and murmuring. Stoker’s visual description of the Brides (“dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red .… All three had brilliant white teeth”13) is unnecessary; the Brides’ playful, seductive tone conveys the dangerous, sinful situation in which Harker finds himself: BRIDE 1: He is yours. You are first. BRIDE 2: And we shall follow … SFX: unearthly singing/moaning BRIDE 1: Oh so young. BRIDE 2: Oh so strong. BRIDE 3: Let’s begin … There are kisses for all of us. They make moaning, breathy noises … “Mmmmm …” 12 It is worth noting here that merely reading the script on the page is much less effective than hearing the radio play; it risks provoking “absurdity and ridicule” (Botting, Gothic, 9) the other side of the coin of horror and terror. 13

Stoker, Dracula, 53.



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BRIDE 1: Oh yes… yes… See, see, under his… his white neck and see there, under the white flesh…

The Brides’ advance on Harker makes very clear the erotic overtones of “a feminine form but a masculine penetration”,14 all the more startlingly interrupted by Dracula. Frederick Jaeger’s performance is not one of a suave sex symbol, rather a mysterious, savage-sounding Count with a strong, powerful voice, “his harsh, metallic whisper”15 with an Eastern European accent. The erotic quickly turns to the horrific for Jonathan: “He had thrown a leather bag … I saw, from under half-shut eyes, the bag move as if there were some living thing. One of them opened the bag and I heard” at which point, the sound effect is of a squalling baby. When Dermot Rattigan suggests that radio drama promotes “an imaginary sense of visual allusion through its creative and carefully composed use of all sounds including verbal, nonverbal, music, etc.”,16 he could be referring to one of the most famous scenes in Dracula, the staking of Lucy: “I cannot believe what I hear”, comments Holmwood in Drac1998. “Then you must believe what you see”, insists Van Helsing. The sounds of hooting owls, the scraping of a crypt being opened, as well as gravel crunching underfoot and the acoustics of a small, closed-in space help to provide atmosphere evoked so hauntingly in prose (“when the flowers hung lank and dead, their whites turning to rust and their greens to browns … and rusty, dark iron, and tarnished brass, and clouded silver plating gave back the feeble glimmer of a candle”17). Lucy’s actions with the child have to be described by the male characters to each other so that the listeners can understand them: SFX: screaming and cries MORRIS: Look over there! By HOLMWOOD: It’s her! SFX: child struggling, crying

the trees.

14

Christopher Craft, “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, in Dracula: Authoritative Text, 446. 15 Stoker, Dracula, 64. 16 Dermot Rattigan, Theatre of Sound: Radio and the Dramatic Imagination, Dublin: Carysfort Press, 2000, 119. 17 Stoker, Dracula, 253.



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Lucy’s performance comprises hissing and spitting punctuated by an animalistic delivery of the “Come to me, Arthur” speech. When Van Helsing approaches her with the crucifix, her scream is given unearthly tones by the application of reverb. When audio gives us “close ups” of sound, they can often make sound effects better than the real thing: Lucy’s staking scene has the potential to be truly horrific on radio. Katherine Seymour and John T.W. Martin as long ago as 1938 suggested that radio would always be among the most affecting of media,18 and radio dramatist Mike Walker has alluded to the fact that while humans have eyelids, they do not have “ear lids”.19 Sound effects on radio can often, therefore, be excruciatingly graphic. Drac1998 holds back from true explicitness: Holmwood screams and there is a sound of a rhythmic clunking, with a lack of squishing blood sounds. This is followed by Lucy screaming as the music swells, with Van Helsing reading the burial service underneath. After four or five strokes, liquid sounds are subsumed by Holmwood sobbing which fades out into the theme music, signalling the end of an episode. The final hundred pages of Dracula build to a climatic chase scene which emphasizes the sweeping setting as the heroes chase Dracula from England across Eastern Europe. Drac1998 compresses the finale of the book even further with extremely short scenes. However, the final scene in which Dracula is consigned to dust becomes confused and ends abruptly, especially for the reader of the book who might be expecting an epilogue. It has been said that horses are difficult to present on radio, and while the scenes with Morris and Seward on

18

Katharine Seymour and John T.W. Martin, Practical Radio Writing: The Technique of Writing for Broadcasting Simply and Thoroughly Explained, London: Longmans, 1938. 19 “Life and Fate: The Radio Dramatization”, Panel hosted by Bridget Kendall with Jonathan Myerson, Mike Walker, and Alison Hindell, BBC Radio 4 Presents Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, St Peter’s College, Oxford, 9 September 2011.



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horseback are effective,20 they are necessarily brief. Dracula’s last performance is anticlimactic, merely gasping, gurgling, and repeating “No!”. This is followed by wolves howling, eerie music, and the credits rolling. “Dracula’s crossing of boundaries is relentless”:21 in crossing over into radio adaptation, he has no final word and crumbles into dust almost as an afterthought. This lengthy adaptation by the BBC strives for completeness. Yet, by virtue of its being an audio adaptation, it encapsulates a series of aural ambiguities which tap into a listener’s previous visual encounters with the fictional vampire. Voyage of the Demeter (2008) – claustrophobia and derangement A very interesting “spin off” of Stoker’s Dracula on radio in recent years is The Voyage of the Demeter by Robert Forrest, as a BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play.22 When Rattigan discusses three groups of people who tune in to hear radio drama, the third category (“those who casually tune-in and decide to stay-with the play or not, depending up on the interest it holds for them”23) might have benefited the most from catching Voyage of the Demeter. Voyage of the Demeter lingers its hour length on the incidents in Stoker that comprise five pages – in short, what Carol A. Senf has called the “hysterical and inconclusive”24 log from the ship Demeter as she sets sail from Varna to Whitby. Forrest has invented names and personalities for four sailors on the Demeter, including Captain Rapelsky, the First Mate Rubaish, Bretov, and the cook Kanesky. Rapelsky is played by Finlay Welsh, who played Van Helsing in Drac1998: this is perhaps appropriate, given the rather short shrift McCarty gave the Demeter incident in Drac1998, inexplicably making the crew British and their actions completely at odds with the log incidents recorded in Stoker. Much of the suspense and horror of the play hinges on the claustrophobia of men in tight quarters on a sea voyage, and listeners unfamiliar with the connection to Dracula could easily imagine, as the 20 A combination of hoof and jingling rein effects and the actors running in place in studio. 21 Botting, Gothic, 150. 22 Robert Forrest, The Voyage of the Demeter, BBC Radio, dir. Patrick Rayner, perf. Finlay Welsh, Gary Lewis, Grant O’Rourke, Steven McNicoll, Alexander Morton, 2008. 23 Rattigan, Theatre of Sound, 18. 24 Senf, “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror”, 424.



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play suggests toward the end, and as Stoker’s captain noted in the log (on page 112), that the deranged First Mate has been responsible for the murders all along. An unnerving and intense atmosphere is evoked by the continuous use of eerie and nervous strings as soundtrack, which highlights tense moments and serves as transition between scenes. An isolated ship is suggested by the sound effects of sails, sea birds, and creaking wood; no doubt, Forrest found Mina’s hypnotized description of Dracula fleeing in the Czarina Catherine invaluable (such as in Stoker, page 442). Although Bretov and Kanesky quickly identify themselves as Russian and Rubaish as Romanian (consistent with Stoker), no cod Russian accents are to be found. All the sailors have northern English or Scottish accents. Also consistent with Stoker is the Captain’s religious devotion and the First Mate’s rejection of superstition. In Voyage of the Demeter, this has been magnified to make Rubaish a scientific and extremely methodical man (“I aspire to have a mind as cool and limpid as a calm sea”), to the annoyance of Bretov, who accuses the First Mate of having no feelings. Rapelsky’s religiosity and Rubaish’s science come into constant conflict, which hinders a truly scientific investigation. Rubaish believes that Newton was the greatest man who ever lived: Rapelsky: Greater than Christ? Rubaish: Was he a man, sir? Rapelsky: And God? …. Where does He stand in your reasoned, scientific view of things?

Rubaish’s godly father beat him, which, among other things, precipitated his rejection of religion. While Fred Botting sees a nostalgia for “warlike paganism” in Dracula, one of the major themes of fin de siècle Gothic is science and religion at odds, “a caricature of Darwinian theory”.25 Bretov and Kanesky are in a sense outcasts from this central debate, given that Bretov is Jewish and Kanesky unapologetically gay. Despite Rapelsky’s refuge in religion, scenes accumulate in which his religious faith, not to mention his control over the ship, begin to unravel. The barometer for moments of Dracula’s ascendancy is Kanesky’s cat Johnny (named, we find out, after Kanesky’s Irish lover from a different ship who died after fifty lashes for the crime of 25

Botting, Gothic, 153, 148.



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sodomy). The Captain is startled by Johnny during the night, when he hears a voice: RAPELSKY: Kanesky, bring a light! I need a light! SFX: thunk of head hitting beam RAPELSKY: Damn! THE STRANGER (neutral, deep, unnerving voice): Have you forgotten how low your own cabin beams are? RAPELSKY: Wake up, man!… Where am I, come to that?… Stand to and explain this darkness! Anyone! THE STRANGER: Are you lost in your own ship? RAPELSKY: I cannot be lost in my own ship. Demeter, mother, giver of corn, giver of life, mother… THE STRANGER: You pray to a pagan hussy? RAPELSKY: Mother of Christ the Lord!

With only Rapelsky and Rubaish left alive on the ship, the two become agonizingly close to solving the mystery in time. Rubaish, unable to cope with the disintegration of his scientific values, jumps overboard after failing to convince Rapelsky to turn back. Scenes 31 through 35, then, become the confrontation between Rapelsky and Dracula. This confrontation is a tour-de-force for radio. The wind whips up as Dracula shouts, “I am what I am”, to Rapelsky’s impassioned “Blasphemy!”. Awesome sound effects of thunder, lightning crackling, and a storm surge as Johnny the cat makes a final reappearance. Destructive and overreaching thunder does not deter Rapelsky when he challenges Dracula: “It’s not the cross that has power, it’s the faith behind it!” In using one setting based on the novel, Voyage of the Demeter exploits the aural medium to create a claustrophobic space in which its heroes – and, by extension, the listeners – are trapped, resulting in feelings of impending madness. The intense focus of the play’s space makes it a unique contribution to Dracula adaptations. Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula (1981) – disappointingly elementary Like many Gothic tales, Sherlock Holmes vs Dracula (1981, rebroadcast 200726) goes to great lengths to claim validity, a fiction

26

Glyn Dearman and Loren D. Estleman, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, BBC Radio, perf. John Moffatt, Timothy West, David March, Nicholas Courtney, 1981.



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“with pretensions to historical authenticity and veracity”;27 the narrator, John Watson, claims that upon this particular case, he has “remained silent” until a “spurious monograph by an Irishman named Bram Stoker” forced him to act. Furthermore, Watson goes on to dispute the role Van Helsing played in defeating Dracula and instead credits Holmes. Watson prepares us for “the most terrible and bonechilling mystery it has been my privilege to reveal”, which he says took place in August 1890. For fans of Holmes – and adapter/director Glyn Dearman clearly is one – this play serves as an amusing tribute, and it has its moments of horror impressed upon the listener by similar techniques of sound theatre to the plays already mentioned. Several Gothic critics have already noted the symbolic connection with Holmes, Fred Botting linking him with Van Helsing and Dr Hesselius from “Carmilla”, and Robert Mighall bundling them all in “a foggy, gaslit labyrinth where Mr Hyde easily metamorphoses into Jack the Ripper, and Sherlock Holmes hails a hansom in pursuit of them both”.28 When Holmes reads The Daily Graph, he decides, “the problem presents one or two interesting facts”. An interview with the Daily Graph’s journalist conjures up the familiar story of the shipwreck at Whitby, which unfortunately is presented as pure narration rather than scene-setting with effects: “The storm broke. The wind howled and the rain lashed the cliffs.” The matter intrigues Holmes sufficiently that he and Watson go to Whitby themselves, accompanied, it seems, by a full orchestra. Holmes manages to spot drops of blood on the railing of the Demeter, before being forced to give up the case. However, his interest is piqued upon reading the Westminster Gazette, where Watson reads of the “Hampstead Horror” and is reminded of “Jack the Ripper, two years ago”. Holmes’ reasoning brings him to the cemetery and Lucy’s staking, which is achieved in a similar but interesting manner to Drac1998: SFX: Eerie music HOLMES: No doubt,

Watson, you are wondering what we are doing

here. 27

Botting, Gothic, 49. Robert Mighall, Introduction to The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror by Robert Louis Stevenson, New York: Penguin Classics, 2002, xxxi. 28



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SFX: Owls hoot, there is movement through the undergrowth HOLMES: We are making for the cemetery over there.

Scene 11 WATSON: Who are these people, Holmes? And why are they gathered around that open coffin? VAN HELSING: Now! You must do it now! SFX: A man screams, a woman thrashes and screams VAN HELSING: Again! WATSON: He’s killing her, Holmes!

After introducing himself to the Crew of Light, Holmes is “delighted to exchange information with you in a more convivial setting”, followed by a huge crash of music. Watson’s first reaction to Van Helsing’s explanation at the Barclay Hotel is: “What ineffable twaddle!” It may be worth examining two versions of Carfax: the one in which Holmes and Watson replace the Crew of Light in Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula and the traditional one in Drac1998. The version that Watson narrates is a good lesson in creating radio suspense. A hooting owl and a screeching door set the scene. “What on earth is that foul smell?” is Watson’s way of asserting that “stench could itself become a Gothic property and evoke its own horrors”.29 A shock of strings builds to a crescendo as Holmes sees “There was someone in the doorway”. Then there is the sound of squeaking as Holmes exclaims, “Rats! Thousands upon thousands of rats!”. They end the scene by shooting their way out and jumping, so the sound effects suggest, into the bushes. In the version presented in Drac1998, Van Helsing confirms the misgivings of the Crew of Light: “It is a tomb, a temporary resting place.” There is a very humorous exchange: HOLMWOOD: It’s filthy and there’s no footprints in the dust, so no one’s been here for a long time. SEWARD: Sherlock Holmes, indeed.

The familiar sound of squeaking is accompanied by Quincey Morris asserting, “How I hate rats”. The effects of an opening door are followed by the intensification of the squeaking. Harker once again recalls the smell element of this scene: “The smell reminds 29

Robert Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 66.



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me… I don’t want to get any closer .... These rats are multiplying, waves of them!” The men flee, and the scene makes a transition to one of Renfield imploring his master. Things next take a decisively uncanonical turn in Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Holmes has only just decided “we must destroy him before he can spread his vampire pestilence throughout the Empire” when Dracula himself pays them a visit. Holmes has identified him by his lack of reflection, and even Dracula has heard of Sherlock Holmes, though apparently not through English newspapers. “I do not drink alcoholic beverages”, Dracula quips. Having failed to frighten Holmes off, Dracula next kidnaps Watson’s wife Mary and takes her on an improbable chase back, not to Varna or the Borgo Pass, but to the open sea. Dracula’s fate is unclear at the end of Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, because he appears to be destroyed by sunlight and then visits Watson, only to disappear again as a bat. “Our part in the drama ends here”, comments Watson. Although contributing some interesting meditations on point of view, particularly in such staple scenes of Dracula lore as the Carfax scene, Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula’s metafictional techniques contribute little new to the aural world of fictional vampire stories. However, the adaptation is notable for the way it uses sensual sound as perceived by Holmes, Watson, and the listeners in order to build up a recognizably Bram Stokeresque universe in the staking scene. Carmilla (2009) – eroticism, phantasmagoria and a sympathetic vampire Douglas McCanfield’s 2009 adaptation of “Carmilla” is a haunting and atmospheric production.30 Though devoid of many of the more horrific elements found in Dracula, the original tale is full of eroticism and phantasmagoria, as “Laura slowly falls under a spell, as if welcoming her own decline”.31 Predecessor to Stoker, and probably an influence on him, J.S. Le Fanu’s tale is open-ended, lacks a monster-slaying structure, and Carmilla is a sympathetic vampire

30 J.S. Le Fanu and Douglas McCanfield, Carmilla, BBC Radio, dir. Lawrence Jackson, perf. Anne-Marie Duff, Brenda Baicz, David Warner, Celia Imrie, Kenneth Cranham, Nigel Anthony, Jacqueline Pearce, 2010. 31 D. MacDowell Blue, “Adapting ‘Carmilla’”, Vampire Film Festival: http://www. vampirefilmfestival.com/Adapting_Carmilla.html (accessed 28 May 2012).



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(Bensen Saler and Charles A. Ziegler would argue Dracula is not32). It is a love story and only “when men take over the action [it is] that Carmilla becomes a monster”.33 BBC Northern Ireland’s adaptation is an ambitious one of “an intimate tale” which “focuses almost entirely upon the narrator Laura and her mysterious friend/predator”34 using an extremely distinguished cast. In fact, much of the suspense and most visceral moments are achieved by a combination of credible acting and stunningly beautiful music. Within the slot of the Afternoon Drama, the adaptation changes little of the original material. The frame story of Dr Hesselius has been done away with, and Mme Perrodon serves as both governess and housekeeper to Laura and her father. After the strains of unsettling orchestral music, a youthful, sweet female voice addresses the listener directly in the tone of a calm confessional: LAURA: Sometimes at night I dream I am awake. I sit up in bed and it seems as though my chamber has grown suddenly dark, as though clouds had drifted over the moon … and then I think I see her, by my bed, reaching to touch my cold hand, her eyes heavy with great sorrow and yet very beautiful. Carmilla...

The music grows sweetly exquisite as Laura explains her isolated upbringing in Styria. The first scene after Laura’s monologue introduces Mme Perrodon and creates a dramatized scene of the castle household waiting for the arrival of Bertha Rheinfeldt, their nearest neighbour General Spiersdorf’s niece. Laura narrates the story of being awoken in darkness at the age of six by a “solemn, but very pretty”35 young woman: LAURA: I became aware of her hands under the coverlet, caressing me gently, soothing me. Then she lay down on the bed and gathered me to her. Immediately I felt delightfully calm. My senses benumbed, I fell asleep again. 32

Bensen Saler and Charles A Ziegler, “Dracula and Carmilla: Monsters and the Mind”, Philosophy and Literature, XXIX/1 (2005), 218-27. 33 Nancy Schumann, Take a Bite: Female Vampires in Anglo-American Literature and Folklore, London: Calliosoph, 39. 34 Blue, “Adapting ‘Carmilla’”. 35 J.S. Le Fanu, “Carmilla”, in Best Ghost Stories of J. S. Le Fanu, New York: Dover, 1964, 277.



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Leslie McMurtry SFX: whooshing sound LAURA: I was awakened

by the sensation of two needles rammed into my breast deep at the same moment and I cried loudly. The lady started back with her eyes fixed on me, then slipped down upon the floor.

The music swells, accompanied by a haunting female vocal. The next scene is of Laura’s father, Mme Perrodon and Laura on a midnight walk interrupted by the “unwonted sound of carriage wheels and many hoofs upon the road”.36 A howling wolf in the distance and insect and bird noises establish the atmosphere. Carmilla’s “mother”, described in prose as “a fine-looking woman” with a “commanding presence”,37 is represented in this brief scene by Jacqueline Pearce with a faint trace of an unidentifiable accent. The scene of Laura and Carmilla’s “first” meeting works solely on the performances and the use of the eerie music. The actress playing Carmilla has a low, Slavic voice yet which is both passionate and “very sweet”:38 CARMILLA: Laura. How wonderful. You are here before me. SFX: the haunting musical theme CARMILLA: Twelve years ago I saw your face in a dream and it has haunted me ever since. LAURA: It’s you! CARMILLA: How strange! Laura: Strange indeed! I saw you twelve years ago, in dream or reality, I do not know. But I could not forget your face. But you have not aged! CARMILLA: How curious dreams are. I feel we have made our acquaintance when we were children. And I already know you intimately.

The language and the performances convey what is explicit in the prose: “her eyes glowed, as, looking hastily into mine, she smiled again and blushed.”39 However, Carmilla eventually makes Laura uncomfortable – “this sense of sin seems to derive from the too passionate female friendship”.40 36

Ibid., 282. Ibid., 283. 38 Ibid., 284. 39 Ibid., 288. 40 Schumann, Take a Bite, 37. 37



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Laura’s first attack of illness seems very much to have influenced Bram Stoker’s depiction of Lucy’s wasting disease: “a sense of exhaustion, a sense of strangulation” pervade Laura’s monologue in the play, which she gives over the unsettling music and SFX of the actress gasping for breath: The room seemed to grow darker and darker. Its eyes – I felt it spring lightly on the bed, its two broad eyes approached my face. Suddenly, I felt a stinging pain.

Laura hyperventilates and screams, “No!”.41 The radio version represents Carmilla’s apparent ability to dim lights, appear and disappear through locked doors as narrated events. Laura discovers a portrait of Countess Karnstein from 1698 which she gives to Carmilla as the likeness is so pronounced. This creates an outburst of affection on Carmilla’s part that is explicit: CARMILLA: How full of tender feeling you are. (she kisses Laura) I live in you. And you would die for me. My love. Laura, my Laura. (she kisses her again) LAURA: I feel strangely faint, Carmilla. Rather light-headed. Perhaps I should take some wine.

Carmilla, it appears, is the “vampire who has fallen in love with her prey”.42 Mme Perrodon’s and Laura’s father’s suspicions are aroused, which is in contrast to the short story. Laura continues to grow weaker; in one scene, thunder crashes before Carmilla’s spectral voice sings in a foreign language, Laura’s breathing shallows, and the echo effects disappear as Laura chokes and gags. The sound of a purring cat is also heard as a piano note is struck again and again. Laura murmurs before Carmilla calls her name; Laura screams. The timely arrival of General Spiersdorf coincides with Carmilla’s disappearance. The final scene takes place in a graveyard, and the expectation for a staking is built on a familiarity with the tropes of Dracula (though we must not forget “Carmilla” came first). In the radio play, the General’s crusade with the sword is not just for the men; Mme Perrodon has brought the weakened Laura along, the idea 41 42

Le Fanu, “Carmilla”, 306. Schumann, Take a Bite, 37.



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being that she will be safer with them than alone at the castle. This gives Laura a more active role in the climax of the story and also gives Carmilla a chance to plead for her life and say things merely implied in prose, even if their conversation takes place in a trance: GENERAL: Countess Mircalla of Karnstein, I found you at last, demon. DOCTOR: Died 17th October, 1708. Yes – not correct, I’m afraid. FATHER: Martin? (heaves crowbar) LAURA: No! No! SFX: crypt lid is lifted LAURA: Oh, Carmilla! CARMILLA: (treated with reverb) My Laura . . . LAURA: Carmilla! CARMILLA: Be with me! LAURA: My friend! SFX: men heave lid CARMILLA: They have come for me, Laura. They mean to kill me. LAURA: No! No! MME PERRODON: Laura! Please! Speak to me, girl. CARMILLA: I love you, Laura. Save me and we will be together! LAURA: Yes!

Our expectations are such that when the coffin lid is prized open, we know that “the features, though a hundred and fifty years had passed since her funeral, were tinted with the warmth of life”.43 No mention is made, however, of “the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches the body lay immersed”.44 Instead, the focus is on Carmilla’s pleading with Laura, who begs to be released from the vampire’s control, to the point that the staking bears little resemblance aurally to the one heard in Drac1998 or Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Laura describes in the final monologue that Carmilla’s head was cut off and her heart staked, then the corpse burnt. She repeats her monologue from the very first scene, adding, “And in my heart, I feel the most profound ... regret …. Carmilla!” The BBC adaptation of “Carmilla” has respected the source text in presenting a sensual, mysterious aural universe by techniques of music and emotionally weighted performances. The intimacy established shows the adaptation to have more in common with a love 43 44

Le Fanu, “Carmilla”, 335. Ibid., 336.



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story than with a traditional monster-hunting structure, as in the plays we have already discussed. Olalla (2010) – degeneration and isolation The least known nineteenth-century vampire story recently adapted on BBC Radio, like “Carmilla”, predates Dracula. “Olalla” by Robert Louis Stevenson was adapted by Marty Ross as one of three Scottish horror tales in his Darker Side of the Border series in 2010.45 Written for Christmas 1885 shortly before the publication of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, “Olalla” first appeared in Court and Society Review and then was collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables (1887). There is some debate whether “Olalla” qualifies as a vampire story, but despite its lack of traditional markers it is closer in form to the Dracula structure, and the radio adaptation has certainly presented it that way. Set during the Spanish Carlist wars, “Olalla” concerns a wounded Scottish officer sequestered in an isolated Spanish villa, “an ancient noble House in Gothic decline” inhabited by a “Wild Man” and a “Child of Nature”.46 Like much of Stevenson’s fiction, it concerns the themes of inheritance: in terms of money, genetics, and religion, where “the biblical and Darwinian dance about each other”.47 The setting of “Olalla” contributes much to its themes of degeneration and isolation, and Olalla evokes this atmosphere through the use of frenetic, nervous Spanish guitar music which serves as scene transitions. The first scene of Olalla gives us a burst of artillery followed by the hero screaming as he is wounded. He is introduced by Dr Querido48 and presents one of the themes: DR QUERIDO: Alexander, keep your head down. ALEXANDER: Animals – the whole bloody lot of us.

45

Robert Louis Stevenson and Marty Ross, The Darker Side of the Border: Olalla, Radio, dir. Bruce Young, perf. Paul Blair, Richard Conlan, Carol Ann Crawford, Roxanna Pope, Richard Greenwood, Simon Tate, 2010. 46 Jay Bland, The Generation of Edward Hyde: The Animal Within, from Plato to Darwin to Robert Louis Stevenson, Bern: Peter Lang, 2010, 315. 47 Ibid., 314. 48 The officer in the short story is never given a name. BBC



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Leslie McMurtry Scene 2. DR QUERIDO: Spain has fought another battle .… You shed Scottish blood when only Spanish was sought. ALEXANDER: I am not a mercenary.

In general, the Scottish officer is presented as much more decisive and masculine in Olalla, though eventually he will “burn with passions more akin to those of a Wild Man”.49 Another character, the village priest, tells the soldier he must recover at an old residencia and warns him against the mother and son, Felipe, “an imbecile”, as well as Olalla, “a pious Catholic girl, one who should not be sullied by contact with a heathen land like your own”. When Alexander reaches the isolated villa, Felipe shows him his rooms: ALEXANDER: I certainly won’t be lonely in here. FELIPE: Señor? ALEXANDER: These portraits everywhere. They are your ancestors, your family? FELIPE: Oh – yes. Family. My blood is theirs.

“Beguiled and repelled by the image of an ancestral lady”, Alexander’s fascination will be familiar to any reader of “Carmilla”.50 Reflecting the nineteenth-century Gothic trend, the portrait “was internalized rather than explained as a supernatural occurrence, a trick of the light or of the imagination”.51 However, the nature of the family connection with the portraits is slightly different from the expectations conjured up by Carmilla. In Scenes 5 and 6, Alexander wanders the land and has encounters with the mother and the son. The Señora is represented on radio somewhat differently than she is in prose, where Robert Mighall describes her as a “biological revenant”52 and Jay Bland stresses her leonine/catamount nature: SEÑORA: Your hand – give me it. ALEXANDER: My hand?

49

Bland, The Generation of Edward Hyde, 329. Ibid., 320. 51 Botting, Gothic, 11. 52 Mighall, Introduction to The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, xiii. 50



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SEÑORA: Give it! (he cries out) Oh yes, this is the hand of a boy, who has shot bullets and used a bayonet and worn a glove of blood. Why? ALEXANDER: Señora, you’re hurting my hand!

She is interrupted by Felipe, whose role seesaws in prose between the Wild Man, the Noble Savage, and the ape. In the short story, Felipe captures and tortures a squirrel, as his “human self is fighting a constant battle which his emerging beast self”.53 The officer reasserts his control over Felipe’s savagery by cajoling and threatening; in Olalla Alexander does it by violence in one of the play’s most intense scenes: FELIPE: Dead things turn red and sweet in his mouth. ALEXANDER: Felipe, leave it! … Let it go! SFX: a crow struggles and flaps it wings FELIPE: Yes, I am a man and it is a beast! A man who will inherit that land from noble birth. ALEXANDER: I know who’s the beast hereabouts. Give me a stone, dammit. SFX: beating, smashing to pulp ALEXANDER: Do you know how many men I’ve killed, Felipe? So damned easy. One hardly needs a gun, or a knife. (He grabs Felipe by the throat) These hands of mine, shaped to crack the spine of a Presbyterian hymnal so often sufficed. You feel how easy it would be to make you suffer, as you did that poor crow? You feel? (He releases him) I at least should know better. FELIPE: I have let the beast in me come out. I will bury the bird. But we must be quick. The black wind is coming.

The next scene is crucial and its ambiguity seems suited for radio: the sound effects of wind and the torturous strains of a woman screaming whip the play into a jangling state of nerves mirroring Alexander’s own. When Robert Mighall suggests that Olalla’s mother is “perhaps the first post-Darwinian ‘vampire’”54 and when Jay Bland rejects the label of vampirism on this story (“Stevenson’s language ... gives no indication of vampirism or lycanthropy”55), both of them take

53

Bland, The Generation of Edward Hyde, 316. Mighall, Introduction to The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde, xiii. 55 Bland, The Generation of Edward Hyde, 319. 54



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the screaming voice as that of Olalla’s mother. However, I would argue that the play suggests it is Olalla herself: FELIPE: It is a beast, in the yard. SFX: continuing woman’s screams ALEXANDER: This house is like a bloody labyrinth! FELIPE: Olalla will be so angry! ALEXANDER: Is that Olalla? FELIPE: It is an animal, frightened by the black wind.

R.L. Stevenson’s prose is exceptionally dense in “Olalla”, a story heavy and labyrinthine with philosophy under which critics struggle to interpret as “a parable … a (eugenic) sermon preached by Olalla”.56 Marty Ross has cut through much of this to highlight the most visceral moments of atavism, shortening the anguished courtship between Olalla and Alexander – a kiss makes Olalla flee after she bites the officer – and precipitating the Señora’s attack. Bram Stoker’s prose has clearly influenced the scene that Marty Ross has created, given that the language closely resembles that of Lucy and the Brides. SEÑORA: How like my husband, so long ago! ALEXANDER: I’ve disturbed you. Sorry. I’ll leave. SEÑORA: I lost him and was left parched, no blood in it, until you came. ALEXANDER: Señora! SEÑORA: Did you not come to bleed beneath my kiss? SFX: She throws herself on him. A struggle. Felipe bursts in. ALEXANDER: Felipe, for God’s sake, she’s biting me! SFX: Olalla runs in, a struggle, the mother sobs SEÑORA: I am a woman, Señor, and need a kiss to live! (She erupts into screams)

The penultimate scene of Olalla has suggestions of the mob scene of James Whale’s Frankenstein. Alexander rushes to try to save Olalla from the mob, and the play ends as the short story does: at the station of the Cross, between the residencia and the village: “You have seen what our birthright has made of our mother ... we were past help a hundred years before we were born, I as much as she.” “Olalla” is an unlikely short story for adaptation, given its tangled association with 56

Mighall, A Geography of Victorian Gothic Fiction, 158.



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the philosophical. At the same time, the vein of vampirism, explicit or implied, runs very deep. In considerably altering the narrative from the original, Marty Ross creates in “Olalla” a mysterious ambivalence that encourages listeners to draw their own conclusions from the aural evidence presented to them. In short, listeners use their imaginations to unravel the narrative of a much less familiar vampire story. Indeed, the status of “Olalla” as a vampire story is in dispute, but that could not be said of Olalla the adaptation. By removing visual markers, Marty Ross has created one of the most ambitious vampire radio adaptations of recent years. The substantial lack of vampire story adaptations on radio before Welles’ version of Dracula in 1938 seems to have a simple explanation. After the saturation of the popular imagination with the very images of vampires that the Balderston/Deane adaption of Dracula made possible, audience expectation for radio vampires has changed considerably. One can conjecture on the difficulty of stage audiences understanding the image of Dracula crawling up the wall presented in the 1897 reading; similar problems in comprehension would be observable if unfamiliar audiences heard the sound effects in Drac1998 or Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula that accompany the scene of the staking of Lucy. The sound effects of oozing liquid and rhythmic thumping are not very eloquent. Moreover, in Drac1998 when Frederick Jaeger makes salivating noises, if it were not for Harker’s narrative explanation, a radio audience might be hardpressed to understand what is going on. After Dracula enters the public consciousness, the radio audience expects Dracula to bite people, the Brides to torment Harker, the Crew of Light to stake Lucy, and it is in a sense easier to make full-length adaptations of Dracula or to refer in a shorthand manner to the staking scene in Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula. Ambiguity is still intriguingly possible, especially in lesser-known vampire adaptations like Carmilla and Olalla. Particularly in the latter, where critics themselves are still divided on whether Olalla or her mother attack others as evidence of vampirism or lycanthropy, one listener’s uncertainty is another’s enjoyment of the visual imagination, the unique way aural drama can tap into the brain’s capacity for narrative storytelling. There is still plenty of scope for “spin off” adaptations of Dracula and his brethren on radio, and plays like 

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Voyage of the Demeter have set the bar high. Indeed, the story told in Voyage of the Demeter is powerful enough to inspire a film adaptation, in pre-production as of late 2012. Adapters will find familiar and new ways of expressing horror and sensuality through the aural in these tales.57

57

Grateful acknowledgements to Ian Rawes of the British Library Listening and Viewing Service, Jamie Beckwith and Aya Vandenbussche for their assistance with the writing of this article.



“LAND OF APPARITIONS”: THE DEPICTION OF GHOSTS AND OTHER SUPERNATURAL OCCURRENCES IN THE FIRST GOTHIC PLAYS EVA ýOUPKOVÁ This article discusses one of the key features of the genre of Gothic drama which reigned over the English stage during the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, approximately between the 1750s and the 1820s. The Gothic stage represented the psyche of the eighteenth-century audience, namely their special delight in “exploiting mystery, gloom and terror”, as Bertrand Evans put it. Gothic dramatists strived to promote this prevailing public taste. The playwright’s expression of the Gothic was not an isolated art form: it was expressed through the visual arts as well as in verse and prose. Many scholars have observed strong links between the Gothic drama and the Gothic novel. The Gothic romances served as a source for playwrights, and the detailed visual backgrounds were helpful in creating settings for the plays. Gothic novels were also very often adapted for stage performance. The nature of the depiction of supernatural events of the adaptations is worthy of attention since it illustrates the obvious differences between Gothic narrative and Gothic drama.

One important aspect of the genre of Gothic drama is the treatment of the supernatural elements in the early Gothic plays. The introduction of ghosts and apparitions played a key role in establishing the enormous success and popularity of the genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contributing to the development of a theatrical machinery and specific staging methods. Critics of the drama of the period would perhaps claim that the period concerned do not form a glorious part of the history of the British theatre. Decline of all dramatic types marked the time of transition between the Restoration theatre and Romanticism. But Gothic drama was able to absorb various influences and help bridge the gap between serious and popular theatre of the period. The genres of Gothic novel and Gothic drama are closely linked and show many signs of common aims and artistic methods. However, Gothic drama, despite the fact that it is a sibling of the Gothic novel, has not stimulated an adequate critical attention, being often dismissed as trifling. Not many valuable studies have been produced, with the

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exception of several interesting introductory essays for some recent editions of Gothic plays. Gothic drama comprises a great number of works. This article, therefore, has had to be very selective as to what cases to analyse, but the basic criterion was to include plays that illustrate certain important features of staging supernatural phenomena. The first simple but widely popular Gothic apparitions on the English stage came along at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the plays of Harriet Lee and M.G. Lewis. Adaptations of Gothic novels by James Boaden exemplify the differences in the treatment of the supernatural in these two genres. And a more imaginative and elaborate staging of ghosts, as well as the presentation of natural spirits following Shakespeare’s example, can be found in the plays of Margaret Harvey, James Robinson Planché, or Edward Fitzball. Defining early Gothic drama: the supernatural amidst the Enlightenment A precise definition of Gothic drama is difficult to devise. Neither the eighteenth-century playwrights nor the members of their audience used the term “Gothic drama”: instead they resorted to various descriptions of the stage productions of their time, which indicated a frequent mixing of genres, with melodrama being the key form of the period. For example, the title page of The Castle Spectre suggests the simple term “a dramatic romance”, but it was also referred to as “a drama of a mingled nature, Operatic, Comical, and Tragical”.1 Other plays were defined by an even longer description, such as “an exhibition of music and dialogue, pantomime and dancing, painting and machinery, antique dresses and armour, thunder and lightning”, and so on. “Gothic play” was a label applied to these types of stage production by later literary critics. One attempt to formulate a definition comes from Bertrand Evans who says that “a Gothic Play is one marked by features including specialized settings, machinery, character types, themes, plots, and techniques selected and combined to serve a primary purpose of exploiting mystery, gloom and terror”.2 1

Paul Ranger, Terror and Pity Reign in Every Breast: A Gothic Drama in the London Patent Theatres, London: The Society for Theatre Research, 1991, 1. 2 Bertrand Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1947, 35.



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As an entertainment form, the Gothic drama reigned over the English stage during the latter part of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It appealed mainly to the middle and lowermiddle classes who frequented the theatres. At the time of great popularity of Gothic drama, between the 1790s and 1820s, there were only three theatres licensed to perform legitimate drama in London. Those three theatres – Drury Lane, Covent Garden and, in the summer months, when those two were closed, also the Haymarket – had been granted letters patent by royal charter. Other theatres in the capital were licensed only for burlettas – pieces that had at least five songs in each Act. Practically speaking, the minor theatres could present almost any of the works in the repertoires of the patent theatres as long as they inserted the right number of musical pieces. Thus the Gothic drama could be performed in a large number of theatres and appeal to the masses. One of the reasons why Gothic drama was so popular was its many ghosts and supernatural occurrences. The eighteenth century was largely a period of enlightenment and rationalism – a belief in the supernatural contradicted a belief in reason, and superstition and interest in ghosts were seen as weaknesses and the result of a lack of education. With the arrival of the Gothic, supernatural occurrences started to return in literary works. It is possible to follow their journey from old ballads, manuscripts by Ossian, and poetry of the Graveyard school, to the centre of literary and dramatic productions. The supernatural was present in many forms: sometimes the reader or spectator experience the visible presentation of a ghost or demon, or it could just be an awareness of the presence of something unnatural or unusual, which is confirmed or denied in the play. In some cases, the audience is left to form their own interpretation of the event. The physical depiction of the supernatural events was varied. For example, the Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms suggests “vocal and mobile portraits; veiled statues that come to life; animated skeletons; doors, gates, portals, hatchways, and other means of egress which open and close independently and inappropriately; secret messages or manuscripts delivered by spectres; forbidden chambers or sealed compartments; and casket lids seen in the act of rising”.3 Supernatural 3 Glossary of Literary Gothic Terms, ed. Douglass H. Thomson, Department of Literature and Philosophy of Georgia Southern University: http://personal.georgia southern.edu/~dougt/goth.html (accessed on 25 July 2012).



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events started to play an important role in the aesthetic theories of their time. Especially significant is the concept of the “sublime”, which is essential to an understanding of Gothic poetics. Edmund Burke in his treatise described the conditions of the existence of the sublime in literature and art: “Terror is in all cases whatsoever, either more openly or latently the ruling principle of the sublime.”4 However, the threat which the recipient feels must not be direct, or else delight cannot be experienced from the sublime moment. Burke also shows that when a spectator watches horrible events, his rational abilities are subdued and his emotional faculties gain in importance. So the strong aesthetic experience can control and dominate the rational side of a person. Burke’s insistence on framing and distancing the sublime moment helped shape Gothic aesthetics in which obscurity, suspense, and uncertainty accompany presentations of terror. Other theorists such as Anna Letitia Aikin (Barbauld) and John Aikin expand on Burke’s ideas, proclaiming a positive pleasure to be derived from the sublime in ways that anticipate later Romantic theorists. They claimed that when readers or spectators encounter some strange or unusual event, their mind is capable of combining the pain of terror with delight arising from a new experience.5 Dr Nathan Drake also recommends writers to rely on natural causes of supernatural events. He warned against the danger of creating horror and disgust instead of positive emotions when the mysterious incidents are not administered with proper care.6 In spite of this attention devoted to the supernatural elements in art the author of the first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764), Horace Walpole, in the Preface to his novel tries to excuse the introduction of supernatural events. As a fictional author of an old manuscript he expresses doubts concerning the willingness and ability of his readers to accept and understand mysterious phenomena in his novel. He wants to justify the introduction of ghosts by reference to dark past ages when the action of the novel takes place: 4

Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in The Works, I, London: Henry G. Bohn, 1854, 88. 5 Anna Letitia Aikin (Barbauld), and John Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Object of Terror, with Sir Bertram, a Fragment”, in Gothic Documents: A Sourcebook 1700-1820, eds E.J. Clery and Robert Miles, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, 127-32. 6 Nathan Drake, “On Objects of Terror”, in ibid., 154-63.



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Miracles, visions, necromancy, dreams and other preternatural events, are exploded now even from romances. That was not the case when our author wrote; much less when the story itself is supposed to have happened. Belief in every kind of prodigy was so established in those dark ages, that an author would not be faithful to the manners of the times who should omit all mention of them. He is not bound to believe them himself, but he must represent his actors as believing them … if this air of the miraculous is excused, the reader will find nothing else unworthy of his perusal.7 The figure of the ghost in early Gothic plays Since the Gothic drama is in many aspects the successor to the Gothic novel, it is not surprising that Gothic dramatists became interested in presenting supernatural events on the stage. There were some disputes concerning the first appearance of a ghost on the Gothic stage. Usually, The Castle Spectre (1797) by M.G. Lewis, the author of the famous novel The Monk, is regarded as the first performance of a play featuring a ghostly appearance:8

The Monk was published anonymously in 1796, but after its great success M.G. Lewis wrote his first play, The Castle Spectre, which was performed on the stage of Covent Garden in December 1797. The play was immensely popular, with an initial run of forty-seven nights. 7

Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, in Three Gothic Novels, ed. Peter Fairclough, London: Penguin, 1968, 37-148. 8 Title page of The Castle Spectre, reproduced in The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas, ed. Stephen Wischhusen, London: Gordon Fraser, 1975.



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The tall female figure in a flowing dress spotted with blood is the ghost of Evelina, the murdered countess; kneeling beside her is her daughter Angela whom the ghost of Evelina tries to protect. There was also music in the scene. Evelina sang a lullaby for her daughter, accompanied by a guitar.9 However, it seems that the truly first attempt at presenting a ghost on the Gothic stage was made by Harriet Lee, younger sister of Sophia Lee. Harriet Lee introduced a ghost in her melodrama entitled The Mysterious Marriage; or The Heirship of Roselva. The play was written in 1793, but Harriet Lee was not successful in her attempt to have it produced. The managers of London theatres rejected it. However, after the enormous success of The Castle Spectre in 1797 she decided to publish it in 1798. In her Advertisement to the play she says that ... as the theatre will soon probably become “a land of apparitions” she [Harriet Lee] hastens to put in her claim to originality of idea, though the charm of novelty may be lost...the female spectre she has conjured up, was undoubtedly the offspring of her imagination …. She is now obliged to produce it to a disadvantage, or expose herself to the charge of being a servile imitator.10

The quotation shows that it was important to Harriet Lee to affirm in print that her ghost anticipated Lewis’ by several years. The Mysterious Marriage is perhaps the first Gothic play by a woman to employ the device of the ghost of the murdered heroine. The scenes take place in a castle in Transylvania. As the title suggests, the plot is about unhappy courtship and concealed marriage. Albert, the villain, first secretly marries Constantia, but then poisons her to be able to wed a rich heiress. The ghost of murdered Constantia appears in Act III, scene III when Albert, fighting the first pangs of a guilty conscience, tries to enter the chamber of the countess who had become his second wife. Albert is alone since Rodolphus, the guard, has fallen asleep. Albert first doubts the reality of his vision, but then admits that he saw it plainly, and therefore it must be real. 9

M.G. Lewis, The Castle Spectre, in Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1992, 206. 10 Harriet Lee, The Mysterious Marriage, in Sisters of Gore: Seven Gothic Melodramas by British women, 1790-1843, ed. John Franceschina, New York: Garland, 1997, 71-72.



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There are many similarities in the staging of the ghost in The Mysterious Marriage and The Castle Spectre. In Lee’s play the ghost of Constantia appears just once but her entrance is, according to stage directions, intended to be quite sensational: Thunder at intervals, with vivid flashes of lightning seen through the casements .... The Ghost of Constantia, shrouded in the lightest drapery, appears before the door, passing the pallet of Rodolphus, who sleeps sweetly. .... She gazes intently, and motions him [the villain] from her [the countess] .... Vivid lightning – the Ghost glides into the chamber of the Countess.11

The entrance of the ghost of murdered Evelina in The Castle Spectre to a great extent resembles this: The folding-doors unclose, and the oratory is seen illuminated. In its centre stands a tall female figure, her white and flowing garments spotted with blood, her veil is thrown back, and discover a pale melancholy countenance .... Angela sinks upon her knees .... The Spectre waves her hand, as bidding farewell. Instantly the organ’s swell is heard; a full chorus of female voices chant Jubilate, a blaze of light flashes through the Oratory, and the folding doors close with a loud noise.12

These extracts illustrate the visual and spectacular effects both playwrights employed, or in the case of Harriet Lee intended to employ, because Harriet Lee complains in her advertisement that her published play is incomplete without decorations and music – “embellishments”,13 as she calls them. Lewis’ use of the ghost in The Castle Spectre is bolder since the ghost of Evelina appears twice, and is more active in the plot. It first appears at the end of the fourth Act when Angela is kneeling in front of her mother’s portrait trying to decide whether to escape from the castle. In the final scene when the attempt fails and Osmond surprises Angela and her long-lost father, Evelina protects both her husband and daughter and prevents them from being murdered by the villain. The 11

Lee, The Mysterious Marriage, 108. Lewis, The Castle Spectre, 206. 13 Lee, The Mysterious Marriage, 72. 12



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scene with the ghost in Lewis’ play is carefully prepared and anticipated: servants in the castle often talk about murder, the mysterious disappearance of Evelina years ago, or the strange sounds coming from the oratory at night. There are several instances of a disguise, as the hero Percy, who tries to hide in the late Earl Reginald’s armour, poses as his spectre, or Angela, whom the maid confuses with dead Evelina. The villain Osmond has morbid dreams which he describes to the audience. In these dreams he tries to embrace the lovely Angela, but when he approaches her the female form changes into the emaciated corpse of dead Evelina. Therefore the spectators expect the real ghost, while in The Mysterious Marriage there is no build-up and it comes as a surprise. M.G. Lewis at least mentions the whole machinery of various supernatural beings and creations, and enjoyed conjuring them up: Why, they say that Earl Hubert rides every night round the castle on a white horse; that the ghost of Lady Bertha haunts the west pinnacle of the Chapel-Tower; and that Lord Hildebrand, who was condemned for treason some sixty years ago, may be seen in the Great Hall, regularly at midnight, playing at foot-ball with his own head! Above all, they say that the spirit of the late Countess sits nightly in her Oratory and sings her baby to sleep!14

Different methods of staging the supernatural Even if the introduction of a ghost is seen as a strong characteristic of the genre of Gothic drama, there are early Gothic plays which do not use the supernatural element at all, at least in the form of a demon. Horace Walpole wrote not only the first Gothic novel but he was also the author of the first Gothic play entitled The Mysterious Mother (written in 1768, published in 1781). Here the element of terror is represented by the psychology of the character because the protagonist becomes insane for a while due to remorse caused by the guilt resulting from double incest. This situation finally leads to the suicide of the heroine. As Horace Walpole wrote in his Epilogue, he was strongly attracted to the topic but did not dare to have it produced on

14

Lewis, The Castle Spectre, 165.



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the stage, because “the subject is so horrid that I thought it would shock rather than give satisfaction to an audience”.15 A supernatural element could be missing from the early plays whose title actually indicated the presence of a ghost. In Henry Siddons’ opera The Sicilian Romance; or, The Apparition of the Cliffs (1794) the ghost walking on the rocks outside the castle is referred to throughout the play but is never seen. Finally, a simple and natural explanation of the ghost is offered, which suggests Henry Siddons’ admiration for the method of the explained supernatural used by Ann Radcliffe. Also in Miss Burke’s The Ward of the Castle (1793) the supernatural element is provided by the castle where the heroine and her maid’s tyrannical master confines them. Their only possibility of realizing their dreams in this absolute isolation is reading Gothic novels, and their mixing of reality and fantasy often results in comical situations. The castle itself contains mysterious elements of which not even the tyrant is aware, like a secret passage or a trapdoor, devices which were often used for staging the supernatural events in later Gothic plays. To illustrate different methods of introducing supernatural phenomena in Gothic novels and plays it is interesting to consider adaptations of Gothic novels for the stage. As I have already indicated, these two genres were very close. The first adaptation of The Castle of Otranto appeared as early as 1781 with the title The Count of Narbonne, but there was no ghost or supernatural occurrence with the exception of the moving armour. However, this was explained since the hero Theodore resembled his ancestor so much that it seemed that the armed knight was the murdered Alfonso who had risen from his grave. The author of the adaptation, Robert Jephson, omitted the scene of the pursuit of Isabel or a picture brought to life, and the mysterious death of Conrad and the helmet and sword of Alfonso are missing or are replaced by natural events. Instead of a spectacular show, Robert Jephson employed narrative passages to describe the scene and atmospheric conditions in the play. The first ghost in an adaptation of a Gothic novel is present in Fontainville Forest (1794), which was an adaptation by James Boaden 15 Horace Walpole, The Mysterious Mother, in Oxford English Drama – Five Romantic Plays, 1768-1821, eds Paul Baines and Edward Burns, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, 65.



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of Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest (1791). James Boaden was an experienced adaptor and dramatist who wrote biographies of the leading actors of his day. He was also a keen admirer of Ann Radcliffe. He adapted three Gothic novels for the stage: apart from Fontainville Forest, there was also Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797) as The Italian Monk (1797) and Lewis’ The Monk as Aurelio and Miranda (1798). Boaden tried to provide a kind of theoretical framework for the depiction of supernatural events in the theatre. He well understood that the situation of a dramatist was very different from that of a novelist and that the conditions under which an audience in a large theatre see the play and how readers enjoy a novel in a solitary situation are quite different: The stage and the closet are very different mediums for our observance of effects ... when the doubtful of the narrative is to be exhibited in drama, the decision is a matter of necessity .… the description only fixes the inconclusive dreams of the fancy … but the pen of the dramatic poet must turn everything into shape and bestow on these “airy nothings” a local habitation and name.16

If we a scene from Radcliffe’s novel and Boaden’s adaptation we see the difference. In The Romance of the Forest Adeline reads a scroll which contains a manuscript in which her late father describes the circumstances of his death. The heroine is alone in a large old chamber at night. The weather is rather unpleasant – there are violent gusts of wind, and she believes that she hears voices. She studies the manuscript in secrecy fearing discovery, so there is no independent observer who could confirm or deny the reality of her fancies. The existence of a phantom calling Adeline is more psychological than physical: readers are supposed to understand that under these conditions the weak girl can easily succumb to strong emotions. Ann Radcliffe writes: “Her imagination, wrought upon by these reflections, became sensible to every impression, she feared to look round lest she should again see some dreadful phantom, and she almost fancied she heard voices swell in the storm, which shook the fabric.”17 16

James Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees et al, Two Volumes, 1825, II, 97. 17 Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981, 141.



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Ann Radcliffe employs this method quite often because she believes that this uncertainty or obscurity accompanying supernatural events and dreaded evil is an important part of the aesthetic experience of the reader. That is to say the novelist can filter a horrific experience through a character’s consciousness so that the difference between the character’s sensations and the outside world can almost disappear. Representations of external evil This method of depicting supernatural events became more common in the course of the development of the genre of the Gothic novel. In the second half of the eighteenth century the characters are threatened by phantoms coming from outside in various forms. Later on, they more often come from inside, that is from the disturbed or agitated minds of protagonists – an attitude presented, for example, by Rosemary Jackson in Fantasy, The Literature of Subversion: “During the course of the nineteenth century the readings of otherness as supernatural … were being slowly replaced and disturbed by readings of otherness as natural and subjectively generated.”18 The situation in Gothic drama was not the same. For instance, James Boaden took a different approach when he was adapting this scene for Fontainville Forest. He understood theatre as a physical and material space: the audience watches the heroine and her strong emotions, and can identify with them. But the distance between the actress and spectators is too large for the audience to take her fantasies as their own. That is why James Boaden found it necessary to show the phantom physically in order to prove its existence. The presence of a ghost is gradually built-up. The phantom calls three times – the first time, the audience just hear his voice; then the second time, he is only “faintly visible”. Up to this point it is not clear whether the ghost is a product of Adeline’s imagination or whether it exists. On the occasion of the third call, the phantom glides across the dark part of the Chamber, and Adeline shrieks – “my senses do not deceive me! Terrible sounds! He fell right here!”19 – and faints. So both Adeline and spectators can see the full-size ghost and its existence is proven 18

Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, London: Routledge, 1981, 62. 19 James Boaden, Fontainville Forest, in The Plays of James Boaden, ed. Steven Cohan, New York: Garland, 1980, 39-40.



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beyond doubt. To be able to experience terror, the spectators needed a ghost of flesh and blood. The author of an adaptation also had to consider the practical questions of the phantom’s appearance on the stage. Even though the ghost was represented by a live actor, Boaden did not want to give up a certain obscurity and translucency of the spectre. He wrote about staging a phantom: “The great contrivance was that the spectre should appear through a blueish-grey gauze, so as to remove the too corporeal effect of a live actor, and convert the moving substance into a gliding essence.”20 However, the battle for the first demon was not over yet, because James Boaden joined the debate when he claimed that the ghost in Fontainville Forest was the first ghost on the Gothic stage. In the Prologue to his historical play Cambro-Britons (1798) he fights for his own ghost when he says: “…if there be any imitation, they who remember my play of Fontainville Forest, will imagine Mr Lewis conceived his phantom from mine.”21 Some critics believe that this physical presence of a ghost in Gothic drama changes the orientation of the genre. Evans says that by displaying the ghost “a playwright [Boaden] undertook to outGothicize a novelist”.22 However, MaryBeth Inverso states that in the moments when James Boaden replaces the paranoid structure of Ann Radcliffe by the physical presence of a ghost, the play becomes less Gothic than the adapted novel, because the uncertainties of a reader are replaced by the complacent security of the spectator.23 However, Boaden’s staging of a ghost was an appropriate one, regarding the theatrical practice of his time. A play is a complex structure. When analysing the text of a play it is not enough to consider just the text without referring to the stage production, which, at the same time, influences the text itself. The need for spectacular effects was heightened by conditions in the legitimate and illegitimate theatres. Both of London’s main patent theatres, Covent Garden and Drury Lane, were significantly enlarged in the 1790s. For example, Drury Lane was rebuilt in 1794 and its stage became quite large: eighty-three feet (twenty-five metres) wide 20

Boaden, Memoirs of the Life of John Philip Kemble, II, 117. James Boaden, Cambro-Britons, in The Plays of James Boaden, v-vi. 22 Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, 93. 23 MaryBeth Inverso, The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama, London: Research Press, 1990, 6-7. 21

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and ninety-two feet (twenty-eight metres) deep. Because of its huge auditorium, improved stage mechanics and increased distance between actors and spectators, it was necessary to concentrate on visual effects instead of the spoken word. Moreover, the audience was often rowdy and people had trouble hearing actors speak. That is why theatre managers had to rely more on spectacular effects than on the text of the play. The actors themselves did not like the vastness. Various accounts from the period complain about the huge size of the new theatre. One of them, the famous actress Sarah Siddons, who was then a member of the Drury Lane company, called it “a wilderness of a place”.24 Improvements in stage machinery There were also important improvements in stage machinery and lighting which contributed to the effective staging of supernatural events. George Rowell mentions the frequent use of stage-traps which enhanced the success of a spectacular drama. Scenery was becoming more complex, which was facilitated by the increased flying space above the stage with a sophisticated counterweight system. Both the scenery and actors could fly, which allowed “gliding” of ghosts as well as divine interventions from above.25 The most important technical innovation was the replacement of oil and candlelight by gas lighting adopted by two London patent theatres by the 1820s. The effects of spectacular drama were greatly improved by the flexibility of gas lighting since it enabled the stage director to focus the source of light on faces or other essential details. This possibility was further enhanced by the introduction of the limelight, perfected by Charles Kean, and allowed to direct a single beam to an individual feature on the stage. This pointed light could be further varied using coloured glass. All these altered conditions brought about the changes in acting methods. Rapid expansion of theatres and different ways of staging required a certain broadening and also coarsening of acting style. As the apron-stage gradually disappeared, actors were forced to overcome a growing distance between them and spectators, leading to greater monotony and declamation. 24

Iain Mackintosh, Architecture, Actor and Audience, London: Routledge, 1993, 35. George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 1792-1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978, 14-24. 25



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Stage adaptations of Gothic novels As with the Gothic playwrights already mentioned, adaptors of Gothic novels also omitted the representations of ghosts and demons sometimes. Boaden left out the supernatural elements completely when he was adapting Lewis’ The Monk. The play was called Aurelio and Miranda. Besides the simplification of the plot and reduction of characters, which was necessary, James Boaden excluded all references to supernatural events, which are very frequent in Lewis’ novel. The author intended to dramatize the main storyline without recourse to the supernatural, as he stated in the advertisement to the play.26 But the adaptation was not successful since the supernatural was a crucial element in Lewis’ imagination, and without it the drama became just a boring sentimental play. Moreover, the dramatist awakened false expectations of spectators who knew Lewis’ novel, which had a wide readership. Spectators expected similar thrills and chills, rape and murder. Boaden himself admitted the failure when he wrote: I had omitted the Devil himself, for the tempter, and given to Aurelio no stronger allurement than a disguised female, enamoured of his eloquence. Kemble acted inimitably, and Mrs. Powell did her best; for the rest, nothing can come of nothing. – I had done little, and they did less.27

After the turn of the century, the practice of staging ghosts and supernatural events became more common. Directors were more experienced and bolder in using stage mechanics and the ghosts started to play a more important role in the plots. An example of a playful and imaginative presentation of a ghost comes from Raymond de Percy; or, the Tenant of the Tomb (1822) by Margaret Harvey. In Scene VII of the second Act, the villain Conrad dwells with his servant Kenric by the tomb of Raymond, who they poisoned. All of a sudden one of the marble blocks rolls away, accompanied by a loud noise, and from the tomb there ascends a ghost resembling the knight commander from Don Juan. Stage directions indicate the advanced 26

James Boaden, Aurelio and Miranda, in The Plays of James Boaden, 1. James Boaden, The Life of Mrs. Jordan; Including Original Private Correspondence, and Numerous Anecdotes of Her Contemporaries, London: Edward Bull, 1831, II, 8.

27



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staging practice and proficiency of stage designers. According to the stage directions the spectre holds a burning torch – there is a big sword at its waist and a clarion is hanging round its neck. In a long monologue it blames both villains for Raymond’s death. Conrad is given time for repentance but Kenric is seized by the spectre and both sink through the trapdoor into the ground. Conrad faints and the scene closes. At that moment the spectators were expected to think that they really saw the ghost of the dead Raymond, who avenged himself. The spectre did not seem to be just the product of a vivid imagination – the stage directions are almost naturalistic. However, in the next Act the court jester Motley tries to frighten the maid Ursula and servant Clifford in the spectre’s attire. He says: Well, to be sure. This is a pretty dress enough! I warrant, poor Kenric thought the devil had got him in real earnest, when one of the banditti … carried him down into the vaults beneath the Marble Hall. But I must put it exactly where I found it, as Conrad by his time is brought to his sober-senses – should he discover me with it, my word, he would give me the trimming for my new jacket.28

Thus Margaret Harvey plays with the beliefs and fantasies of spectators; the tyrant is punished for murder and the audience can relax, after the previous thrill, during the comic performance of a jester. As results from the previous examples, the spectre as a ghost of the long-lost relative, murdered under mysterious conditions by one of the villains, is the most common type of Gothic ghost. In the course of the development of the genre, ghosts began to play a more active role in the plots. Starting from the first simple attempts present in Lee’s drama and Boaden’s adaptation, they developed into bolder representation in M.G. Lewis and the elaborate ghost in Harvey’s play. They became an integral part of the stage production. Ghosts of dead relatives were usually exposing the guilt of the villain, frightening the tyrant or the heroine, and finally even protecting the heroine from the tyrant’s assaults.

28

Margaret Harvey, Raymond de Percy; or, the Tenant of the Tomb, in Sisters of Gore, 219.



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Shakespeare’s influence The ghost of the murdered relative was clearly derived from Shakespeare whose influence was strongly felt in Gothic drama. As far as the depiction of ghosts and supernatural events is concerned, this was perhaps the strongest influence of all. James Boaden acknowledges his indebtedness to Shakespeare in his Epilogue to Fontainville Forest: Our vent’rous bard has often heard me say – Think you, our friends, one modern ghost will see, Unless, indeed, of Hamlet’s pedigree: Know you not, Shakespeare’s petrifying power, Commands alone the horror-giving hour?29

A typical example of this influence can be seen in the play St. Clair of the Isles; or, the Outlaw of Barra (1838) by Elizabeth Polack. This historical melodrama describing an episode from Scottish history is based on the novel by Elizabeth Helme, St Clair of the Isles (1803). There is a grey spectre called Bodach Glas, which appears to the heir of the Scottish noble family and warns him of imminent death. The ghost is serious and trustworthy, bearing the appearance of a greyhaired and bearded old man dressed in a dark mantle and white wig. But Shakespeare provided an example for less serious manifestations of the supernatural element in Gothic drama as well. A parallel to the personification of the forces of nature, that is fairies and elves from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, can be seen in the number of spirits, fairies and goblins which populated the woods and meadows of scenes in later Gothic plays. Bertrand Evans quotes M.G. Lewis as the first Gothic dramatist who used spirits of nature in his play The Wood Daemon; Or, One O’clock (1807). Apart from the title character Lewis introduced a number of giants, elves, furies and zephyrs.30 Natural spirits also played a role in adaptations of two novels, The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (1820), by James Robinson Planché, which was an adaptation of John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819), and The Devil’s Elixir; or, the Shadowless Man (1820) by Edward Fitzball. This last adaptation was based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Elixiere des Teufels (1815-16).

29 30

Boaden, Fontainville Forest, in The Plays of James Boaden, 69. Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, 150-54.



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In the first play the air spirit Unda and the water spirit Ariel appear. These new elements, which are not present in Polidori’s short story, act as antidotes to the malicious power of the vampire Ruthven. Ariel and Unda are to be seen only twice – at the beginning and at the end of the play – but their roles are significant. They warn Margaret, the heroine, against Ruthven’s intrigues and try to protect her. In the last Act they appear at the moment of the vampire’s destruction, indicating indirectly that they contributed to his defeat. The pagan character of both phantoms is strengthened by their spectacular arrival and elaborate dress. The water spirit ascends from the ground (via a trapdoor) in a lustrous white gown lined with shells. It evokes the air spirit which descends on a silver cloud (using pulley blocks) dressed in a sky-blue muslin gown set with glitter. The choir accompanies their appearance: according to the stage directions its shouts are supposed to imitate an echo and illustrate the atmosphere of the setting – a spacious basalt cave. Against the positive natural spirits there appears in the introductory vision the demon-vampire as a negative, evil force. Ariel and Unda perform a magic ritual during which Ruthven ascends through the trapdoor from one of the tombs in the cave. His long grey coat with metal buttons contrasted with the angelic whiteness and sky-blue of the air and water spirit. These were clear semantic signs indicating the development of the plot and the characteristics of Ruthven. The Devil’s Elixir brings an even more colourful depiction of supernatural elements. The introductory vision resembles the witches’ scene in Macbeth. There is the King of Shadows with his servants. They are preparing a love potion, stoking up a big cauldron and exorcizing demons. They wake up the phantom Gotzburg who has been sleeping for a hundred years paying for his wicked life. He really looks like a devil – the costume descriptions indicate he has a “red body, arms and legs – half tunic of brown and silver tissue – red sandals, and wings”.31 Gotzburg is the Shadowless man from the title of the play who has sold his soul to the devil. The Faustian motif is clear as well as the influence of the German “Schauerroman”, which inspired English novelists and dramatists of the period.32

31 Edward Fitzball, The Devil’s Elixir; or, the Shadowless Man, in The Hour of One: Six Gothic Melodramas, ed. Stephen Wischhusen, London: Gordon Fraser, 1975, 37. 32 Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, 49.



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Direct reference to German novels can be found in one more Gothic drama from that time called The Flying Dutchman; or, the Phantom Ship (1827) whose author again is Edward Fitzball. In the first scene of this play the heroine reproaches her maid: “… you’ve been poring over another of those German Tales and now … fear to sit alone … we only want a spectre to render it a perfect romance.”33 The Flying Dutchman can be cited as another example of a colourful depiction of supernatural beings. There are eight water fairies dancing on the stage who illustrate the movement of the sea tides and accompany the witch Rockalda. Such picturesque depictions of natural spirits are present in a number of plays from that period. A question often discussed concerns the moral orientation of spirits and demons. MaryBeth Inverso believes that Gothic playwrights and adaptors “... were … quietly conferring moral clarity and Christian retribution upon the ethical chaos of the Gothic text”.34 On the whole this is true. However, the first appearances of ghosts in Gothic drama lacked this clear moral orientation. For example, in The Mysterious Marriage, with perhaps the first ghost of the dead relative, it is not clear on whose side the ghost is. There are at least two feasible interpretations – either the dead Constantia protects the sleeping heroine by preventing the tyrant from getting to her chamber, or it demands justice for itself, since Constantia was the first lawful wife of Albert. In a number of plays of a later date the side which the phantom defends is obvious. In The Castle Spectre the murdered countess Evelina protects her husband and daughter Angela, covering them with her own body, shielding them from the drawn dagger of the tyrant. In Raymond de Percy the ghost of the murdered lord of the castle takes his torturers to hell. Some Gothic dramas, such as the The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles, introduce a fight between good and bad spirits for influence on the fate of protagonists. In Polidori’s story, the vampire destroys everything and everybody. James Robinson Planché introduces the good spirits Ariel and Unda who should combat the negative power of Ruthven and protect Margaret; in the end, they even destroy the vampire. So when the servant Nicolas in The Devil’s Elixir poses the rhetorical question whether

33 Edward Fitzball, The Flying Dutchman; or, The Phantom Ship, in The Hour of One, 11. 34 Inverso, The Gothic Impulse in Contemporary Drama, 8.



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“… it can be permitted that bad spirits triumph over pure and virtuous hearts?”.35 The answer is “no”. What is also important in relation to supernatural phenomena is the notion of superstition, which is significant for the social and political dimensions of Gothic literature. Superstition was regarded as a rather negative concept in the eighteenth century. The rationalists did not support faith in miracles, because it suppressed the norms of moderation and the dominance of reason. The dramatists had to confront superstition and deeply rooted resistance to it in their stage productions. M.G. Lewis mentions this fact in the Address to the reader of The Castle Spectre, where he tries to justify the presence of the ghost of Evelina: Against my Spectre many objections have been urged: one of them I think rather curious. She ought not to appear, because the belief in Ghosts no longer exists! In my opinion, that is the very reason she may be produced without danger; for there is now no fear of increasing the influence of superstition, or strengthening the prejudices of the weak-minded. I confess I cannot see any reason why Apparitions may not be as well permitted to stalk in a tragedy, as Fairies be suffered to fly in a pantomime, or heathen Gods and Goddesses to put capers in a grand ballet.36

The humorous side of superstition and love of horror tales and books is seen in The Flying Dutchman.37 But exaggerated superstition was not only the indulgence of the weak-minded. When servants or maids are superstitious in Gothic drama, they are not taken seriously. They usually provide a comic relief for the spectators. However, a tendency to superstition is seen in noble characters as well. Gothic heroines often suffer from a strong imagination which is scorned by male characters. Adeline in Fontainville Forest admits that reading a manuscript in a solitary place is her passion. She says: “At last I am alone! …. A general horror creeps thro’ all my limbs, and almost stifles curiosity.”38 In Planché’s adaptation The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles, Margaret is afraid of sharing her worries with her father 35

Fitzball, The Devil’s Elixir; or, the Shadowless Man, in The Hour of One, 32. Lewis, The Castle Spectre, in Seven Gothic Dramas, 1789-1825, 223. 37 Fitzball, The Flying Dutchman; or, The Phantom Ship, in The Hour of One, 11. 38 Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 38. See also Evans, Gothic Drama from Walpole to Shelley, 100. 36



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since he would laugh at her: “… he is such an enemy to what he calls superstition, that I dare not expose myself to his ridicule.”39 To conclude, I believe that despite its obvious limitations as a genre, that is naïve and predictable plots, stock characters and stock spectacular effects, Gothic drama represented popular culture. As the size of London and provincial theatres increased and the editions of novels and plays became inexpensive and accessible, Gothic plays were available to a broad spectrum of society. Some early theatrical reviews illustrate that actors and directors were able to involve the audience in their production and draw an emotional response from the spectators. Staging of ghosts and supernatural events contributed to the theatrical success of the genre and was often the main crowdpuller for the audience.40 The depiction of ghosts and other supernatural occurrences underwent a marked progress from short and simple appearances without a definite impact on the plot or without elaborate stage mechanics, as in The Mysterious Marriage or Fontainville Forest, through The Castle Spectre, where the ghost starts to play a more active role in the plot, to the sophisticated presentation of spirits in a play like The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles. The development of ghost staging also reflects the progress in production practice at the turn of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Sidelights, trapdoors and pulley constructions facilitated the display of ghosts so that the audience could enjoy real spectacular shows. Theatre managers, playwrights and directors understood the importance of their spectres. As Harriet Lee predicted, Gothic plays became the true “lands of apparitions”. And James Boaden confirmed this by remarking in the Epilogue to his play: “I die if I give up the ghost.”41

39

James Robinson Planché, The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles, in The Hour of One, 22. 40 However, the approval of ghosts was not universal. For example, John Genest in Some Account of the English Stage, from the Restoration in 1660 to 1830, Bath: Carrington, 1832, VII, 163, finds the spectacular effects and ghosts in Boaden’s plays “contemptible”. 41 Boaden, Fontainville Forest, in The Plays of James Boaden, 69.



GOTHIC ARCHITECTURE, CASTLES AND VILLAINS: TRANSGRESSION, DECAY AND THE GOTHIC LOCUS HORRIBILIS FANNY LACÔTE The connection between Gothic architecture and the topics of transgression and decay is a very interesting analytical angle to consider. This article aims at examining the Gothic architectural locus, i.e. the Gothic villain’s abode – typically an isolated, decrepit structure, standing out from the rest of the buildings and embodying the features of its inhabitant(s). By looking at a variety of texts, ranging from novels and short stories to excerpts from a comic book and a television show, it intends to illustrate the different forms that the imagery of Gothic houses assumes in modern popular culture and entertainment. Gothic fiction characteristically stages a paradoxical and ambiguous place – either a castle, a convent, a mansion or the old house next door – which not only plays the role of an asylum or a refuge for its elusive tenant, but also provides a base for all kinds of far-fetched situations and a site for vice and excess: it is there that the most terrible secrets are revealed and it is also there that the truth about the landlord’s identity is uncovered.

The clearly established identity of the Gothic novel – which has made it so suitable for parody – revolves around a number of elements, or a set of ingredients, which are so constantly present that they resemble clichés. The anonymous reviewer in the essay “Terrorist Novel Writing” in 1797 parodied the highly conventional nature of the Gothic through the formula of a recipe: Take an old castle, half of it ruinous. A long gallery, with a great many doors, some secret ones. Three murdered bodies, quite fresh. As many skeletons, in chests and presses. An old woman hanging by the neck, with her throat cut. Assassins and desperadoes, quant. suff. Noises, whispers, and groans, threescore at least. Mix them together, in the form of three volumes, to be Taken at any of the watering-places before going to bed.1 1

“Terrorist Novel Writing”, in The Spirit of the Public Journals for 1797, 3rd edn, London: Printed for James Ridgway, 1802, I, 229.

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The commonplaces of the Gothic novel indeed pervade the numerous specimens of the genre, and one of the elements that have ensured its durability over the centuries has been the evolution of these topics, their adaptation to their time of usage and to the readership’s expectations. The topics can be regarded as indicators of vital areas of the Gothic genre, and their resurgence in contemporary art and literature illustrate the fact that the Gothic is somewhat “timeless”. In this article I propose to study the interaction and evolution of two main Gothic motifs, often intimately connected in contemporary literature and visual arts, namely the buildings, that is, the architectural structures where the plot takes place, and the villain as the owner of the properties. To be more precise, I intend to focus on the Gothic house as a place of authority, as the realm where the master lives. The link between architecture and the Gothic novel is, as Montague Summers puts it in The Gothic Quest, “congenital and indigenous, it goes deep down to and is virtually of the very heart of the matter”.2 Whether it is a castle, a convent, a manor house or a mansion, Gothic fiction typically stages a paradoxical and ambiguous place, which plays the role both of an asylum and of a refuge but which also provides a base for all kinds of far-fetched situations and excess: the most terrible secrets are revealed there. More often than not, when the story is not that of a house in particular, the house still remains closely linked to the history of the main character. My comparative study is based on extracts taken from both classic and contemporary novels. The former cover Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)3 and The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797),4 John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819),5 Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796),6 William Beckford’s Vathek (1786)7 and Jane Austen’s Gothic parody Northanger Abbey 2

Montague Summers, The Gothic Quest: A History of the Gothic Novel (1938), New York: Russell and Russell, 1964, 189. 3 Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859. 4 Ann Radcliffe, The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797), Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2011. 5 John William Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale, London: Gillet, Printer, 1819. 6 Matthew Gregory Lewis, The Monk (1796), Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2009. 7 William Thomas Beckford, Vathek (1786), New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.



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(1817).8 Contemporary works are The Hellbound Heart (1986) by Clive Barker9 and The Grotesque (1989) by Patrick McGrath.10 Besides, I will focus on multimedia works, such as a television show and a graphic novel, namely the first episode of the TV series American Horror Story (2011) by Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk11 and the comic book Courtney Crumrin: The Night Things (2003) by Ted Naifeh.12 The typology of Gothic and neo-Gothic houses It is possible to distinguish between three types of representation of Gothic houses: firstly the mineral structure – an actual building made of stone – sometimes rendered as a place of confinement or as the theatre of supernatural apparitions; secondly, the house as a human being, assuming anthropomorphic, personified features; and finally, the house with animal qualities. A brief elaboration on each of these types is in order at the outset of this article. The most significant example of a mineral building in Gothic fiction remains that of the castle, which may become the scene of the supernatural. The castle, a direct reference to the Middle Ages, is actually the most common architectural structure in Gothic fiction. It is sometimes modelled upon real buildings, or sometimes, as in the case of Horace Walpole, an expression of the same architectural imagination that the writer exercises in the “Gothic” remodelling of Strawberry Hill. As Walpole himself suggests, “the fantastic fabric [of Strawberry Hill] was the scene that inspired the author of The Castle of Otranto”;13 more recently, Michael Snodin14 has addressed the similarities between the real-life architecture of Strawberry Hill and the imaginative architectural spaces of Otranto for The Castle of Otranto (1764). And it is characteristically a haunted place, as is the 8

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), London: Richard Bentley, 1856. Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart (1986), New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1991. 10 Patrick McGrath, The Grotesque (1989), London: Penguin Books, 1992. 11 Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, American Horror Story, Pilot, 2011. 12 Ted Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin, Volume One: The Night Things (2003), Portland, OR: Oni Press, 2012. 13 Horace Walpole, “Preface” to A Description of the Villa of Mr Horace Walpole at Strawberry-Hill near Twickenham, Middlesex, in The Works of Horatio Walpole, Earl of Orford, London: Printed for G.G. and J. Robinson, 1798, II, 398. 14 Michael Snodin, Horace Walpole’s Strawberry Hill, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015. 9



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case of the Castle of Lindenberg, in The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis, which hosts the event of the Bloody Nun, every five years, at midnight. Furthermore, the castle appears in the title of several other Gothic novels, apart from Horace Walpole’s, including The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789) by Ann Radcliffe, and Emmeline, or the Orphan of the Castle (1788) by Charlotte Turner Smith. Montague Summers notes the frequency with which words such as “castle”, “abbey” and “priory” appear in the titles of Gothic novels: “The number of romances published in the fifty years following Otranto which proclaimed the word Castle in their titles is a striking proof of the immense importance of the Castle in the Gothic Novel.”15 The Gothic castle also has the ideal characteristics of a prison, as can be seen in the novels of Ann Radcliffe, including The Mysteries of Udolpho and its castle, where Emily is held captive. The motif of the main character being imprisoned by the villain inside the Gothic castle remains one of the major components of the traditional Gothic novel. Therefore it is not surprising to find this stereotype in contemporary literature and visual arts, under different variants, such as the figure of the villain being presented as a prisoner in his own home, as if one could not exist without the other, as if they were in fact a single entity. For instance, in The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, Frank is a prisoner from the room upstairs, and in The Grotesque by Patrick McGrath, Sir Hugo is strongly linked to his family mansion which is falling apart, like the health of its owner, unable to escape it. The series American Horror Story takes place at a neighbouring house, more precisely in a mansion which is depicted as decaying and literally haunted, holding captive any soul that died within its walls. The manor is subject to superstitions: “You’re going to die in there; you’re gonna regret it”, says the little girl to the twins before they enter the house in the opening scene of the first episode. The cursed manor strives to destroy each family that comes to live in it: everyone comes to a tragic end. All the Gothic elements occur within its walls, as if they could only work in this well-defined environment. The second category of Gothic houses is that of the human being. The description of some Gothic buildings resorts to personification, so much so that readers do not know whether they are dealing with a 15

Summers, The Gothic Quest, 189.



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building or a human being. The anthropomorphism of the structure begins with the choice of the adjectives that qualify it, and which are similar to those we would use to describe a person. “Silent, lonely, and sublime” are the adjectives used to describe the castle of Udolpho, the house which acts like a sort of glamorous vampire, bewitching and seducing its residents and turning them into victims.

Fig.1: Still frame from American Horror Story, Pilot The second feature of the personified house is the name given to it: the sixteenth-century manor in The Grotesque is called Crook, and Montoni’s castle in Ann Radcliffe’s novel is named Udolpho: “There, said Montoni, speaking for the first time in several hours, is Udolpho.”16 Montoni does not say, “the Castle of Udolpho”, but just “Udolpho”, as if it were a person’s name. In The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker, the family house is presented as a “vampire house”. One of the upstairs’ rooms of the family house imprisons between its walls the body – or what is left of it – of Frank, the Gothic villain of the novel, who is reduced to feeding himself like a vampire through the walls of the house, sucking the blood of the victims which soaks the floor and the walls: The room was like a furnace, as the dead man’s energies pulsed from his body. They didn’t get far. Already the blood on the floor was 16

Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 179.



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Fanny Lacôte crawling away toward the wall where Frank was, the beads seeming to boil and evaporate as they came within range of the skirting boards. She watched, entranced. But there was more. Something was happening to the corpse. It was being drained of every nutritious element, the body convulsing as its innards were sucked out, gases moaning in its bowels and throat, the skin dessicating [sic] in front of her [Julia’s] startled eyes. At one point the plastic teeth dropped back into the gullet, the gums withered around them. And in mere moments, it was done. Anything the body might have usefully offered by way of nourishment had been taken; the husk that remained would not have sustained a family of fleas. She was impressed. Suddenly, the bulb began to flicker. She looked to the wall, expecting it to tremble and spit over her lover from hiding.17

In addition to providing shelter for the hybrid creature – half-human, half-vampire – that Frank is, the room itself possesses some powers similar to those of the vampires. It is able to summon Julia, and seems to influence her with some kind of bewitching powers, sometimes by taking control of her body. Deprived of her own free will, the young woman feels attracted to the room without knowing why: She wasn’t sure why she went up, nor how to account for the odd assortment of feelings that beset her while there. But there was something about the dark interior that gave her comfort; it was a womb of sorts, a dead woman’s womb. Sometimes, when Rory was at work, she simply took herself up the stairs and sat in the stillness, thinking of nothing; or at least nothing she could put words to. These sojourns made her feel oddly guilty, and she tried to stay away from the room when Rory was around. But it wasn’t always possible. Sometimes her feet took her here without instruction to do so.18

In American Horror Story, likewise, the characters speak about the house as if it were a person: Moira, the housekeeper, warns the new owner that an old house like this “has a personality and feelings, mistreat it and you’ll regret it”. Additionally, the real estate agent explains to the new owners: “As you can see the previous owners really loved this place like a child.” 17 18

Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 75. Ibid., 38.



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In some contemporary works, the description of the Gothic house is taken even further, to the extent that it has been given the aspect and features of an animal. This is the third category of the Gothic house I introduced above. In The Grotesque, Sir Hugo, its owner, compares Crook to a prehistoric animal: Rounding the bend in the drive, I found Crook heaving up before me against a sky in which the last dim light still faintly lingered. Black against that darkling air, no line straight, it seemed a great, skirted creature that rose by sheer force of will to thrust its wavering gables at the sky – a foundering mastodon, it seemed, a dying mammoth, down on its knees but tossing its tusks against heaven in one last doomed flourish of revolt.19

Of all the houses that flourish in Gothic fiction – be it traditional or contemporary – one characteristic is immutable: their antiquity, their past. People have been living in them, and we can say they are haunted, literally or not, by the past human presence that once inhabited them and gave them their identity. In Courtney Crumrin, a comic book, Uncle Aloysius’ house is presented as a place haunted by a dark past: “It is well known that terrible things happen there ….”20 The mysterious aura of these ancient houses is emphasized by superstitions, by gossip and stories about the terrible things that once occurred within their walls. The manor in American Horror Story is no exception, and the real estate agent must explain what she knows about its story: “Speaking of the last owners, full disclosure requires that I tell you what happened to them.” The traditional Gothic locus horribilis and its evolution The indoor geography of the buildings in Gothic fiction is a maze of secrets, where the hero gets lost. The internal architecture of the house consists of a giant labyrinth, within which there are subterranean stairs and backdoors, hidden corridors and so on. The inside of the house is also characterized by darkness, conducive to anamorphic illusions of the senses. The authors of our contemporary works insist on the obscurity present within, and they tend to present it as an omen of dark events that could happen if the protagonists persisted in their 19 20

McGrath, The Grotesque, 42. Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin, 13.



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exploration. For instance, darkness characterizes the upstairs room of the family house in The Hellbound Heart by Clive Barker: The bell was still pealing when she opened the door of the front room on the second floor. It was the largest of the three upper rooms … but the sun had not got in today (or any day this summer) because the blinds were drawn across the window. The room was consequently chillier than anywhere else in the house; the air stagnant. She crossed the stained floorboards to the window, intending to remove the blind. At the sill, a strange thing. The blind had been securely nailed to the window frame, effectively cutting out the least intrusion of life from the sunlit street beyond. She tried to pull the material free, but failed. The workman, whoever he’d been, had done a thorough job.21

Everything in the house is in favour of the Gothic plot or a pretext for the most terrible fears to be justified if the conditions are met. “And are you prepared to encounter all the horrors that a building such as ‘what one reads about’ may produce? Have you a stout heart? Nerves fit for sliding panels and tapestry?”, Henry Tilney asks Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey.22

21 22

Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 27-28. Austen, Northanger Abbey, 128.



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Fig. 2: Courtney Crumrin, Volume One: The Night Things, 25 Darkness not only causes temporary blindness for the characters, but it also promotes hallucination, and leads to anamorphosis and misperceptions. At night, every shadow in a Gothic novel becomes a monster. Courtney Crumrin, from the eponymous comic book, is a prisoner of her uncle’s antique house. During the night she wanders through the dark corridors that end up looking like a gigantic maze haunted by moving and disturbing shadows. In terms of location, the Gothic house used to be set in far-away places. Indeed, the house in traditional Gothic fiction has a very special location: it is built in remote areas, isolated from the world, often in the countryside. Like the castle of Udolpho, it rises on the top of a hill as an imposing and lonely structure, according to its first description:



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Fanny Lacôte The sun had just sunk below the top of the mountains she [Emily] was descending, whose long shadows stretched athwart the valley, but his sloping rays, shooting through an opening of the cliffs, touched with a yellow gleam the summits of the forest that hung upon the opposite steep, and streamed in full splendour upon the towers and battlements of a castle that spread its extensive ramparts along the brow of a precipice above.23

However in contemporary works there has been a change from the theme of the isolated Gothic house to a more nearby reality. The location of the Gothic house has experienced a shift from wild and isolated places to the urban sphere. As Walter Kendrick puts it: “Chills have traditionally taken whatever vehicles the time provides: when ruined abbeys were popular, chills lurked there; when domesticity reigned, chills went domestic ….”24 The neo-Gothic house, though certainly hidden from view by a wall, a hedge of shrubs or thick curtains drawn on the inside, is no longer located in a place cut off from the world. It is in the neighbourhood: one of those houses you can glimpse at from home (you only need to raise a curtain to see it), but, held back by rumours and superstitions, you never really approach it. This is the case of the family home described in The Hellbound Heart: “A few curtains were twitched aside when Lewton’s van drew up, and the unloading began; some neighbours even sauntered past the house once or twice, on the pretext of walking the hounds; but nobody spoke to the new arrivals, much less offered a hand with the furniture.”25 The same goes for the manor in the comic Courtney Crumrin. The first page consists of two vignettes: the first locates the old house in its neighbourhood, and the second depicts it as a crumbling mansion, typical of Gothic fiction. It is further added that the place is noted for its “disrepair and general gloom”.

23

Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 178-79. Walter Kendrick, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment, New York and London: Weidenfeld, 1991, 264. 25 Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 22. 24



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Fig. 3: Courtney Crumrin, Volume One: The Night Things, 13 Even though it is not a castle but simply the “house next door”, it has something that distinguishes it from the others: an old-fashioned elegance and a sort of an archaic quality. Besides, the ruins and the decaying appearance of these houses can be regarded as indices of their antiquity, of the many decades or even centuries they have crossed, or of the corruption they witnessed and which begins to gnaw them behind their walls. The manor Crook in The Grotesque, this giant of the sixteenth century, seems to collapse on itself, tired of witnessing the machinations of its inhabitants, or perhaps it is simply worn out by the south wind that brings corruption and fumes. Still, the will for self-destruction of the old building becomes more and more prevalent throughout the novel, weighting the atmosphere until it becomes unbearable. These houses of Gothic fiction, barricaded from the outside world, constitute by themselves a whole microcosm and are recognized as places of authority. The neo-Gothic house is but a variation of its traditional ancestor. It has adapted to the lifestyle of contemporary readers, has been 

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modelled on their fears, such as the fear of the Other, the unknown which is yet so close. It is located in the midst of other houses, in a seemingly quiet neighbourhood. But it still shares with its traditional Gothic precursor a certain dimension and a gloomy aspect: the hostile environment from which it emerges, which forbids or discourages access or any approach, and gives the place a degenerate, decadent atmosphere, suitable to malaise. These images, taken from American Horror Story and Courtney Crumrin, illustrate that situation:

Fig. 4 and 5: Still frame from American Horror Story, Pilot and page detail from Courtney Crumrin, Volume One: The Night Things, 9 In Gothic – as well as in neo-Gothic – stories, horror and mystery always take place in enclosed spaces, whether in a castle or an Elizabethan mansion. However, the traditional Gothic locus horribilis has been modified, adapted to a contemporary readership and their lifestyle. Horror does not necessarily take place within the castle, although its presence has not completely disappeared from neo-Gothic landscapes. Indeed, the essence of contemporary Gothic has become domestic, as Fred Botting puts it: “In later fiction, the castle gradually gave way to the old house: as both building and family line, it became the site where fears and anxieties returned in the present.”26

26

Fred Botting, Gothic (1995), London, New York: Routledge, 1996, 3.



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Portrait of the Gothic villain as the tenant of the house Villains are the most detailed and complex characters in Gothic narratives – and the fact that they tend to occupy leading positions only adds to their centrality. We could easily establish an identikit of the Gothic villain: a giant whose face bears the marks of a dual nature and a profound viciousness. He is as daunting as the impenetrable castle he lives in. As an anti-hero, he represents a multi-faceted character who embodies a demon and personifies a crystallization of fears. Firstly, the villain is “the stranger”, whom we do not know much about, and whose past is rather mysterious. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank is, for his neighbours, just “the odd fellow who’s lived in the house for a few weeks the previous summer”;27 and Courtney Crumrin, the heroine of the eponymous comic book, knows nothing about her uncle when she comes to live in his gloomy house, although she does keep memories of her previous stays in the house, which “were not pleasant ones”.28 Secondly, the villain is either the owner of the Gothic edifice or the one that reverses power and seizes the structure in an illegal and wicked way. In this case he symbolizes a threat to the established social order, which may collapse in order to make room for tyranny and vice. The villain represents a legitimate figure of authority: he is the one possessing power, whether political or religious. Let us recall that Ambrosio from The Monk (1796) by Matthew Gregory Lewis is a powerful religious figure, whereas Lord Ruthven from The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori is a gentleman of noble birth, thus possessing social and economic clout. Likewise, Schedoni, in The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) by Ann Radcliffe is the religious advisor of the Marquise, whereas Vathek, in the eponymous novel (1786) by William Beckford, is a caliph and holds absolute governmental authority. Recurrent in Gothic fiction, the figure of the “baron-villain” who laughs at the society’s conventions can be seen as an epitome of an antisocial power, as a symbol of a decadent aristocracy, and as a crystallization of the general anxiety of the time. In contemporary works male protagonists also tend to be men of cultural power and social influence. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank is 27 28

Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 32. Naifeh, Courtney Crumrin, 14.



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an experienced, worldly man. In Courtney Crumrin, Uncle Aloysius is depicted as a wise, knowledgeable old man. Last but not least, in The Grotesque, Sir Hugo is a man of culture, more precisely a scientific scholar. The villain, whether a monk or a tyrant, embodies vice and represents an erotic threat, which in some Gothic novels is fulfilled, as in The Monk: Ambrosio is haunted by the demon of the flesh; at first he is only a voyeur, watching Antonia in her bath, but at the end he turns out to be an incestuous rapist and murderer. At the same time, Gothic villains boast an ambivalent nature, which conceals a complex tormented psychology. These characters are both attractive and repulsive. Like vampires, who awaken as bloodthirsty monsters at dusk, Gothic villains can transform themselves at different times of the day – which brings to mind Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’s dual personality. Striving to preserve appearances, they work in secret and hide their true nature, which is only revealed when the time has come for them to fulfil their misdeeds. Gothic villains possess characteristics that evoke Faust’s legend: avid for experience and knowledge, they desire to rise beyond their human condition, which leads them to sign a pact with evil forces – like that between Mephistopheles and Faust – which predictably leads to eternal damnation. Villains are men whose disillusion brings them to extreme depravation, which, if not already developed at the beginning, is just waiting to be put to the test. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank is moved by “a beautiful desperation”,29 human experiences do not satisfy him anymore. However, whereas Faust is filled with a “libido sciendi”, we could say that Gothic villains are haunted by a “libido sentiendi”,30 a sensual desire which often leads them to become libertines. This desire holds them prisoners, as libertinism is a spiral that inexorably leads to intolerable acts. Tired of the usual perversions, Gothic villains must be creative so as to renew their excitement, which inevitably leads to transgression and excess. Frank is forced to go further and further to satisfy his thirst for 29

Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 34. In De Vera Religione (c. 390), the philosopher and theologian St Augustine wrote about the concept of libido, which he divided into three sorts: a “libido sciendi”, a “libido sentiendi” and a “libido dominandi”. See Eric Dubreucq, Le Cœur et l’Ecriture chez Saint Augustin: Enquête sur le rapport à soi dans les Confessions, Villeneuve d’Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003, 151.

30



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experience, described as an “appetite for experience that conceded no moral imperative”.31 He is travelling the globe in search of the ultimate pleasure: “Youthful pleasures had possessed the appeal of newness, but as the years had crept on, and mild sensation lost its potency, stronger and stronger experiences had been called for.”32 He manages to find the secret contained in the box of Lemarchand, an ingenious puzzle that leads to the Cenobites, a world of prohibited wonders. But he is defeated by his own game and eventually is imprisoned in this poisoned world. This Faustian quest, for Frank in The Hellbound Heart, is endowed with a highly destructive – or “selfdestructive” – power. Another interesting point to consider is the merging of architecture and the living being into a single entity. Let us recall Charles Perrault’s tale of Bluebeard, and the strong link between the Marquis Bluebeard and his castle: the villain hides a part of his soul – the darkest part for that matter – in the heart of his castle, symbolized by the forbidden chamber, and his wife eventually finds it by pushing the door of the bloody cabinet, a prohibited place that reveals the dual nature of the Marquis. The link between Bluebeard and his castle typically resembles the connection existing in Gothic narratives between the villain and his house. The figure of the villain, whether in traditional or contemporary Gothic fiction, strongly depends on the representation of his residence. In Courtney Crumrin Uncle Aloysius is presented as a mysterious and gloomy man, like his home, full of secret rooms and private chambers from which he never seems to emerge, as we can see on the image below:

31 32

Barker, The Hellbound Heart, 33. Ibid., 16.



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Fig. 6: Page detail from Courtney Crumrin, Volume One: The Night Things, 14 The Gothic villain does not exist without its house, a physical structure that hides and protects him, and vice-versa; so much so that we end up merging them into a single entity. We can notice this particular link in The Hellbound Heart when Frank’s body is literally incarnated in the walls of the upstairs room of the family home. The Gothic house is into made a fortress worthy of the Marquis de Sade’s novels: it embodies its owner’s evil twin – another recurrent Gothic theme – its dark side, and its dual nature. They complement each other. While the Gothic villain shows an unalterable face and a spotless appearance to the outside world, his house contains his darkest and most shameful secrets. To pursue another comparison, we could say that the eponymous figure in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) reminds us of villains from traditional Gothic narratives, as if it were modelled on their characters: his unchanging features, instead of revealing his true nature, hide it so well that he 

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seems to wear a mask. He hides his true self in a place which could be symbolized by the castle, or even by the bloody chamber previously mentioned. These forbidden places reveal the dark side of the villain’s soul, in the same manner as Dorian Gray’s portrait, hidden in the attic, away from prying eyes, reveals his true face. The Gothic house becomes the exact replica of its owner, and sometimes we do not really know who is controlling whom. Sir Hugo, the disabled protagonist of The Grotesque, is firmly convinced that the house eventually absorbs the soul of its residents: “There is a way, I have come to believe, that a structure, in time, becomes immanent with the spirit of its residents, and to this I may have been responding when I gazed at the chimneypiece this morning.”33 He also has the feeling that he is an outgrowth of the house: … I discovered to my horror that my wheelchair was an excrescence of the living boards of Crook, and that I was its sentient blossom, that I was growing into my wheelchair, merging with it and in the process turning into a sort of giant plant. Hindered though I was from investigating my own extremities I knew somehow that green, leafy extrusions were sprouting from my back and my arse and my arms and legs and feet, and these extrusions, these sprouts and tendrils, had fused with the wood and the basketwork of the wheelchair, and had begun to crawl across the floorboards and clutch at table legs and doorknobs and electrical wires, and I knew they would in time colonize the entire structure, and bring it down; I would then merge organically with Crook and we would rot together on that high hill …34

The manor is falling apart, like the helpless body of Sir Hugo whose mental health is slowly decaying. He senses that the house will collapse when he dies, as if they actually were one single entity: In the windows downstairs the lights shone into the night, and thus did the life of the house still burn, still feebly burn, and then, only then, as I stood at the bend in the drive and leaned, panting, after my climb, on my walking stick, only then did I experience a sudden intimation of mortality: my own house would go down as I would go down; we were the last of the line.35 33

McGrath, The Grotesque, 118. Ibid., 157. 35 Ibid., 42. 34



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Even when the house is not physically or rather textually present in Gothic narratives, it exists in the mind of the narrator or the protagonist, who revisit it in their thoughts. It exists in the subconscious and memories, and is integrated into the hero himself, haunted by his own imagination. In The Grotesque, as in many Gothic tales, the house is no longer a simple architectural object: it becomes a metaphor for the tortured soul of its owner, a living extension of his troubled being. .

This analysis has allowed us to demonstrate the persistence and evolution of two intertwined elements of the Gothic genre in literature and contemporary entertainment and graphic art – the Gothic villain and the Gothic house. Even if the status of the Gothic house has evolved over time, outbalancing its simple role as a mineral building, gaining in personality and in humanlike behaviour, it is still strongly dependent on the Gothic villain’s figure. The interplay is also true: rare are the malevolent characters in Gothic fiction – traditional or contemporary – without a roof to hide their misdeeds. And these two reciprocal commonplaces from the traditional Gothic novel are still present in the literature and visual arts of our time. In contemporary Gothic narratives, the plot takes place in isolated villages, in dark metropolises or in abandoned factories and other remnants of the postindustrial era. Modern horror finds a natural home in this new urban decor, in these daily, familiar places, where the monstrous lurks. What generates fear is the surfacing of the uncanny in present-day cities and in the midst of clean, sanitized neighbourhoods. The role of architecture in the popularity of the Gothic genre to this day is perhaps, then, a central one: it plays an iconic function by providing a setting identikit, an easily identifiable place where the Gothic action is bound to unravel. The Gothic’s popularity is perhaps due to its entertaining power, as it plays at giving us a fright – typically within the villain’s household. But it also works as a catharsis insofar as it exorcizes our demons, and makes us reflect upon human nature by dealing with the universal unconscious, the repressed, and death. The Gothic house, then, is the place where the unfolding of horror serves to express the fears and anxieties felt during a given era. But the Gothic genre also remains open for the projection of the imagination of future generations, as McGrath states: 

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It is a supple and resilient genre that shows no sign of exhaustion. Rather, it is capable of infinite renewal, as its diverse themes and rich stock of symbols are gathered up and reinvested with meaning by successive generations of artists.36

And the Gothic house is perhaps one of the symbols of the genre which has given few signs of exhaustion.

36 Patrick McGrath, “Transgression and decay”, in Gothic: Transmutations of Horror in Late Twentieth Century Art, ed. Christoph Grunenberg, London: MIT Press, 1997, 153.



PART III3RVWPRGHUQ*RWKLF±,GHQWLW\7UDQVIRUPDWLRQVRI WKH9DPSLUH

POSTMODERN GOTHIC: TEEN VAMPIRES JOANA PASSOS This article addresses the transformation of the vampire figure from a repulsive, threatening creature into a desired lover figure for teenage audiences in recent films and TV series. The films that set the archetype of the subgenre, such as Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) or Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), represent the vampire as a scary, hideous figure who evokes some deeply set collective fears: the silent invasion by foreign lobbies or peoples, pandemic contaminations like the medieval pest or the feared venereal diseases and the temptation of pagan, licentious sex. These film adaptations fit the spirit of the original novel by Bram Stoker, and they project Victorian racism and sexism as remaining key elements in dominant Western mentality. Recent film and TV adaptations, however, put forth new meanings associated with the vampire figure by a contemporary teenage audience, revealing a postmodern artistic stance insofar as they offer new, ironical articulations of former hegemonic myths. This article will thus attempt to trace the playful, provisional rearticulation of the Gothic heritage with the contemporary aspirations which the vampire embodies.

In Gothic Studies, Dracula,1 has become a classic model of horror stories, granting its main character, Count Dracula, a life of his own outside the scope of the novel as a sort of popular myth or archetype of vampire characters. As such, Dracula has been the object of diverse and overlapping approaches, proving to be a complex text, rich enough to provide relevant answers to different questions. This plurality of meanings may help explain why Dracula remains an iconic character in Western popular culture, a century after his creator’s death (Bram Stoker, 1847-1912). In 1897, the original novel was received as a horror story intended for adults, successful among a popular audience, and it was dismissed among fin-de-siècle British scholars as superstitious folklore or lowbrow culture.2 However, through time, Dracula has been interpreted as representing the symbolic decadence of aristocracy in 1

Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897), London and New York: Penguin Books, 1992. Camille-Yvette Welsh, “A look at the Critical reception of Dracula”, in Critical Insights, Dracula, ed. Jack Lynch, Ipswich, MA: Salem Press, 2009, 38-54.

2

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bourgeois society,3 as the expression of racist phobias about foreign/ immigrant peoples at the zenith of colonialism,4 as the ideal of homoerotic bonding to protect women and territory from competing powerful males, and, naturally, as the subliminal expression of erotic desire in the repressive context of Victorian society. The novel has enjoyed an even more popular afterlife through film and TV series adaptations. This article aims at analysing the evolution of the vampire figure by comparing its archetype, Stoker’s Dracula, and the first film adaptations, namely Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror (1922)5 and Dracula (1931),6 with more recent films such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)7 and the Twilight Saga (from 2008 to 2012).8 At the same time, the article will provide a critical view of the different meanings and ideologies Dracula personifies as a popular myth, at different moments in time, within changing sociological contexts. Stoker’s novel: narrative structure and plot As part of the British literary tradition, it is remarkable how little Stoker’s novel has been discussed in terms of style and writing technique in spite of its immaculate narrative structure. It is no small achievement to create an epistolary novel involved with the supernatural, mystery and suspense without a narrative voice guiding the reader. Let it be noted that one only gets partial information from the letters by the characters themselves. In this way, the reader is confronted with a complex plot where connections between action and perceptions have to be inferred. All the directions that a narrative voice might provide, which are such an easy strategy to hold the plot together and guide the reader, are replaced in Stoker’s novel by the 3

David Punter, “Dracula and Taboo”, in Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999, 22-29. See also David Punter, The Literature of Terror, available at: http://www.glyndwr.ac.uk/rdover/other/david_pu.htm (accessed in July 2012). 4 Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”, in Victorian Studies, XXXIII/4 (Summer 1990), 621-45. 5 Nosferatu, a Symphony of Horror, 1922, directed by F.W. Murnau, Film Arts Guild. 6 Dracula, 1931, directed by T. Browning, Universal Pictures. 7 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, 1992, directed by F.F. Coppola, Columbia Pictures. 8 Twilight, 2008, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, Summit Entertainment. New Moon, 2009, directed by Chris Weitz, Summit Entertainment. Eclipse, 2010, directed by David Slade, Summit Entertainment. Breaking Dawn, 2011/2012, directed by Bill Condon, Summit Entertainment.



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coherence among the sets of letters by different characters. Thus, at the outset of this article, a word of credit should be given to the writer, so often dismissed in the shadow of his own creation, Dracula, a character who does not share centre stage easily (or anything else really). As Dracula set a literary tradition, soon becoming a classic model of vampire stories, it may be important to briefly examine its basic story lines, which were to recur, or echo, in many subsequent products of the horror subgenre it helped to establish. Plot-wise, Bram Stoker’s Dracula revolves around a vampire that moves from his castle in the Carpathian Mountains (Romania) to London, with the intention of preying on the heart of a modern city. In the process of moving to London, Count Dracula engages the legal services of an Englishman, Mr Jonathan Harker, whom he keeps imprisoned in his Transylvania castle, while the count himself travels to London. There was a predecessor to Jonathan Harker, an earlier envoy, Mr Renfield, who had travelled to Eastern Europe to meet the Count. But while set on emigrating, the vampire wants someone with a life (and a wife) worth taking, hence Harker is no accidental choice. Within the logic of the plot, Dracula wants to replace Jonathan Harker as a husband, as a Londoner, and as a man of his time, with social connections after which to expand his own vampire preying (why else would the first victim be Lucy, the best friend of Jonathan Harker’s fiancée, first move in a scheme to replicate a social circle of “un-dead friends”?). Accordingly, Dracula will have to face a set of opponents, such as Van Helsing, Dr Seward, the American Quincey Morris and Sir Arthur Holmwood, who will close ranks with Jonathan Harker when he escapes and returns to London. In the duel between vampire and a team of heroes gathered by a set of converging circumstances, the novel turns out to be a good detective story as well, where truth is gradually revealed, demanding a mental journey from this team of men of science and reason into the unknown, the occult and the supernatural. Only by admitting the possible existence of the vampire can they face and beat him. Thus the story also provides a thesis on the limits of reason to understand life and the world in all its complexity.



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Stoker’s character template: the vampire archetype as a menace to Western supremacy A basic interpretation of the vampire figure, as it is represented in Stoker’s novel, has to consider its main features and habits: first, vampires live at night, which represents an inversion of normal human patterns of life, as people are active mostly during the day. Secondly, vampires feed on blood, which is a taboo, since to drink human blood is a form of cannibalism and abuse, and blood is a substance usually connected to witchcraft, sacred rituals or empowerment (since lineage relies on blood to claim power). Thirdly, while they feed on others, they may feel sexual attraction, and they are as promiscuous (thus, sinful) as seductive. Fourthly, they may infect or contaminate human beings, creating new vampires; even so, they are lonely figures, cursed to live an eternally meaningless, solitary life after death. Finally, though they hold the promise of eternal life, they are represented as cruel, disgusting figures, who have undergone a degradation of human abilities and qualities. These are the original negative connotations of the vampire figure, personified by Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Consequently, in its nineteenth-century version, Dracula inspired horror and repulsion. As a damned figure he represented a risk for one’s soul, while his appetites were a danger to one’s body, health and morality. Besides, he was a predator that could create others like himself, expanding the danger he represented like a plague. In this view, Dracula became the personification of a terrible menace to British society. As a figure that represents a collective threat he had an exhilarating effect, inspiring strategies of collaboration and mutual support among the threatened community, symbolized by the group of friends fighting him. In agreement with this line of interpretation, if one envisages Dracula as an opponent of British society, then, the importance of his foreign status and his cultural difference in relation to Western civilization becomes a central flaw, a further mark of a fall from grace. That is why the geographical distance between London and his place of birth, in the East, is translated in terms of a corresponding cultural distance from modern civilization. This is the reason why reference to the remoteness of his world is such a key element in Dracula’s characterization, to the extent that it has to be mentioned in the opening pages: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; … I find that the district he named is in 

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the extreme east of the country, just on the borders of three states, Transylvania, Moldavia and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian mountains; one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.”9 One should recall that Dracula is created at the height of British imperial power, as the epitome of a foreign, impending attack on Britain, by uncivilized, competing powers. An established approach to the vampire figure is precisely the debate around postcolonial Gothic, which has emerged as a field of study.10 From a postcolonial point of view, the revealing social anxiety which Stoker’s vampire figure arouses is the clear manifestation of racial prejudice as an ideological apparatus of British colonialism, which equated the arrival of foreigners with the destructive “return of the repressed”. As the vampire travels from Transylvania (from the East) towards London, the very heart of colonial power, his intention, from a racist viewpoint, can be nothing less than to contaminate and weaken it. In this line of reading, Dracula can stand for the vanguard in the invasion of the Western colonial world by peripheral, minority cultures, disrupting the status of the West as a normal/normative society. If one interprets the trajectory of the vampire, moving from his Eastern, remote castle to London, as a movement that reverses the logic of colonial hegemony, then, the result is a strong appeal to male bonds, inviting white males to close ranks and protect Western civilization (and white women) from these invading, rival men coming from abroad, be it the East or other parts of the colonial empire (note the surname of his first victim is “Miss Lucy Westenra”, the Western bride: Dracula comes to take her, and with her, as with other would-be brides, Western vitality and procreation abilities). This male dispute by two groups of men – the Westerners and the aliens, or, the nation and its others – over the female body invites a dialogue with another field of studies that has equally been deeply interested in the Gothic and the vampire figure as an icon of popular culture: feminist studies, such as Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous Feminine11 and Marina Warner’s argument in From the Beast to the

9

Stoker, Dracula, 11-12. William Hughes and Andrew Smith, “Defining the Relationship between Gothic and the Postcolonial”, in Gothic Studies, V/2 (November 2003), 1-6. 11 Barbara Creed, The Monstrous Feminine, London: Routledge, 1993. 10



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Blond and Managing Monsters,12 a key corpus of research to explore Western popular mythologies. From a feminist point of view Dracula is an extremely conservative figure as he strengthens the exclusive hold of patriarchy to power, action, initiative and competition. Women, like any other goods, have to be protected from rivals, and they exist to feed male hunger – for sex, for comfort, for heirs, and for blood. Alternative feminist recreations of the vampire figure, such as women or lesbian vampires, respond to this patriarchal construction of Dracula as a male vampire. But the meanings associated with this popular character, as discussed in different fields of research like Gothic, postcolonial and feminist studies, deserve further attention. Dracula’s sexuality, contamination and terror It is widely accepted in Gothic Studies that even if the vampire is a damned, threatening figure, there has always been an element of titillation in the worldly versions of the character, promiscuously coveting sexy brides, bringing about their sexual awakening.13 In the original novel, sex is not mentioned explicitly, but it goes without saying that the Count’s sexual appetites are impossible to keep under control according to the norms of decency or the standards of socially correct behaviour, since he does not abide by any of them. Besides, the two victims he chooses are two adorable ladies, and we are told he keeps three beautiful female vampires in his castle. Consequently, one of the most prominent aspects in the characterization of Dracula is sexuality, framed by Stoker as aggressive, exclusively mindful of his own narcissistic and predatory needs. Moreover, there is a suggestion that, as a damned, satanic creature, his sex habits are sinful, lusty and beastly. But, somehow, as the corollary of these elements, Dracula becomes hyper-sexualized, taking pleasure in the exchange of bodily fluids, penetrating others with his protuberant teeth. Because of this carnal sexuality, the vampire figure has aroused a repulsive terror associated with a long European history of sexual diseases. Hence, the vampire character has been discussed as the source of a pandemic contamination, replicating itself bite by bite. John S. Bak argues, in his Preface to the critical anthology 12

Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blond, London: Chatto and Windus, 1994; Managing Monsters, London: Vintage, 1994. 13 M. Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire, Gender, Fiction and Fandom, from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower Press, 2005.



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Post/modern Dracula, from Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis,14 that Dracula is a case of “bad blood”, which makes him an adequate metaphor for the AIDS threat. In the same anthology, William Hughes15 also emphasizes the centrality of blood as a key element at the heart of the Gothic/vampire subgenre. However, Hughes sees the perception of vampires as symbols of disease or blood contamination as a later postmodern projection onto the Victorian character: For all this, blood, other than in its status as a gruesome detail rather a symbolic substance, remains strikingly absent from the reviews of 1897. It becomes, though, once brought into pre-eminence in postmodernity, the emblem of a praxis, a preoccupation of the twentieth-century practice of criticism, rather than a theme that is discretely Victorian. At the heart of Dracula criticism, as it were, is blood – blood over-determined as a psychoanalytical substitute for semen, or as Foucault would have it, a marker in “the order of things”…16

Like Hughes, I believe the enduring connection between blood and contamination associated with the vampire figure is rather a matter of sex and promiscuity, which reverberates with deeply set fears in the European psyche, after centuries of syphilis. This link between vampires, sex and disease is equally present in Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel (film version from 1992), one of the screenplays that most respects the original Bram Stoker novel. In Coppola’s film, a paradigmatic scene shows Van Helsing, the personification of sound, insightful reason, declaring: “civilization and syphilization have spread together”, claiming mankind never lived without promiscuity and venereal diseases. Dracula’s migration from Modernism to postmodernism At the moment when Dracula was written and published, the West was living at the zenith of colonialism, a political and social configuration that promoted patriarchy, racism and hegemonic (selflegitimating) concerns as very clear priorities at the heart of Britain’s 14

Post/modern Dracula, from Victorian Themes to Postmodern Praxis, ed. John S. Bak, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, ix-xi. 15 William Hugues, “On the Sanguine Nature of Life: Blood, Identity and the Vampire”, in ibid., 3-13. 16 Ibid., 4.



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dominant ideologies. By 1900 the Gothic had been long established as a popular literary subgenre and, in this context, the only setback in the reception of Dracula was the Modernist trend, rather keen on technological improvement and rational organization, marginalizing Romanticism, folk culture and medieval revivals17 – three key elements in the composing of vampire mythologies as outmoded, “passé” references. Yet, while Modernism was dismissive of Gothic motifs, postmodernism revived them, as a reminiscence of the Romantic spirit and as an alternative fantastic universe in the library of world myths. Actually, it is the coherence of the Gothic world as an alternative universe framed by communal life, poetic and magic references and a slower pace of life that feeds current-day Gothic subculture, a powerful icon of resistance to brisk, pragmatic liberalism. Postmodernism is, essentially, a revisionary mode (Brooker; Docherty;18 Kroker and Cook;19 Foster;20 Jameson21), creating new meanings for old references, and that is why some of its most important strategies are quotation, inter-textual references, duplication, revival and rewriting. If postmodern artistic practices playfully recuperate elements from diverse cultural heritages (not exclusively Western), reorganizing these elements in order to create something new, I disagree that postmodernism is blank parody, as Fredric Jameson22 argued at a certain dated moment. It took some decades to realize which roads postmodernism would take beyond deconstruction and playful quotation, but some of the alternatives it promoted (by making room for new modes of thought) have already emerged, as for example the ecological movement, feminism and gender awareness and postcolonial studies (including related alternative mappings of globalization). On the whole, through 17

Modernism/Postmodernism, Critical Readers, ed. Peter Brooker, London: Longman, 1992. 18 Postmodernism: A Reader, ed. Thomas Docherty, New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 19 Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene, Excremental Culture and Hyper Aesthetics, Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Education, 1991. 20 Hal Foster, The Anti-aesthetic: Essays in Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1985. 21 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso, 1991. 22 Ibid., 17.



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postmodern practices a deep revision of the historical and cultural archive of the western world is taking place. In the frame of this revival trend and its corresponding recreation of older cultural references, how does Dracula migrate from Modernism to postmodernism, surviving yet another generation of fans? How are the meanings associated with this character reorganized and revitalized? I would like to use the vampire film tradition, as well as the more recent trend of television series, to offer some tentative answers to these questions. Nosferatu (1922), a silent film directed by F.W. Murnau and starring Max Shreck, is, by all standards, a Gothic horror film. The vampire is an oddity, a monster, an animal-like creature that contaminates the city like the plague, a subtext of the plot. He is attracted to pretty women, but he only has the instincts of a predator, unfit for social exchange. He sucks life, sucks blood, and lusts after sex, but he does so instinctively, as compulsory drives, without deliberate planning or scheming. Nosferatu’s behaviour is almost like a trance, shy of human society, slow-witted to the point of being easily tricked into staying with his self-sacrificing victim until dawn, when, carelessly, he exposes himself to the sunlight, being killed. Nosferatu is true to Gothic patterns creating a genuine horror story. The film was a huge success that still keeps all its power to seduce audiences to this day. It is meticulously shot, with outstanding photographic quality and a subtle, elegant script, full of suspense. A few years later, Hollywood released its own film adaptation, Dracula (1931), directed by Tod Browning and starring Bela Lugosi. In these nine years, the vampire evolves a lot: no longer a monster, he becomes a dandy with hypnotic powers, a rather sophisticated gentleman in full control of social skills. Still, Hollywood’s vampire is a patriarchal figure, preying on women and overlapping his thirst for blood with sexual desire. Again, the secretive foreigner is a lethal threat, disguised as a sophisticated cosmopolitan tourist. In a way, since less obvious and limited in social skills, this new version of the vampire only grew scarier for his ability to participate in social life. He also stands out as the surviving representative of old, decadent monarchies, despotic and lawless, which no longer have a place in modern, western society. Tod Browning’s Dracula represents, as opposed to the world represented by the Count, the values of democratic principles and western civilization, emphasizing the 

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rejection of blood aristocracies as a dead social model based on superstition and ignorance. After Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi’s Dracula there were many remakes and versions of the character. All of these tended to reproduce the traditional model, remaining, for the most part, horror, Gothic stories. A radical transformation of the myth happens with Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, a film from 1992. And it is the prologue in Coppola’s film version that makes all the difference. For the first time, Dracula is given a motive for his war against God. His damnation is an act of divine vengeance, a punishment that leaves the audience on the vampire’s side. As Vlad Dracul started his war against God in the name of love, the public is expected to like the vampire, identifying with him against the human heroes of the story, who are the opponents to the happy ending of a love story that lasts centuries. This romantic version of Dracula disappointed the critics and the audience that should be drawn to the film in the first place: fans of horror films that expected a real scare show from the film and got, instead, a love story. The director’s perspective and audience expectations could not be further apart. However, total credit has to be given to Coppola, and not only for the visual and poetic quality of the film, which eventually granted him a wide box office success. I would rather highlight the fact that Coppola was the first director who sensed the direction in the revival of the vampire as a popular figure. It was time to break with the exhausted and limited horror tradition, transforming the vampire into a perfect lover. As a lover figure, the vampire changed from a horror character to a romantic hero, and this detour also implied a change in target audience, from adult viewers to teenage audiences. To prove Coppola right, there are countless television series for a teenage audience featuring vampires. A few examples seem relevant. Consider Split, an Israeli series, the famous Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, the very successful Portuguese Red Moon (Lua Vermelha) and even the cartoon series Monster High. In all these cases, either the supernatural is represented as an alternative part of normality, with vampires attending schools and facing all the usual teenage problems and insecurities, or contact with vampires starts a self-discovering journey, forcing the main characters to make choices and define their position in society. In any case, it is a more superficial, light version of the 

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vampire myth that survives in this popular form. Yet I would not dismiss it as a totally irrelevant avatar. Clearly, the vampire is no longer meant to scare you, or to be repulsive, but he epitomizes an instance of the marvellous and the magic universes that survive in these technological times. As such, vampire stories still feed a primal need for imaginative stimuli, in a continuum, say, with fairies and alien/robot stories, one more possibility among alternative forms of the marvellous universe currently available for young imaginations. Gothic urban subcultures supremely dislike this “childish” view of the Gothic as they see their search for alternative life styles and for refined, mythical references taken from a chivalric, medieval world, belittled by a connotation of immaturity and Carnivalesque exhibitionism. What I am claiming is that Gothic characters and myths perform different functions for these two age groups and although they share certain clearly identifiable aesthetics and scenarios, their investment in Gothic references and the emotional compensation they get from Gothic scenarios is completely different. Young teenagers get imaginative stimuli, a break with normality, novelty and wonder. The Gothic as a resistance culture is about a collective search for alternative life styles, promoting communal feelings, self-discovery, poetic and refined interests, or even a pathway to occult sects and magic practices, popular among youth Gothic cultures. However, in both cases, an important element in the vampire and Gothic mythologies is blood, usually meant to be the carrier of a revelation related to an ancient genealogy that claims the young protagonist at the moment she/he is searching for self-definition in the transition to adult life. Blood, as lineage, is a distinguishing mark that confers to these teenagers some form of superiority. Secondly, as in Coppola’s version of Dracula, the encounter with vampires implies a sexual awakening. If we leave television series aside and return to the film canon of vampire stories, after Coppola’s Dracula one would have to mention the Twilight Saga as the next stage in this lineage of popular film versions of the vampire story. Edward and Bella, or, Romeo and Juliet with a happy ending, live the perfect love story, as first suggested by Coppola’s remake of Dracula. The difference between the Twilight Saga and Coppola’s (or Tod Browning’s, or Murnau’s, or Bram Stoker’s) version is that the main characters in the Twilight Saga are 

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teenagers. The vampire has grown younger in postmodern times, and changed considerably. In a postmodern period of cultural re-invention, rewriting and insightful revision of cultural heritage, all the older connotations of the vampire myth are in the process of being reassessed, as possible elements to answer the needs and demands of contemporary culture. First, in our secular times, the main obstacle to immortality, namely, the risk of damnation and moral degradation, is no longer scary. Damnation is no longer credible, and moral degradation is in tune with a relative notion of moral values, a culturally flexible one, which is under revision in a world without absolute values. Secondly, sexual license is another attractive element to covet the company of vampires. After all, foreign, sexy, high-class visitors are most welcome in a global world. In order to understand how the class reference is important in this process of myth-making note the fact that the Cullens, in the Twilight Saga, are attractive insofar as they do not resemble or invoke a family of immigrants, increasingly rejected by Western prejudice as a swelling, money/blood-sucking minority group. So, we are back at the beginning, left with pagan sex, hypnotic beauty, racist fears and enhanced, supernatural powers. To conclude my argument, I would like to approach Gothic aesthetics as a Romantic heritage and frame vampire love stories as a return of repressed patriarchy in the postmodern era. As perfect lovers, vampire characters indeed testify to the resilience of Romanticism and the feuilleton genre as central streams of popular culture in postmodern times. Let us recall that Romanticism evokes the special status of the poet, whose life has to be extra-ordinary to fit the special, exalted sensitivity of the Romantic hero. As such, the Romantic self rejects everyday normality, for which it feels an unbearable ennui, with its routines, mean preoccupations and boring pragmatism. As a reaction to a modern, industrialized, urban world, an anonymous, busy and bourgeois one, the Romantic hero takes refuge in the exotic, for instance travelling to distant (un-modern) places (as epitomized by Lord Byron’s journey to Greece), or, instead of escaping in terms of space, Romanticism proposes a journey back in time, to medieval, pre-modern, rural worlds. That is how the Gothic enters the Romantic literature so successfully. After the French Revolution and the fearful excesses of the dictatorship that followed the fall of the monarchical 

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regime, European sensitivity valued imagination, emotions and the affects as the only reasonable elements to balance the blindness of pragmatic reason. As Gérard Gengembre remarks, “la raison a montré sont terrifiant et exaltant visage dans la Révolution” (“Reason has revealed its terrifying and stimulating face during the French Revolution”).23 Consequently, by the end of the eighteenth century, Romanticism becomes a liberating formula to express one’s individuality, make room for private emotions, and reclaim a place for fantasy and the marvellous in modern imagination. Being a vampire is the perfect means to break “utter normality”, as Bella Swan says in the trailer for the last episode of the Twilight Saga. As such, vampires become powerful Romantic heroes that sparkle evasion to an imagined, higher reality, where everything is grand, perfect, eternal. Note that the rural wilderness where the Twilight Saga takes place – dark, desert and on a huge scale compared to the human figure – is in stark contrast to the urban, technological, bourgeois (liberal) world the Gothic has always exorcized. And the only instance of a mundane, urban authority in the Twilight Saga is the Renaissance world of the Volturi, adequately displaced in time (seventeenth century?) and space (Italy). In the twenty-first century, Prince Charming is the vampire, and that is how Dracula has renovated itself, remaining young and popular forever. Ironically, one would say the vampire has had a facelift and has manicured his nails, and with his promise of eternal youth and beauty he has become a liberating figure with which popular culture identifies, thus embodying the pagan, secular, individualist, postmodern times. That is how I read the survival of a fictional character such as Dracula, through time and in so many different media, remaining as captivating and inspiring as ever for such wide audiences and across so many countries.

23

Gérard Gengembre, Le Romantisme en France et en Europe, Paris: Pocket Classiques, 2003, 22.



VAMPIRES “ON A SPECIAL DIET”: IDENTITY AND THE BODY IN CONTEMPORARY MEDIA TEXTS1 LEA GERHARDS Looking at recent popular cultural productions in cinema and television, it is striking that contemporary vampire narratives seem to foreground their vampire protagonists’ natural thirst for blood and, concurrently, their epic struggle to suppress it. Bloodthirst is primarily presented as a nutritional need and as a biological impulse which vampires learn to question and constrain by constantly working on their self-control. Instead of giving in to their basic physical need to hunt and kill humans, these vampires seek alternative ways of feeding: the Cullen family in Twilight and Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries fall back on a “vegetarian” diet consisting mainly of mountain lions and other animals and True Blood’s vampires have a newly developed synthetic blood at their disposal. As will be argued in this article, the recent trend of vampires refusing to subsist on human blood and struggling for self-restraint can be placed within a more general evolution. The shift in vampire genre conventions that began in the twentieth century can be described as a process of domestication in which the vampires’ civilized nature and benevolence become manifest in their modified eating behaviour. By framing vampiric bloodthirst as a conflict between mind and body and by portraying the disciplining of the body as a marker of character strength and strong morals, recent vampire narratives it can be argued represent the postmodern notion that the body expresses identity and the self.

Bella: “I know what you are.” Edward: “Say it. Out loud. Say it!” Bella: “Vampire.” Edward: “Are you afraid?” Bella: “No.” Edward: “Then ask me the most basic question: What do we eat?”

This dialogue is part of a central scene in Twilight, the 2008 film adaptation of Stephenie Meyer’s popular supernatural romance novel 1

This essay is based on an earlier version published by the author, “Warum Edward Cullen Diät hält: Zur Domestizierung des Vampirs in aktuellen Medientexten”, in Kulinarisches Kino: Interdisziplinäre Perspektiven auf Essen und Trinken im Film, eds Daniel Kofahl, Gerrit Fröhlich and Lars Alberth, Bielefeld: transcript, 2013, 21532.

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of the same name. Twilight tells the story of seventeen-year-old Bella Swan, who falls head over heels in love with her mysterious classmate Edward Cullen. Having become suspicious after a number of strange events, Bella discovers Edward’s secret: he is a vampire. To be precise, he is a creature that, within the supernatural Twilight universe, threatens Bella’s health and safety. This is because Edward, as a vampire, occupies a position at the top of the supernatural food chain. Much to Bella’s advantage though, her lover is a vampire “on a special diet”, who abstains from human blood for ethical reasons and therefore refers to himself as “vegetarian”.2 The films of the Twilight saga, as well as other popular cultural productions incorporating the vampire motif, feature quite a number of references to the realm of human as well as vampiric food and feeding. In this respect, it is striking that recent vampire narratives seem to foreground their vampire protagonists’ natural thirst for blood and, at the same time, their epic struggle to suppress it. Already in 2003, Sally Miller pointed out that “One of the most striking features of contemporary vampire fiction is the vampire’s reluctance to feed”.3 In her essay about “Vampires, the Body and Eating Disorders”, Sally Miller looks at Anne Rice’s novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003). More recent but equally popular examples of the trend are the four films of the Twilight Saga (2008-), Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse und Breaking Dawn (Part I), as well as the television

2

Twilight, film, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, 2008 (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2009, DVD). In vampire narratives, the word “vegetarian” is used as an analogy for someone abstaining from their primary food source, and instead consuming something that can sustain them but is less nourishing. It is worth noting that the analogy is often presented with a wink in the texts, so it is perfectly clear there is an awareness that the comparison is inherently flawed. Throughout the Twilight Saga, the term “vegetarian” is explicitly (and famously) used to describe the Cullen family’s diet; Edward Cullen refers to himself as “vegetarian”: “… I’d compare it to living on tofu and soy milk; we call ourselves vegetarians, our little inside joke. It doesn’t completely satiate the hunger – or rather thirst. But it keeps us strong enough to resist. Most of the time.” (Twilight 164). 3 Sally Miller, “‘Nursery fears made flesh and sinew’: Vampires, the Body and Eating Disorders: A Psychoanalytic Approach”, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Carla T. Kungl, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2003, 53.



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programmes True Blood (2008-), The Vampire Diaries (2009-) und Being Human (2009-)4, all of which will be referred to in this article. In these productions, bloodthirst is primarily presented as a nutritional need that vampires learn to question and constrain by constantly working on their self-control. Instead of giving in to their basic physical impulse to hunt and kill humans, these vampires seek for alternative ways of feeding: the Cullen family in Twilight as well as Stefan Salvatore in The Vampire Diaries fall back on a vegetarian diet consisting mainly of mountain lions and other animals, and True Bloods vampires have a newly developed synthetic blood at their disposal. Other feeding alternatives are the consumption of donated human blood from the hospital (The Vampire Diaries), attacking humans while making sure they are not mortally injured (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries), drinking vampire blood (Being Human), or abandoning nutrition altogether (Being Human). As will be argued in this article, the recent trend of vampires refusing to subsist on human blood and struggling for self-restraint can be placed within a more general evolution of the motif towards a sympathetic vampire that differs greatly from the popular Dracula figure in Bram Stoker’s novel. Although vampires have fascinated us for centuries, there is a conspicuous surge of the motif at the moment, and a number of scholars have recently registered a resurgence of vampire narratives.5 In 2012, vampires were occupying a complex popular cultural space, ranging from literature and film, television and comics to music and the Internet. As Stacey Abbott observes, today’s audiences are familiar with the vampire motif not so much through works of literature, but most notably through film and television.6 The substantial influence of these media on contemporary audiences forms

4

The American remakes of Being Human’s first and second series were aired in 2011 and 2012 on SyFy. However, due to lack of space, the American versions cannot be considered here. 5 For example, Marcus Recht, Der sympathische Vampir: Visualisierungen von Männlichkeiten in der TV-Serie Buffy, Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 2011, 9; Sam George, “‘OPEN GRAVES, OPEN MINDS’ OPENING ADDRESS”, 2010, 2: http://herts.Aca demia.edu/SamGeorge/Talks/16975/Open_Graves_Open_Minds_Opening_Address (accessed 29 January 2011). 6 Stacey Abbott, Celluloid Vampires: Life After Death in the Modern World, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007, 1.



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the background to this article, which will in turn focus on the portrayal of vampiric characters in a number of film and television texts. Since the introduction of the vampire motif into literature in the eighteenth century, the characteristics of the vampire have changed in manifold ways. The literary and cinematic vampire figure functions as an exceedingly flexible metaphor for alterity. In this way, it can acquire different cultural, social as well as political meanings in different contexts,7 working as a projection surface for various cultural aspects. Variation also springs from the fact that the motif has “crossed mediated boundaries and genre divides”,8 enabling the existence of manifold vampire narratives. One of the most striking metamorphoses of the conventional figure of the literary and cinematic vampire is what has been referred to as its “domestication”.9 In a number of works, scholars have addressed the tendency of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to portray the vampire as “sympathetic”.10 This article will support the argument that the shift in vampire genre conventions can be described as a process of domestication. In addition, it will argue that within this process of domestication, the vampire’s civilized nature and benevolence become manifest in its modified eating behaviour. One of the scholars who have dealt with this genre shift in detail is Jules Zanger. In his essay “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door”,11 he distinguishes the “new” vampire type from an “old” one, drawing on Stoker’s Dracula as exemplary for the latter. After 7

Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, “Introduction: The Shape of Vampires”, in Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture, eds Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 2. 8 Melissa Ames, “Twilight Follows Tradition: Analyzing ‘Biting’ Critiques of Vampire Narratives for Their Portrayals of Gender and Sexuality”, in Bitten by Twilight: Youth Culture, Media, and the Vampire Franchise, eds Melissa A. Click, Jennifer Stevens Aubrey and Elizabeth Behm-Morawitz, New York: Peter Lang, 2010, 37. 9 Blood Read, 2. 10 For example, Linda Badley, Writing Horror and the Body: The Fiction of Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Anne Rice, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996; Sandra Tomc, “Dieting and Damnation: Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire”, in English Studies in Canada, XXII/4 (Dec. 1996), 441-60; Milly Williamson, “Vampire Transformations: From Gothic Demon to Domestication?”, in Vampires: Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil, ed. Carla T. Kungl, Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2003, 101-107; Abbott, Celluloid Vampires; Recht, Der sympathische Vampir. 11 Jules Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door”, in Blood Read, 17-26.



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giving an overview of the development of the vampire motif towards a sympathetic vampire type, Zanger’s conclusions about the evolution of the tamed vampire will be taken as a structuring guideline for this article. In the last part of the essay, an attempt will be made to relate the modification of vampiric nutrition to postmodern notions of identity and body, all within the frame of contemporary consumer culture. As Sarah Sceats claims, “food and eating are essential to selfidentity and are instrumental in the definition of family, class, ethnicity …. encoded in appetite, taste, ritual and ingestive etiquettes are unwritten rules and meanings.”12 Similarly, Fabio Parasecoli argues in his work Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture: “Food influences our lives as a relevant marker of power, cultural capital, class, gender, ethnic, and religious identities.” According to Parasecoli, popular cultural texts may provide valuable insights into both our relationship with the body and the process of eating.13 Thus, recent popular vampire narratives lend themselves ideally to the purposes of this essay. The evolution of the sympathetic vampire type Shifts and developments in genre conventions concerning the portrayal of the popular cultural vampire character have been discussed repeatedly in an academic context. As I have already indicated several publications deal with the motif of the “new” vampire type which emerges in current productions. Scholars tend to agree: one of the first popular representatives of the sympathetic vampire type is Barnabas Collins, the star of the American gothic daily soap Dark Shadows (1966-71).14 Traits of the self-conscious vampire, tormented by its thirst for human blood, may already have been discernable in earlier texts, such as John William Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) und James Malcolm Rymer’s Varney the Vampire (1845-47). However, Dark Shadows explicitly foregrounds the aspect of the vampire’s grappling with its very nature, a phenomenon which prompts sympathy for the protagonist on the part of the audience.15 Sympathetic vampire Barnabas Collins in turn exerts considerable 12 Sarah Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 1. 13 Fabio Parasecoli, Bite Me: Food in Popular Culture, Oxford: Berg, 2008, 2. 14 Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 105. 15 Recht, Der sympathische Vampir, 87.



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influence on the portrayal of vampire Louis in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire as well as on Angel and Spike, the two main male vampire characters in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.16 Indeed, Anne Rice is often cited as the mother of the sympathetic vampire type and the flourishing subgenre emerging around it.17 In her novel, vampire Louis is committed to a moral code commanding him to feed on animals instead of humans. Whenever he does kill a human being, Louis reflects on his situation and suffers severely from a burdened conscience.18 In this way, he can be seen as a prime example of the sympathetic vampire type. Generally speaking, the evolution of the motif towards a compassionate and compassion-evoking vampire can be described as a process of domestication19 – a process which always becomes manifest in the vampire’s modified eating behaviour. The following sections will take a closer look at four major aspects of this process: the shifts in the vampire character “from solitary to multiple and communal, from metaphoric Anti-Christ to secular sinner, from magical to mundane”20 as well as the Americanization of the figure. According to Zanger, crucial shifts in representation have “demythologize[d] the vampire”. One major change in the portrayal of the vampire in literary and film texts concerns its metaphysical and religious status.21 While Dracula was presented as Anti-Christ and as the embodiment of Evil in Stoker’s novel, the new sympathetic vampire is no longer an instrument in the conflict between God and Satan. Instead, its actions can be taken as indicating its individual personality and condition. Thus, the character of the vampire is no longer pigeon-holed as inherently evil, but the existence of “good” as well as “evil” vampires becomes possible. In this context, it seems that the vampire’s character formation is expressed in its eating behaviour. Indeed, the element of a conflict between “good” and “evil” vampires is crucial for example in the Twilight Saga. Twilight’s “good” vampires, the members of the Cullen family, maintain a 16

Ibid., 88. Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 111. 18 Recht, Der sympathische Vampir, 89. 19 Tomc, “Dieting and Damnation”, 441; Miller, “‘Nursery fears made flesh and sinew’”, 53; Williamson, “Vampire Transformations”, 101. 20 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 19. 21 Ibid., 18. 17



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special position within the vampire world. This is due to their lifestyle that differs fundamentally from other vampires: the Cullens, as already mentioned, lead a vegetarian life, not feeding on humans because of moral considerations. Edward explains in Twilight: My family, we’re different from others of our kind. We only hunt animals. We’ve learned to control our thirst.22

As becomes clear in Breaking Dawn (Part I), when he was a newborn vampire, Edward temporarily abandoned his father’s lifestyle before ultimately deciding to resort to vegetarianism for the rest of his vampire existence: A few years after Carlisle created me, I rebelled against him. I resented him for curbing my appetite. And so for a while, I went off on my own. I wanted to know how it felt to hunt, to taste human blood. All the men I killed were monsters, and so was I …. I looked into their eyes as they died, and I saw who I was and what I was capable of.

Thus, Edward is presented as going through personal experiences, which lead to his individual decision in terms of eating behaviour, making him a “good” vampire. Bella admires her fiancé’s strong morals and self-control, referring to Edward as “someone capable of courage and sacrifice”.23 Her words indicate the markedly positive meaning of vampiric vegetarianism and, generally, of self-discipline in the Twilight Saga. Remarkably, not only Edward watches his diet with great care: Bella, who has a regular diet in the novels, seems to be a vegetarian in the Twilight film version. In restaurants she orders the veggie burger, mushroom ravioli and spinach salad, and advises her father to eat a healthier diet, pointing out he ought to “cut back on the steak”.24 During her lunch breaks, she is also portrayed as nibbling on celery as well as talking to Edward at the school’s salad bar. In this way, the film makes striking visual references to Bella’s supposed vegetarianism, mirroring Edward’s decision to modify his vampiric diet: 22

Twilight (film). Breaking Dawn, Part I, film, directed by Bill Condon, 2011 (Universal City, Summit Entertainment, 2012, DVD). 24 Twilight (film). 23

CA:



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Fig. 1: Bella at her high school’s salad bar.25 The main antagonists of the Cullen family in part one of the Twilight Saga are three vampires whose lifestyle is effectively set against the Cullens’ philosophy. Laurent, James and Victoria are nomads, introduced into the narrative as roaming through the family’s territory. They turn out to be the murderers of a number of Forks’ citizens, as they hunt their prey in the area the Cullens call their home. To those “evil” vampires, Bella is nothing but a “snack”.26 Furthermore, other vampires who are constructed as antagonists and therefore “evil” vampires in the Saga are the Volturi, the unofficial vampire royalty. The Volturi possess great authority in the vampire world, being known for their drastic and sometimes cruel judgements. Like all “evil” vampires in the Twilight universe, they subsist on human blood. Edward informs Bella in New Moon that what the Volturi lack is “respect for human life, of course”.27 No longer solely embodying Satanic evil, the sympathetic vampire is motivated by subjective experiences and acting according to its individual character. Its moral strength and benevolence are indicated by its modified eating behaviour – a characteristic trait not shared by its antagonists, the “evil” vampires, who therefore represent its antithesis.

25

Figs 1, 3 and 4 are screenshots, taken by the author of the essay from the DVD versions of the films of the Twilight Saga. 26 Twilight (film). 27 New Moon, film, directed by Chris Weitz, 2009 (Universal City, CA: Summit Entertainment, 2010, DVD).



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A second feature that distinguishes the “new” vampire type from the “old” one according to Zanger is the new communal spirit of the vampire.28 While Dracula used to be solitary, acting alone on his quest to take over the city of London, the sympathetic vampire is a decidedly social creature. It lives as the member of a family, with friends and lovers it relates to in either the human or the vampire world. The Twilight Saga is a paramount example for this shift in representation: The films focus on Edward Cullen as the member of a family which consists of a father, a mother and five adopted children who in turn form amorous couples among themselves. Family, according to Anna Silver, is one of Twilight’s leitmotifs: “the series is … concerned with the contemporary American nuclear family, and a woman’s role within that family. Identity, in the series, occurs within the context of group identity, particularly family.”29 Anna Silver underlines the Cullens’ status as a settled group that is organized as a family, which clearly distinguishes them from other vampires in the Twilight universe who are presented as nomads, solitary figures or covens.30 This status definitely has a positive connotation within the Saga. It is striking that the Cullens being firmly located in a specific place becomes significant, as it works as a way of determining their status as social creatures. Significantly, we learn that the Cullen family enjoys hunting animals together. As far as their classmates are concerned, Edward and his siblings spend regular camping trips with their parents. In this way, feeding becomes a shared family matter in the Twilight Saga – the vampiric version of a family meal. A similar focus on interpersonal relationships can be found in The Vampire Diaries, which deals with the romantic love triangle between the two vampire brothers Stefan and Damon Salvatore, and the human girl Elena Gilbert. In addition, a similar pattern as in Twilight emerges when Stefan, the initially “good” and blood-abstinent brother, temporarily turns “evil” in season 3, leaving his hometown behind and

28

Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 18. Anna Silver, “Twilight is Not Good for Maidens: Gender, Sexuality, and the Family in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Series”, in Studies in the Novel, XLII/1 (2010), para. 4: http://www.faqs.org/periodicals/201004/2118675201.html (accessed 24 December 2010). 30 Ibid., para. 16. 29



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roaming the country as his bloodthirsty alter ego, “the ripper”.31 Again, Stefan’s rejection of human blood seems to be linked to his being rooted in a place, marking him as a creature with a fixed home as well as relations to a specific community. The British TV series Being Human revolves around the efforts of three supernatural creatures, a vampire, a werewolf and a ghost, to lead a normal and supposedly human life. The three main characters share a flat, again taking up a fixed residence and developing a close friendship over the course of the series. Strikingly, the first season’s promo poster depicts the supernatural protagonists in their living room, indicating the significance of home and community in the series:32

Fig. 2: Being Human’s first season promo poster.33 The third important shift concerns the loss of many folkloristic features of the vampire.34 This shift not only concerns the vampire as a social creature on an interpersonal level, but also relates to a societal level. Many folkloristic characteristics used to mark Dracula as a magical creature, and therefore as unambiguously Other – which is what prevented him from blending into human (or, British) society. Zanger refers to the mutability of the old vampire type: that is, its 31

As I Lay Dying, Season 2, Episode 22 (The Vampire Diaries, Television Series, created by Kevin Williamson and Julie Plec, 2011). The CW. DVD. 32 According to his status as sympathetic, domesticated vampire, Mitchell is portrayed with a blood bag, which he stole from the hospital. 33 http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_DQDwDvZ7rRg/TDFiZO9zi0I/AAAAAAAAARo/pgO LgO32k4g/s1600/Being%2BHuman%2B01.jpg. 34 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 19.



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ability to transform into mist or into animals, such as insects, bats or dogs. Indeed, the vampiric ability of spontaneous mutation does not seem to play any role in current vampire narratives.35 What also proves ineffective are traditional defensive measures, such as crucifixes and holy water,36 a phenomenon which is obviously connected to the vampire’s secularization. Although some vampires in Being Human are sensitive to religious symbols, another feature of the new vampire becomes visible in the same TV series: the vampire’s usual shunning of light. Vampire and protagonist John Mitchell is not forced to run errands at night but can walk around during the day as well. Not bothered by sunlight, Mitchell is able to participate in all sorts of mundane activities, such as regularly going to work in order to pay his monthly rent. Thereby he becomes a well-known member of human society. Similarly, the Salvatore brothers in The Vampire Diaries possess magic lapis lazuli rings which shield them from the destructive power of the sun. Both brothers attend the local high school; moreover, Damon is involved and known in the Founder’s Council, a group of high-ranked civil servants in the town of Mystic Falls. In the Twilight universe, vampires are not threatened by daylight at all. Instead, Twilight’s vampires are famous for sparkling like diamonds in the sun – a characteristic trait of their skin which may reveal their supernatural being but does not hurt or destroy them. The Cullens are respected citizens of Forks; Carlisle in particular is held in high esteem for his work as a doctor at the local hospital. The family members’ capacity to walk unharmed in the sunlight enables them to pursue school and academic educations and to take up professions. The accumulation of graduation caps in the Cullens’ staircase shows that all of them hold several academic degrees. As esteemed members of Forks’ community, the Cullens are integrated into American society. The implications of this will be elaborated on in the following section. 35 Regarding this phenomenon, Sally Miller remarks: “One of the biggest modifications of the vampire myth in contemporary fiction is the “density” of the vampiric body. No longer able to transform or transcend its corporeal presence, the vampiric body has become a body that has ceased to exist, yet cannot die” (Miller, “‘Nursery fears made flesh and sinew’”, 56). According to Sally Miller, the tragedy of the vampire aspiring to suppress its physical needs reflects a cultural desire to be free of the body (ibid.). 36 Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 19.



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The American vampire next door In her book Celluloid Vampires, in which she examines the cinematic vampire figure, Stacey Abbott proclaims the “violent usurpation of a traditional vampire by a modern one”,37 describing a process during which the old vampire representing an archaic and barbaric past is replaced by a new, modern and civilized vampire.38 Indeed, the members of Twilight’s Cullen family are portrayed as modern, young vampires. They live in an elegant house, drive expensive cars and are interested in contemporary music, literature, fashion and technology. When visiting Edward’s home for the first time in Twilight, Bella is surprised by the Cullens’ house for being so open and flooded with light. Edward smirks: “What did you expect? Coffins and dungeons and moats?”39 With a wink, the film thus distances itself from traditional vampire narratives and their mythology. Stacey Abbott points out: “rather than acting in opposition to modernity, the vampire has come to embody the experience of it.”40 For her, the modern vampire is no longer linked to the past but is rather firmly positioned in its contemporary setting: in a place.41 Similarly, Evangelia Kindinger explains that the vampire used to be represented as “deterritorialized”.42 Always looking for human prey, it was constantly on the move: “The traditional vampire is a nomad, an uprooted figure: uprooted from both life and home.”43 In more recent narratives, however, the vampire seems to be rooted in specific (albeit sometimes fictional) American regions,44 for instance in Forks, Washington, in the Twilight Saga, in Mystic Falls, Virginia, in The Vampire Diaries, and in Bon Temps, Louisiana, in True Blood. Supposedly, this is because the bloodsucker no longer poses a fatal threat to those regions’ human population. No longer on the prowl for

37

Abbott, Celluloid Vampires, 4. Ibid., 2-3. 39 Twilight (film). 40 Abbott, Celluloid Vampire, 5. 41 Ibid., 3. 42 Evangelia Kindinger, “Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction: Of ‘Vamps’, ‘Supes’ and Places that ‘Suck’”, in Onlinejournal Kultur & Geschlecht, 8 (2011), 2: http://www.ruhrunibochum.de/genderstudies/kulturundgeschlecht/pdf/Kin dinger_Regional_Fiction.pdf (accessed 10 January 2012). 43 Ibid., 12. 44 Ibid., 2. 38



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human prey, settledness in connection with vegetarianism becomes a marker of the vampire’s being civilized. In contrast to Dracula, who was not restricted by national or state frontiers,45 the territorial rootedness of Twilight’s vampire family is indicated by the fact that there are a number of boundaries the Cullens strive to preserve. These are boundaries that delimit the family’s living space for their own safety. The Cullens depend on hiding their vampire existence from the human population in Forks. Therefore, the appearance of Laurent, James and Victoria in Twilight poses a problem for them, since the three hunt and kill humans in the Cullens’ adjacent neighbourhood: Carlisle: “I’m afraid your hunting activities have caused something of a mess for us.” Laurent: “We didn’t realize the territory had been claimed.” Carlisle: “Yes, well, we maintain a permanent residence nearby.” Laurent: “Really? Well, we won’t be a problem anymore. We were just passing through.”46

At the same time, the Cullens are limited in their freedom of movement and action by certain boundaries that were determined within the frame of a peace treaty with the werewolves of the Twilight universe. According to this treaty, the vampire family is absolutely prohibited from entering the Quileute reservation: the transgression of these boundaries would result in a war between the supernatural creatures. Evangelia Kindinger emphasizes: In Twilight, the regionalization of vampires serves to Americanize and thus tame them .… Regionalism roots the vampire in concrete places and cultures.47

In this way, she links the process of the vampire figure’s regionalization and Americanization with that of its domestication.48 Here, we come full circle in the argument on the portrayal of the new vampire type. Zanger, summarizing his findings, confirms:

45

Ibid., 12. Twilight (film). 47 Kindinger, “Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction”, 18-19. 48 Ibid., 12. 46



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“Since when do vampires like baseball?”, Bella asks in Twilight. Edward, with a sense of humour, replies: “Well … it’s the American pastime!”50

Fig. 3: The Cullen family playing American baseball. The connection between the vampire’s domestication and its integration into American society becomes particularly clear in True Blood. The series’ title refers to “Tru Blood”, a drink consisting of synthetic blood invented by Japanese scientists in the programme’s universe. The blood drink has recently been made available in ordinary supermarkets and bars. It is marketed as an alternative food source for vampires, who can buy the drink in different flavours or blood types. The corresponding marketing campaign promises that “Tru Blood” entirely meets vampires’ nutritional needs. With the invention of synthetic blood, vampires have “come out of the coffin”, now campaigning for equal rights. Nan Flanagan, official spokesperson of the “American Vampire League”, repeatedly argues for the enforcement of the “Vampire Rights Amendment”: 49 50

Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 19. Twilight (film).



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Now that the Japanese have perfected synthetic blood …, there is no reason for anyone to fear us. I can assure you that every member of our community is now drinking synthetic blood. That’s why we decided to make our existence known. We just want to be part of mainstream society.51

The invention and sale of synthetic blood mean that everyday tasks, such as shopping for food in grocery stores and socializing in bars, are performed by vampires now, too. In this way, they are able to step out of their monstrous marginality that up to this point had shaped their lives. Thanks to “Tru Blood”, their survival is theoretically ensured without the biting and killing of humans. Therefore, the official majority of vampires strives for a peaceful coexistence with humans as well as for equality and integration into human mainstream society – a process referred to as “mainstreaming” in the series.52 Between consumption and ascesis: the disciplined vampire body I don’t want to be a monster. My family, we think of ourselves as vegetarians, right, because we only survive on the blood of animals. But it’s like a human only living on tofu. It keeps you strong but you’re never fully satisfied.53

The Cullen family pays a high price for their blending into human mainstream society and for all ensuing privileges, namely their willingness to question their vampire nature and to suppress their biological instincts. Sally Miller points out that the vampire’s refusal to bite humans is “Frequently framed as an act of conscience”.54 In a similar manner, Zanger characterizes the implications of the abovedescribed shift in the portrayal of the vampire figure. According to him, the vampire’s new communal spirit allows for greater social 51

Strange Love, Season 1, Episode 1 (True Blood, television series, created by Alan Ball, 2008, HBO: DVD). 52 Evangelia Kindinger sees a reference to the North American history of slavery in True Blood: “the American South, with its complex history of slavery, prejudice and discrimination, is the perfect setting for discussing the integration or segregation of the new race ‘vampire’ into American society” (Kindinger, “Reading Supernatural Fiction as Regional Fiction”, 9). 53 Edward in Twilight (film). 54 Miller, “‘Nursery fears made flesh and sinew’”, 53.



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complexity.55 The vampire has become more “human”, as it is driven by human emotions and motivations. It loves, regrets, has doubts, reflects upon its situation, experiences inner conflicts, and is torn between contradictory physical impulses. Zanger underlines the importance of the vampire’s new complexity in terms of character: “Here, in this new capacity for self-examination, for self-judgment, even for self-loathing, appears the most significant aspect of the new vampire.”56 Arguably, vampiric bloodthirst is represented in recent vampire narratives as a conflict between mind and body. The disciplining of the vampire body is portrayed as a marker of character strength and strong morals, which becomes manifest in the fact that the protagonists’ willingness to improve their individual character by controlling their physical impulses is rewarded by their integration into human society. The relationship between mind and body is a key philosophical problem that has been dealt with repeatedly in different academic disciplines since Descartes.57 For the purposes of this article, the work of Mike Featherstone seems particularly interesting. He focuses on ideas about the relationship of mind and body within postmodern consumer culture – which is precisely the culture in which recent vampire narratives emerged. According to Featherstone, the relationship between body and self that developed in consumer culture is decidedly new and differs from previous cultural ideas.58 First and foremost, he underlines the “significance of appearance and bodily preservation within late capitalist society”.59 Advertising keeps reminding the individual that self-improvement is possible and necessary in all aspects of life.60 Body work is seen as a way of selfexpression and self-actualization for individuals:61 the more a body resembles an ideal young, healthy, fit and beautiful body, the more 55

Zanger, “Metaphor into Metonymy”, 21-22. Ibid., 23. 57 Andrew Edgar, “Body”, in Key Concepts in Cultural Theory, eds Andrew Edgar and Peter Sedgwick, London: Routledge, 1999, 44. 58 Mike Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture”, in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, eds Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth and Bryan S. Turner, London: Sage Publications, 1999, 187. 59 Ibid., 170. 60 Ibid., 172. 61 Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, “Introduction”, in The Body: A Reader, eds Mariam Fraser and Monica Greco, London: Routledge, 2005, 28. 56



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value it seems to be awarded.62 This results in “ascribed bodily qualities to become regarded as plastic – with effort and ‘body work’ individuals are persuaded that they can achieve a certain desired appearance”.63 However, Mariam Fraser und Monica Greco describe the process of optimizing the body as “a disciplining force, placing even greater burdens on individuals”.64 The term “body maintenance”65 incorporates the metaphor of a machine being transferred to the body: like cars and other consumer goods, bodies require regular attention and constant maintenance in order to keep functioning efficiently. Individuals may resort to advice by experts such as therapists and fitness trainers – the “helping professions”66 – but also by advice pages in magazines or self-improvement programmes on television. Quite paradoxically, advertising urges individuals to be thin and simultaneously to consume, promising instant gratification.67 Consumer culture values the thin and firm body, which is set against everything that is “fat and uncontained”.68 Sceats points out that “fatness in contemporary western culture is regarded as generally disgusting; studies have suggested that fat people are stigmatized, held to be somehow morally responsible for their condition”. In her monograph Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, Sceats deals with such ideas and their relation to female eating disorders.69 Thus, the disciplining of the body is not only achieved by means of fitness training and personal hygiene, but also manifests in a particular eating behaviour. Featherstone emphasizes the abundant choice of “dietary, slimming, exercize and cosmetic body-maintenance products”70 being produced, marketed and sold, and Bryan S. Turner suspects an “‘elective affinity’ between dietary management and the rise of capitalism”.71 62

Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture”, 177 and 179. Ibid., 178. 64 Fraser and Greco, “Introduction”, 28. 65 Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture”, 182. 66 Ibid., 191. 67 Sceats, Food, Consumption, and the Body in Contemporary Women’s Fiction, 66. 68 Ibid., 90. 69 Ibid., 64. 70 Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture”, 170. 71 Bryan. S. Turner, “The Discourse of Diet”, in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory, 164. 63



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Featherstone concludes that “body maintenance in order to look good merges with the stylized images of looking good while maintaining the body”.72 Thus, fitness and slimness come to be associated not only with energy and vitality, but also with worthiness as a person.73 People who work on their bodies in a disciplined manner are considered more attractive and more socially acceptable. On the flipside, bodily neglect can be taken as indicating laziness, low self-esteem and even moral failure.74 In summary, Featherstone emphasizes the consumer cultural notion that “appearance and bodily presentation express the self”.75 The body as expression of the self – it is precisely this aspect of postmodern consumer culture that seems to become tangible in the figure of the new sympathetic vampire. Linda Badley writes about Anne Rice’s vampire novel series: “In the Vampire Chronicles, the body provides the structural principle for the self, shaping character, and forming identity or soul.”76 As I indicated earlier, current vampire characters are strongly related to Rice’s bloodsucking protagonists, which suggests that similar notions of the body may play a role in today’s narratives. Similar to the Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, contemporary vampire texts have the potential to address society’s covert fears and unspoken desires.77 According to Linda Badley, recent horror productions express postmodern social fears concerning identity and the body: “confusion about the self as it relates to the body is at the centre of many of our present uncertainties.”78 The vampire is not only a character that stands for corporeality because of its superhuman strength and supernatural sexual attraction.79 Due to its immortality, it also embodies eternal youth, beauty and health – attributes which are highly valued in consumer culture. For instance, the members of Twilight’s Cullen family attract 72

Featherstone, “The Body in Consumer Culture”, 184. Ibid., 183. 74 Ibid., 186. 75 Ibid., 189. 76 Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 119. 77 Williamson, “Vampire Transformations”, 105. 78 Badley, Writing Horror and the Body, 8. 79 Robert Tracy, “Loving You All Ways: Vamps, Vampires, Necrophiles and Necrofilles in Nineteenth-Century Fiction”, in Sex and Death in Victorian Literature, ed. Regina Barreca, London: Macmillan, 1990, 33. 73



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favourable attention in Forks through their appreciation of expensive consumer goods, such as cars and fashion, their model-like looks, and their hard and firm body. The vampire family may thus comply with a number of desired attributes to which the human protagonist Bella as well as the audience of the Saga aspire. At the same time, the Cullens can be argued to represent an aspect of consumer culture that favours an individual ascetic body and the constant disciplinary shaping of the self. Milly Williamson points out: “The sympathetic vampire, so popular on American television, is a creature troubled by its ontology; it is a being at odds with its vampiric body and the urges that this body generates.”80 Strikingly enough, it is precisely the vampire’s struggle with its own body that resonates so strongly with audiences and that accounts for the vampire’s popularity.81 Quite revealingly, most of the recent sympathetic vampire characters look back to a time when they used to give free rein to their biological impulses. In each case, this was tantamount to the loss of control, brutality and criminal behaviour. As already pointed out, at the end of the first season of The Vampire Diaries, even-tempered Stefan Salvatore turns out to have a murderous past. In the course of three seasons, he undergoes a drastic development from being the good-natured brother on an animal blood diet to becoming his previous cold-hearted alter ego, the “ripper”. The determining factor responsible for turning Stefan is the sudden change of his diet: Villain Klaus blackmails him into drinking such an amount of banked human blood that he loses control over himself completely. Klaus forces Stefan to give in to his vampire nature and simultaneously to leave his home behind: “You can either remain here … or you can embrace what you truly are.”82 When he finally returns to Mystic Falls after a veritable killing spree, Stefan is willing to curb his appetite, and tries to regain his place in the network of relationships he had managed to build up for himself before. His plan is to win back his human girlfriend Elena, whose love he seems to have lost, by “fighting [his] bloodlust, trying to gain control of [his] life again”.83 Stefan’s brother

80 Milly Williamson, “Television, Vampires and the Body: Somatic Pathos”, 2007, para. 2: http://intensities.org/Essays/Williamson.pdf (accessed 10 January 2012). 81 Ibid., para. 29. 82 As I Lay Dying, Season 2, Episode 22. 83 Heart of Darkness, Season 3, Episode 19 (The Vampire Diaries).



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Damon is confident: “Before you know it, you’ll be the king of moderation!”84 Similar to Stefan Salvatore, John Mitchell in Being Human turns out to have become immersed in a vicious lifestyle of murder and debauchery after his transformation into a vampire, cultivating a legendary status among vampires. Only in the 1960s did Mitchell begin to resist his nature. Reflecting on the past, Mitchell as well as Stefan and Edward are appalled by the crimes they have committed. They come to terms with their conscience, and subsequently decide to change for the better in terms of ethical behaviour. These vampires constantly make an effort to express their moral, benevolent selves through the restriction of their physical needs. The enormous exertion of mental force that is required to go through with their choice is underlined in all texts. For instance, Mitchell’s flatmate admires Mitchell’s unique self-control, comparing him to other vampires: “I’d forgotten what they were like, the others. They’re predators. Every inch of them is just hunger and fury. The energy it must take him, every minute, not to be like that …”85

Edward’s vampire father is the master of self-command in the Twilight Saga. In New Moon, we learn that Carlisle’s exceptionally strong will and readiness to make sacrifices enabled him to become the person he aspired to be, namely a doctor: Bella: “How do you do it?” Carlisle: “Years and years of practice.” Bella: “Did you ever think of just doing it the easy way?” Carlisle: “No. I knew who I wanted to be. I wanted to help people. It brings me happiness, even if I am damned regardless.”86

What is interesting is that the Cullens’ docile, good-natured selves are not only expressed in their alternative feeding habits. In fact, their inner disposition is also literally “written on” their bodies and can be read for example by Bella. That is, while evil vampires in Twilight are characterized by red eyes which point to their thirst for human blood, 84

1912, Season 3, Episode 16 (ibid.). Flotsam and Jetsam, Season 1, Episode 1 (Being Human, television series, created by Toby Whithouse, 2009, BBC 3, DVD). 86 New Moon (film). 85



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the Cullens, who only hunt animals, have golden eyes after having fed. The postmodern notion of the body as expression of the self seems to be reflected literally here. Moreover, the fact that the family’s eye colour becomes drastically dark as soon as they are hungry points to the fact that the project of suppressing their natural physical impulses is never-ending and therefore requires the constant disciplining of the vampiric body:

Fig. 4: Edward Cullen after having fed (top) and hungry (bottom). The grappling with vampiric bloodthirst in recent media texts is represented as an eternal conflict between body and mind that is never solvable. As Sally Miller writes, “the vampire can never be entirely free of its hunger and the conflicts surrounding it; … what is found in 

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these [texts] is a [sic] merely a domestication, and not an eradication of appetite”.87 The contemporary sympathetic vampire is a domesticated, civilized and almost human creature. Crucial aspects of its domestication are the repression of its thirst for human blood and the search for nutritional alternatives. In this context, the vampire is portrayed as concerned with determining its roots and becoming settled in a specific homelike place, which is possible because the vampire refrains from pursuing its prey. Yet, although the new vampire is connected to others in different kinds of relationships in these places and although it easily blends into mainstream society, it must always stay bound to its vampiric nature. Vampiric appetite in the vampire narratives discussed is framed as a biological impulse that needs to be questioned and constrained. Here, ideas of physical ascesis as an expression of character strength and good morals are central. In this way, recent vampire narratives work as a productive space for the negotiation of consumer cultural discourses on the relationship between body and self.

87

Miller, “‘Nursery fears made flesh and sinew’”, 53.



FOREVER YOUNG, THOUGH FOREVER CHANGING: EVOLUTION OF THE VAMPIRE MARIA ANTÓNIA LIMA The enduring influence of the vampire myth on many young people today reveals the relevance of one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful surviving archetypes. Yet, since Bela Lugosi’s portrayal of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the figure of the vampire has undergone many transformations. In recent years, works such as Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian and Stephanie Meyers’s Twilight series illustrate this evolution. This article strives to understand how pervasive the vampire tale currently is in world culture and why this may be so at this particular time, interested as we are in images of eternal youth. Besides, it aims at discussing what the vampire myth can tell us about sexuality, power, alienation, sickness, evil, loneliness and death, at the same time as it tries to establish whether vampirism may be regarded not just as a looming presence in the night, but as a symbol of our own human insecurities and desire for love, justice and freedom.

One of the most outstanding prerogatives of the vampire character is its capacity to win over time and extend its life for all eternity. The vampire myth according to the Gothic framework from which it springs has indeed the gift of immortality and the power of remaining forever young. Due to its extraordinary versatility and capacity for adaptation, the vampire can embody the fears and anxieties of different times and places, as Nina Auerbach remarks: “[E]very age embraces the vampire it needs.”1 How can the popularity, adaptability, and unique appeal of the vampire figure to this day be accounted for? The American writer Les Daniels, author of Citizen Vampire and Yellow Fog, states: “The sexual metaphors, from seduction to the stake, continue to resonate …. Our era is more obsessed than any other with immortality and eternal youth. The vampire is not really a menace. It’s what we long to

1

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 145.

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be.”2 Such a statement reveals that the character of the vampire has come a long way since its emergence as a terrifying and frightening figure. Today, the proliferation of vampire narratives in all media formats – from literature to film – is closely connected to a “new” vampire, one who still shares some of its original traits, but who has adapted to new realities and challenges. The idea of eternal youth is central to the construction of the vampire myth throughout the decades. It could be argued that some of the most obsessive desires for eternal youth which modern society reveals, and which it seeks by means of plastic surgery and other artificial methods, are as dangerous as the immortality of the vampire. Indeed, rather than the idealized life of the everlasting, the idea of living forever seems to produce an extremely disturbing state of unending, living death. As actor Christopher Lee rightly observed, “to be condemned to live, or to ‘exist’ is really the word, forever, when you are dead, and yet in a sense living is ghastly. It’s like being in a permanent state of burial”.3 Acknowledging the trap that immortality actually entails is one of the reasons why audiences have felt empathy with the vampire for so long. After all, this is a creature which, unlike ourselves, is not exposed to the physical vulnerability and the dangers of a mortal existence which render us so helpless. Unlike us, the vampire is immortal – but at what cost? This article will discuss the appeal which the figure of the vampire has exerted in literature and the arts ever since its creation. It will analyze the evolution of the vampire figure from its inception to present-day versions. More specifically, it will investigate the concepts of immortality and eternal youth as regards their present-day expressions in such media as cinema and television. The first section looks into the seductive quality of the vampire trying to approach the reasons for its increasing popularity. Conversely, the second section analyses the repulsive quality of the vampire reflecting on its simultaneous powers of attraction and repulsion. The third section debates this contradictory quality of the vampire as a contemporary 2

Daniels as cited in Katherine Ramsland, “Drinking in the Vampire”, Chicago Tribune, December 08, 1989. Accessed June 12, 2012. http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-12-08/features/8903160447_1_new-vampirevampire-research-center-count-dracula-fan-club/3 3 Christopher Lee as cited in Martin Riccardo, Liquid Dreams of Vampires, St. Paul, Minnesota: Llewllyn Publications, 1997, 13.



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dilemma of the self, venturing that its paradoxical nature is the most appealing element to many readers and viewers. The seductive quality of the vampire What is the appeal of vampires and why has our obsession with them become so compelling? Why have they acquired such tremendous popularity and why do people still fall prey to their magnetic allure? There is much in our attraction for vampires that may remain inexplicable, but possible answers to this mystery are still of great interest as they reveal feelings, urges and aspirations of our contemporary societies. Just as vampires hold a strong attraction power, so do other personifications of handsome evil represented in literature and the cinema by characters such as Lord Ruthven, Varney, Dracula, and Lestat. Indeed, since the first literary and cinematic creations, and with the exception of Murnau’s Nosferatu, which featured a rather repulsive protagonist, not only has the vampire been immortal, but he is also very sophisticated and attractive. The paradox of this attraction has been particularly well represented in the American cinema. Bela Lugosi started this trend and Christopher Lee, Raul Julia, Frank Langella, Gary Oldman, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Robert Pattinson continued it, rendering the vampire both romantic and seductive. Some writers and film directors seem to know that the best way to transport their victims to the dark side is through seduction. If we examine the above-mentioned sexy vampires which the cinema and television series have immortalized, we can conclude that they all portray the vampire as an extremely attractive bad boy or rebel, who seems to be a mixture of Lord Byron, James Dean and a rock star, ready to defy all authority, who is admirable for what Carol Senf called his “romantic independence” and for his “refusal to conform to arbitrary social standards”.4 In The Vampire Lestat, Anne Rice transformed Lestat into a rock star, because, she claims, “rock singers are symbolic outsiders” who are “expected to be completely unpredictable, and completely themselves, and they are rewarded for that”.5 This reward seems to compensate them for the anguish of living between life and death, especially at those moments when they 4

Carol Senf, The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988, 7. 5 Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat, New York: Ballantine, 1985, 38.



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seduce their victims. These, in turn, are easily seduced into experiencing painful and pleasurable feelings, in the tradition of a dark romanticism to which Anne Rice refers in an interview: I think the vampire is a romantic, enthralling image, ... the image of this person who never dies and takes a blood sacrifice in order to live and exerts a charm over people; a handsome, alluring, seductive person who captivates us, then drains the life out of us so that he or she can live. We long to be one of them and the idea of being sacrificed to them becomes rather romantic.6

But why are people so attracted by the seductive allure of a vampiric criminal and by the possibility of achieving immortality through death? The popularity of the famous song Killing Me Softly (a product of pop culture which has no connection with the Gothic phenomenon, but where death and pain are used as metaphors) comes to mind. The truth is that many vampire enthusiasts are unconsciously drawn to the imagery of death, without being able to explain the nature of this irresistible impulse, which Freud called “Thanatos”, a death drive that compels humans to engage in risky and selfdestructive acts that may lead to death. In vampires, Eros, the life instinct, and Thanatos, the death instinct, are so closely interconnected that only a constant blend of the two can faithfully reflect the dual nature of the vampire, in which sex and death are so closely associated. In Liquid Dreams of Vampires, Martin Riccardo is aware that human motivation is driven by these subconscious forces and that deep undercurrents and hidden motivating factors relating to vampires must be discerned. In his work, the author examines many aspects of the vampire’s appeal that relate to the human condition, such as death, immortality, alienation, romance, sexuality, violence, power, surrender and the vampire’s kiss. Focusing on the variety of emotional elements in the perception of the undead, Riccardo explores the psychological impact of the vampire on our dreams and its strange appeal in popular culture, concluding: “On the level of dreams and

6

Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire: a Critique. Accessed June 13, 2012 in http://voices.yahoo.com/interview-vampire-critique-2437697.html



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fantasies, vampirism can be an outlet for erotic feelings that might be difficult to accept in a direct way”.7 In a society that is so heavily engaged in the exploration of dark and forbidden erotica this difficulty may be easily negotiated; however, there is a risk of the vampire becoming obsolete and losing its value in providing a powerful and meaningful metaphor. In the age of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, and Blade, is the vampire a dying species, or will it return to its original roots of pure villainy and perverse transgression? This is why the myth has to adapt, in order to provide new ways of meeting each age’s new social and existential challenges. It thereby continues to offer the opportunity of escaping from our fears and limitations, and to stand for the promise of the transgressive and the subversive, which William Patrick Day considers an indispensable feature of its attraction. In his work Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, Day is conscious of the ambiguous nature of the vampire, especially in an era in which we are no longer sure what human nature is, living as we do with the uncertainty of whether humanity is defined by our capacity to control our desires and impulses or by our tendency to seek to liberate and affirm them. However, Day is certain that “[t]he fundamental appeal of vampire stories, what catches our attention at even the mention of the undead, remains their lurid extravagant, exotic sensationalism,” because he believes that “the vampire story is a chance to walk on the dark side, indulge in the perverse, the forbidden, the dangerous, the supernatural.”8 The repulsive quality of the vampire But the question remains: why are people, particularly women, so strongly attracted to such a terrifying creature? Bram Stoker describes Dracula as a man with a strong and aquiline face, massive eyebrows meeting over the nose, a heavy mustache and, most importantly, razor sharp white teeth protruding over his lips, pale, pointed ears, thin cheeks and a strong chin. And he sums up: “The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.”9 In the nineteenth century, this description helped to associate Dracula with pure evil, making him be 7

Martin Riccardo, Liquid Dreams of Vampires, 89. William Patrick Day, Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture, Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2002, 5. 9 Bram Stoker, Dracula, New York: Norton Critical Editions, 1997, 24. 8



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seen as a diabolic villain. Although his image has changed in the meantime, acquiring more eroticized and sympathetic traits, we still find there is strangeness in the power of an attraction which at the same time implies a degree of repulsion. John and Anna Laetitia Aikin attempt an explanation in On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror. They observe that “the apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror, where our moral feelings are not in the least concerned and no passion seems to be excited but the depressing one of fear, is a paradox of the heart … difficult of solution”.10 While confirming that the imagery of horror fiction seems to be necessarily repulsive, in his work The Philosophy of Horror or the Paradoxes of the Heart, Noël Carroll finds that the genre has no lack of consumers. According to Carroll, this is due to the fact that the key element in the emotion of art-horror is repulsion or disgust. What motivates people to seek unpleasant experiences in art is the fact that they are seduced by the force of the power possessed by monstrous entities such as Dracula or Lord Ruthven (in Polidori’s The Vampyre) which induce an overwhelming awe, like all deities and demons, leaving us defenseless in their irresistible presence. He clarifies this line of thought as follows: “The objects of art-horror have power, i.e., they are fearsome, and they engender a paralyzing sense of being overwhelmed; they are mysterious in a way that stuns, rendering one dumb and astonished by the onset of otherness, if the fiction is artful.”11 To go further into this paradoxical mystery, Carroll evokes Descartes’ “Third Meditation”, in which he draws a distinction between what he calls objective reality and formal reality in order to explain that the objective reality of a being is the idea or thought of that being without a commitment to its existence. We can think about vampires without thinking that vampires exist. On the other hand, a being that has formal reality exists. From this perspective, Dracula might be said to have objective reality but not formal reality, which led Carroll to conclude: “Saying that we are art-horrified by Dracula means that we are horrified by the thought of Dracula, where the

10 John and Anna Laetitia Aikin as cited in Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror or The Paradoxes of the Heart, London: Routledge, 1990, 161. 11 Ibid., 166.



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thought of such a possible being does not commit us to a belief in his existence.”12 The objective reality of the vampire, or what Auerbach has called its “non existent abstraction”,13 and the aesthetic distance maintained by the media in relation to the objects of art-horror allow us to enjoy the thrill of being haunted by the vampire because we know we are safe from its destructive powers. In Liquid Dreams of Vampires, Riccardo argues that nowadays with real-life threats such as date rape, stalking and domestic violence, the vampire has become a safe sex metaphor for expression of self-victimizing fantasy. Auerbach also confirms the irony implicit in this preference for safe relationships with vampires, instead of more dangerous relations with humans in real life, when she explains that we continue to believe in them perhaps because “our century has made it impossible for us to believe in wiser fiends or better friends”.14 It seems to be a fact that love, sex, and death create powerful emotional experiences that can be potentially attained to a more intense degree through a highly idealized aesthetic connection with the vampire, which may have induced the overwhelming attraction many people feel. James Hart, the screenwriter for Coppola’s 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, apprehended the irony involved in the allure of death in the vampire, observing: “The vampire comes and says, ‘I’m going to kill you and you’re going to love it – and not only that, you’re going to want more.’”15 Achieving love through death requires submissive and sadomasochistic attitudes which expose a perverse fascination for a simultaneously brutal and seductive being, subordinating the victim to the vampire, which ties in with what Sylvia Plath noted when she wrote: “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart of a brute like you.” (“Daddy”). Rather than causing repulsion, the vampire causes desire for and attraction to all the feelings of dependency, entrapment and victimization he manages to provoke, filling his victims’ empty lives. These perverse impulses reveal the dark side of human identity in a world hungry for mystery in which people desperately seek Faustian knowledge without being aware of its destructive effects. In this 12

Ibid., 29. Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 6. 14 Ibid., 98. 15 James Hart as cited in Martin Riccardo, Liquid Dreams of Vampires, 17. 13



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respect, Dani Cavallaro states: “The vampire is used to expose the monstrosity of humanity itself, the gaping and festering wounds of cultures and civilizations which may only perpetuate themselves through brutality and iniquity.”16 It is a fact that blood has been used as a rejuvenator throughout history and even now there is some evidence of extreme cases of vampire torture or murder, in which the killer drinks the victim’s blood in order to obtain their life.17 As an icon of the failure of culture itself, the vampire has thus turned into a cultural necessity. Some recent adaptations satirize the cult of the romantic, erotic vampire, as Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss, a criticism of a post-human future, and the television series The Lost Boys, which explores the audience’s fascination with the subject through a mixture of horror and humour. Many examples, which demonstrate that the vampire has caused fascination more often than terror, can be found in interviews with vampire fans, followers of vampire cults and members of Gothic urban subcultures which make sense of its appeal and reveal its significance today. A few significant statements and comments are the following:  “I’ve always wanted to be a vampire … because vampires live forever.”18  “I want to be drained” …. She believed that giving herself to a vampire would be “the ultimate sacrifice – more than desire or love.” If she got killed “it would be an exciting way to die.”19  “I just can’t believe that this is all there is to it – we’re born and then we live and then we die … I mean Lestat made such a big impact on everyone he met.”20  “He’s never satisfied, he (Lestat) always has to look for more things, to challenge one more thing. It’s what you and me keep doing.”21

16

Dani Cavallaro, The Gothic Vision – Three Centuries of Horror, Terror and Fear, London: Continuum, 2002, 188. 17 Matthew Beresford, From Demons to Dracula – The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, London: Reaktion Books, 2011,195. 18 Martin Riccardo, Liquid Dreams of Vampires, 7. 19 Ibid., 23. 20 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire – Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, London: Wallflower Press, 2005, 187. 21 Ibid., 188.



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These examples show the curiosity and fascination surrounding the myth of Dracula and other vampires. More than one hundred years after Bram Stoker’s influential novel was published, it is important to notice that an interest in vampires is still prevalent in popular culture. This is suggested by the recent popularity of many television shows and the widely known success of Anne Rice’s novels. Testimonies such as these are also an interesting way to look at the issues of gender pertaining to both vampires and their followers, the modern portrayal of vampires, the nature of identity and identification, and the nature of fandom. The contradictory quality of the vampire, or, the contemporary dilemma of the self The attraction to the vampire’s eternal life is closely associated not only with a permanent dissatisfaction with our present condition in life, but also with our contemporary fascination with fame, success and social recognition, which leads to frustration and anxiety. According to Milly Williamson in The Lure of the Vampire – Gender, Fiction and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy, we live in a ‘‘‘success’-oriented culture which also severely curtails the possibility of the self”.22 Vampire narratives today expose this contemporary dilemma of the “self” which also constitutes one of the reasons for their appeal. According to Williamson, the vampire personifies another dilemma of the “self”, namely its duality, that appealing mixture which associates, for example, Louis’ sorrow and Lestat’s glamour in The Interview with the Vampire. This duality, which creates an effect of simultaneous attraction and repulsion, has generated enormous fan cultures in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A misfit with a positive image, the vampire also seems to live in a state of existential contradiction due to his condition of a living dead, possessing a conflicting nature which, in The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature, Mary Pharr and Leonard Heldreth call an “oxymoron implying someone both admirable and subversive”.23 They claim that “the vampire’s contemporary image envisions a being who is simultaneously terrifying and attractive – even envied, a being 22

Ibid., 2. Mary Pharr and Leonard Heldreth, The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999, 1.

23



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whose allure reaches to the deepest levels of the collective unconscious”. As a creature of both darkness and light, an immortal yet dead being, a beautiful but monstrous individual, the vampire personifies transgression due to its power of confounding all categories of thought. Typical of the Gothic is the fact that its narratives aim at dissolving the boundaries which separate the human from the monster. The close relationship between these opposing facets, which reflect human identity, is what creates sympathy for the monstrous outsider, in the tradition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818). This sympathetic relationship with the vampire expresses, as Margaret Carter well observes, “a shift of emphasis from the threat of the other to the allure of the other”.24 Joan Gordon and Veronica Hollinger also argue that the figure of the vampire has undergone a variety of fascinating transformations and significant metamorphoses. According to them, these transformations began in the mid-1970s, especially with Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976), a key moment that defined the late twentieth-century tendency for depicting the vampire sympathetically. Consequently, the contemporary vampire has ceased to be associated with the pure evil represented by Count Dracula, or with his metaphysical dimension as an anti-Christ, and has become the expression of the human condition. The reason why people identify so closely with vampires is that there is a long history of vampire fiction in which the vampire is sympathetically constructed, originating a legacy that does not derive directly from Dracula but rather from Lord Ruthven in Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) and Varney in Rymer’s “Varney the Vampyre” (1847). If the Victorian reader was essentially attracted by the horror of vampirism, the late twentieth-century reader is less interested in the diabolic image of the vampire than in its erotic and alien qualities, which are often perceived as attractive. This change in readers’ preferences also reflect a change in cultural attitudes which nowadays are more likely to involve sympathy with the alien other or the outsider, someone who simultaneously threatens and attracts. Margaret Carter acknowledges all these changes in the fictional characterization of the vampire when she states: “Today, creators of 24 Margaret Carter, “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction”, in J. Gordon and V. Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire in Contemporary Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 30.



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fictional vampires often choose the Romantic path of identification with the ‘alien’ supernatural being rather than with the superstitious majority bent on excluding and destroying him or her”.25 It is thus understandable that contemporary writers should treat vampires sympathetically, for exactly the same reasons as nineteenth-century authors vilified them in order to justify their necessary persecution. In Fantasy – The Literature of Subversion, Rosemary Jackson asserts that by having his heroes stake Lucy and Dracula’s three wives, “Stoker reinforces social, class, racial, and sexual prejudices”, and that “[b]y defeating these [forbidden sexual] desires, the narrative reasserts a prohibition on exogamy”.26 Jackson sees the vampire as an alien whose sexuality causes a very strong appeal which the nineteenthcentury managed to suppress, but which is now a source of attraction. This is the result of the transformations in the metaphorical charge of the vampire which has led to an empathic portrayal that would have been unthinkable in the past, as Rice’s novels and those of Chelsea Queen Yarbro and Stephanie Meyer well illustrate. As an extremely powerful metaphor in contemporary culture, the vampire possesses an essential function which helps to explain its continuing “undeath” in the twenty-first century, due to its powerful effect on the collective imagination. For Jackson, the work of metaphor is vital for the construction of all fantastic narratives because the realm of the fantastic is composed of “all that is not said, all that is unsayable, through realistic forms”.27 And this is especially true when applied to the vampire myth, because it apparently holds the key to some incredible knowledge, but this knowledge is only attainable through suffering. This can turn the power of the vampire’s intellect into a metaphor for a warning against some things that one does not want to know, a necessary condition that contributes to preserving the mystery of the myth. There are so many nuances regarding the myth of the vampire that it is impossible to arrive at a final and complete answer as to the fascination it provokes. As Riccardo puts it, “there is no single aspect of the vampire that explains totally the popularity of the image or the power it sometimes has over people. The vampire is plainly 25

Ibid., 29. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy - The Literature of Subversion, New York: Routledge, 1995, 121, 119. 27 Ibid., 26. 26



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multidimensional in its appeal.”28 A mysterious being, nowadays a reluctant symbol of evil whose innocence is hidden, the vampire as the outcast indicates an “unspeakable” existence of terrible injustice. It should be remembered that behind its celebrity status there lies the experience of a marginalized self, which Peter Brooks describes as “innocence buried alive and unable to voice its claim of recognition”.29 Fans have proved extremely responsive to this sense of otherness, of feeling alien or like an outsider in a world of humans, which finds correspondence in the sense of alienation often felt by the characters portrayed in works of art. The Byronic idea of the lonely vampire bohemian is very attractive to young people. One example is Spike’s popularity with fans of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer. Confirming her sympathy for this kind of vampire, Laura, one of his fans, explains Spike’s appeal: As a human, he was incredibly sensitive – as a vampire, Spike is still “tainted” by humanity … Spike is capable of love and selflessness. Spike loves more completely and powerfully than any other character on the show … Why relate to Spike? Spike is the ultimate outcast. He does not fit in anywhere, and is struggling to find his place in the world.30

This description could be applied to Count Saint Germain’s disenchanted idealism, to Lestat’s status as a rule-breaker and the glamour this affords, and also to the most depressive and romantic moments of the inhumanly beautiful Prince Charming, Edward Cullen, in Twilight. Reflecting the crisis of authority in our time, the vampire as an attractive rebel is a twentieth and twenty-first century figure, in spite of the existence of potential rebellion in all vampires. This kind of attraction is due to the transformation of the vampire as villain into the vampire as hero, a fact that has led Margaret Carter to state: “As a rebellious outsider, as persecuted minority, as endangered species, and as a member of a different ‘race’ that legend portrays as

28

Martin Riccardo, Liquid Dreams of Vampires, 22. Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess, York: York University Press, 1995, 20. 30 Milly Williamson, The Lure of the Vampire, 74. 29



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sexually omnicompetent, the vampire makes a fitting hero for late twentieth-century popular fiction.” 31 Let Me In, a 2010 American romantic horror film directed by Matt Reeves, provides an example of a creature of the dark leading the audience, with unexpected heroism, to light. Owen is an unhappy and lonely twelve-year-old boy who is neglected by his divorcing parents and is continually harassed at school by bullies. When he meets Abby, the vampire girl next door, he is finally able to fight his loneliness and his adversaries at school. This story of friendship, between a young boy and a vampire child in New Mexico in the early 1980s, deals with the theme of integration, which in this case is as important to the boy as it is to the vampire, which shows their similar struggle to fit in. Both of them personify the figure of the excluded “alien” which the vampire is used to representing. The representatives of the social order can maintain that order only by discriminating against different existences and by persecuting otherness, instead of accepting it. This ruling human perversity feeds on our energy and creativity, as Auerbach notes: “There are vampires and vampires, and the ones that suck blood aren’t the worst”.32 This dominant psychic vampirism is also an extremely important reason for our empathy with vampires because through them we are able to tear off the mask of injustice and corruption that undermines our troubled present times. Auerbach also observes: Dracula’s dominance in our century allows us to imagine our relationships, intimate and political, as entangled in psychic vampirism. Vampires and vampires live with us today because, throughout the twentieth century, we have embraced Draculas and Draculas.33

To conclude, the desire to be forever young like the vampire takes its toll: being cursed to roam the earth forever, loveless, suffering and in a state of eternal need, depending on young blood to survive, like Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows. Bram Stoker also conveys the 31 Margaret Carter, “The Vampire as Alien in Contemporary Fiction”, in J. Gordon and V. Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire in Contemporary Culture, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 29. 32 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, 101. 33 Ibid., 111.



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same kind of ethical message, perhaps to disturb the most selfconfident readers of his time: “How blessed are some people, / Whose lives have no fears, no dreads, / To whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, / And brings nothing but sweet dreams.”34 Fear is an integral part of human life, but it seems that the beings we should fear most are ourselves, divided as we are in a maze of contradictions and split motivations. The postmodern subject is lost in doubt, forever questioning the meaning of life and the role of existence. Just like present-day vampire adaptations, the individual’s identity is fragmented, laden with conflicting urges and incompatible needs: the body and the mind, the technical and the spiritual, the ephemeral and the eternal. And the appeal of the abyss seems to lurk somewhere – perhaps in the alluring charm of the vampire.

34

Bram Stoker, Dracula, 122.



WHO’S AFRAID OF DON JUAN? VAMPIRISM AND SEDUCTION MARIA DO CARMO MENDES The changes undergone by the nineteenth-century figure of the vampire have suggested the existence of a close link between the myths of Don Juan and the vampire. This article has the following purposes: 1) to identify the most important connections between the vampire and Don Juan (e.g. the sexual and social threat, the irresistible allure capacity, the aristocratic origin); 2) to recognize the aspects that separate them (e.g. the vampire’s desire to appropriate other people’s life, and therefore to perpetuate an anti-natural existence, the steps of the vampire activity, the notion of mental disease in vampirism, missing from Don Juan’s myth; 3) to argue that the links between the two myths contribute to erase Don Juan’s mythical aura. This paper will seek to depart from the thesis presented at the outset and to discuss its contribution to the failing of the myth.

Two literary figures stand out in the Western canon as symbols of seduction: one of them is Dracula, the other Don Juan. A comparison between them may shed some light on the literary expression of sexuality and transgression in general and men’s somewhat aggressive and predatory courtship strategies in particular. Indeed the destructive power of Tirso de Molina’s Don Juan, created at the beginning of the seventeenth century, resembles the vampire’s. The mesmerizing power, the irresistible fascination, the illegitimate and even immoral advances, and the absolute control of the opposite sex are features common to vampirism and Donjuanism. So, a survey of the literary myth of Dracula should draw a parallel between the figure of the vampire and some elements of the mythical character of Don Juan. In the light of this, the present article aims at pointing out some essential characteristics which Don Juan and the vampire share, as well as other aspects that make them utterly distinct. I will focus on Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula, with some references to the more widespread and complex portrait of the vampire. The first section provides an analysis of Don Juan and the vampire’s emergence and evolution. The second section discusses some significant links between Don Juan and the vampire. The third section presents them as

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what I propose to call “fatal men”. The fourth section discusses the concept of “female vampirism” and the rise of Donjuanesque women by the end of the nineteenth century. The fifth section looks into the dissimilarities and the idiosyncrasies of Don Juan and the vampire. Present-day popularity Although they were born into very different cultural times – the Spanish Baroque and the Victorian period – Don Juan and Dracula are literary myths that share a few outstanding features. For one, both overcame the borders of literature and became inspiring characters in many other artistic expressions. And, despite their different emergences and geographical origins, their popularity remains unscathed to this day. For us to understand the shared traits of their complex identity, a preliminary glimpse at their parallel historical evolution is in order. All over the twentieth century, Bram Stoker’s Dracula played a major role in European and North-American literature and film. Among the many examples of the vampire myth’s continued existence in literature are the novels Salem’s Lot (Stephen King, 1976), The Ultimate Dracula (Byron Preiss, 1991), Dracula Unbound (Brian Aldiss, 1992), and The Secret Life of Laszlo, Count Dracula (Roderick Anscombe, 1994). In the movie industry, the last decades are well exemplified by Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), and Jordan Neil’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), among others. The number of societies formed in the twentieth century also bear testimony to the fact that a taste for vampirism is very much alive: a few examples are the Vampire Research Centre in Elmhurst (1970), the Gothic Society of Canada (founded in 1993), the Research Institute of Vampirism in Seattle (1991), the Transylvania Society of Dracula (created in the Romanian capital), and the Dracula Society, established in London, in 1973.1

1

On this matter, see Jaime Noguera, Vampiros. La Sangre Es la Vida, Málaga: Centro de Ediciones de la Diputación Provincial de Málaga, 2002, 301-313. For an analysis of the vampire’s presence in contemporary literature, see the works of Montague Summers, The Vampire in Europe, New York: University Books, 1968; Anthony Masters, The Natural History of the Vampire, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1972; Mathew Bunson, The Vampire Encyclopedia, New York: Gramerci Books, 2000; and Michel J. Dennison, Vampirism. Literary Tropes of Decadence and Entropy, New York: Peter Lang, 2002.



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As far as Don Juan is concerned, the myth has been recurrently turned into cinema material: putting aside those where he is a minor character (e.g. The Great Lover, directed by Alexander Hall in 1949, and Don Juan of New York, directed by Gene Sacks in 1972), some films are closely related to famous literary versions: Don Juan and Faust (Marcel L’Herbier, 1972), inspired by Grabbe’s drama, and The Adventures of Don Juan, starring Errol Flynn and directed by Vincent Sherman in 1949 (a good example of how the American industry places the character in a framework of adventures). In the 1970s, two movies can be taken into account: Don Juan, directed by Roger Vadim (1973), starring the then sex symbol, Brigitte Bardot, as a female Don Juan; and Joseph Losey’s Don Giovanni (1979), an adaptation of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni o sia il dissoluto punito (1789). Some versions not strictly connected to the myth, but rather to the character’s aura, must also be examined as Donjuanesque adaptations: in 1995, Jeremy Leven directed Don Juan de Marco, where a mythomaniac disguised as Zorro (Johnny Depp) reports on his amorous exploits to Marlon Brando in the role of an unenthusiastic psychiatrist. In 1998, the French director Jacques Weber adapted for the screen Molière’s play Don Juan ou le Festin de Pierre. So, Dracula and Don Juan share a remarkable success in different art expressions (even in comics and popular culture) across the world, Portugal included.2 This systematic presence and productivity allows them to be regarded as myths. As Pierre Brunel asserts, the label “literary myth” implies three categories: birth (“emergence”), plasticity (“fléxibilité”), and spreading (“irradiation”).3 Since their creation, Dracula and Don Juan have been continually changing, settling in different social contexts and raising new meanings, in eternal movements of rebirth. We can see them in Western and Eastern cultures, in comics, paintings, musical adaptations, and university programmes. What remains to be seen is how far their paths cross in terms of the qualities they share.

2

Six years ago, for instance, a group of well-known lusophone writers (Ana Paula Tavares, Gonçalo M. Tavares, Hélia Correia, João Tordo, Jorge Reis-Sá, José Eduardo Agualusa, Miguel Esteves Cardoso, Rui Zink, and Susana Caldeira-Cabaço) published a collection of vampire short stories coordinated by Pedro Sena-Lino, Contos de Vampiros, Porto: Porto Editora, 2009. 3 Pierre Brunel, Mythocritique. Théorie et parcours, Paris: PUF, 1992, 77.



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Bringing together Don Juan and the vampire – the demonic quality The first aspect to highlight regarding the common traits of the characters under focus is their devilish nature. In Stoker’s novel, Abraham Van Helsing’s words connect the vampire to a devil. Count Dracula’s powers are almost unlimited, but the doctor trusts that human beings can destroy him: “Well, the devil may work against us for all he’s worth, but God sends us men when we want them.”4 Likewise, in Mina Harker’s journal, the vampire’s description is linked to the devil: This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men, he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning be the growth of ages, he has still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination by the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command, he is brute, and more than brute, he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not, he can, within his range, direct the elements, the storm, the fog, the thunder, he can command all the meaner things, the rat, and the owl, and the bat, the moth, and the fox, and the wolf, he can grow and become small, and he can at times vanish and come unknown. 5

Even before the romantic revisions, Don Juan is also described as a devil or, at least, an evil creature. Indeed, the first allusions to Don Juan as a demonic figure come out in Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest.6 Judith H. Arias invites us to examine three passages: “following Don Juan’s adventure with Duchess Isabela in Naples and his precipitous flight from the palace, his uncle Don Pedro exclaims: ‘He tied his cape to the balcony and fell like Lucifer. I ran and saw him in the moonlight writhing like a snake on the ground’”.7 Later, Batricio defines Don Juan as a messenger of “the devil”. And finally, Don Juan’s servant, Catalinón, says about 4

Bram Stoker, Dracula, London: Penguin Books, 1994, 269. Ibid., 427. 6 The Spanish author created the literary myth of Don Juan, as Leo Weinstein states in The Metamorphoses of Don Juan, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959, 23: “We find in Tirso’s Burlador practically all the future interpretations of Don Juan, either directly or in spe. But in order to lend itself to infinite variations, a literary theme must be both simple and rich, clear and yet subject to varying interpretations general and universal but embodied in a highly individualized personage.” 7 Judith Hepler Arias, “Don Juan, Cupid, the Devil”, in Hispania, 75, 1, 1992, 1108. 5



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Batricio: “Poor fellow, he’s fallen into Lucifer’s hands”. These metaphorical associations of Don Juan and the Devil are reinforced by two references to Don Juan as a serpent. Arias adds: Don Juan is the devil in human form. Tirso’s great insight is to present him as a demythologized Satan, not a distanced God or an obscure demon, but a mortal acting entirely within the confines of social organization.8

Significantly, the satanic condition becomes crucial to portraying Don Juan in romantic versions, mainly in the most well-known ones: the drama by José Zorrilla, Don Juan Tenorio (1844). Recurrent comments link the protagonist to Satanism. Mejía, Don Juan’s rival, claims he has been defeated by a man “who is a Satan”.9 Later, he states that Don Juan’s victory with women is a result of his diabolical skills. Ciutti, Don Juan’s servant, is convinced that his master is “a devil in human flesh” (idem, 128). Doña Inés’ statement confirms Don Juan’s diabolical personality: “Maybe Satan gave you his fascinating eye, his attractive word and the love he refused to God”.10 Satanism is a condition to vampirism. In Polidori’s novel (firstly ascribed to Byron) we can see the connection of Don Juan to the vampire. Lord Ruthven, the protagonist, is “a Donjuanesque seducer whose monstrosity is based in his lack of ethics. He builds his ego parasitically from women he conquers”.11 Don Juan’s metaphorical link to Satan is evident in Tirso’s The Trickster and it returns in the romantic version by Zorrilla in Don Juan Tenorio. In general terms, then, we might say that Don Juan and the vampire share a demonic capacity to control, manipulate and subjugate innocent and weak women. Monléon proves to be well aware of this shared skill when he asks: “What defines Don Juan? What gives him life? Like the

8

Ibid., 1113. My translation, henceforth. José Zorrilla y Moral, Don Juan Tenorio, 25ª edición, Prólogo de Francisco Nieva, Edición de Francisco Peña, Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe, S.A., 1999, 140. 10 Ibid., 190. 11 José B. Monléon, “Vampiros y donjuanes. Sobre la figura del seductor en el siglo XX”, in Revista Hispánica Moderna, XLVIII, 1, 1995, 24. 9



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vampire, Don Juan is fed by his conquests and without the ability to repeat this cruel rite he would not exist.”12 Fatal seduction and sexual transgression Don Juan and Dracula, relentless predators of the female sex, can both be regarded as “fatal men”, in association with the so-called “femmes fatales”. Since the former’s birth in the seventeenth century, Don Juan has been exceptionally seductive and destructive. In Tirso’s drama, his beauty, youth and cheerfulness are persistent features which increase his success in seduction. Besides, in The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest he is portrayed as a special man who offers young women the opportunity of living an adventurous life – a life which drastically contrasts with their parents’ arrangements: marriage, children, and stability.13 It comes as no surprise that the subversive, slightly forbidden nature of this unusual male fascinates women. Actually, it is typical of Romanticism to offer images of rebels who defy laws and restrictions. Don Juan, Prometheus, and Cain are mythical figures who express such romantic beliefs as individualism, human uprising and religious disbelief. And, in matters of the heart, women are easy prey to the bearers of a (good) promise. Don Juan promises endless love and, sometimes, the stability of a marriage. Even though he has no intention of keeping his word, he provides brief moments of happiness and hope, tricking women into believing they will live an exceptional relationship. Much along the same lines, according to David Punter, Dracula offers: … the promise of true union, union that transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we can also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in convention relationships.14

12

Ibid., 25. Tirso de Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra, 21ª edición, Madrid: Editorial Espasa Calpe, S.A., 1997. 14 David Punter, The Literature of Terror. A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the present day, London: Longman, 19. 13



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The strong sexual contours of the two characters’ exploits raise interesting social questions as to the morals of their epoch. Indeed, Dracula and Don Juan mirror deep concerns of their creators about the times in which they arose. If the emergence of the Don Juan myth coincides with the beginning of modernity and the striking theological worries of the Counter-Reformation, Stoker’s Dracula is closely connected, in González de Sande’s words, with ... the anxieties of his time, hypocritical and repressive. He offers the vain illusion of immortality, satisfies the subconscious desire we all have of power without limit … and especially a sexual emancipation that produces an ambivalent feeling of fear and search. [Dracula] invites us to transgression with his advocacy of unlimited pleasure and his vindication of the rights of the human body against the doctrine that preaches severe morality and established rules, and only admits the immortality of the soul.15

Even if nineteenth-century writers respect the (historically grounded) “otherness” of the vampire, they seek to identify him with human, morally condemned, faults: the unscrupulous behaviour and the capacity to hurt the other. In the nineteenth century, the vampire portrayal reflects a more general change: writers replace the picture of a superhuman being by an ordinary individual whose own personal desires are opposed to political, social and legal restrictions. The vampire then represents a common disbelief in the supernatural power and a growing concern for contemporary social issues, as seen in works by Dickens (Bleak House), George Elliot (Middlemarch) and John W. Polidori (whose Vampyre is an excellent case of the transformation of the older supernatural creature into a credible human being). The nineteenth-century vampire is an aristocrat who emerges from obscurity and discloses a compelling capacity to seduce as his main distinctive attribute – combined with an enormous hypnotic power. This feature allows a more or less direct analogy with the mythical Don Juan.

15 Mercedes González de Sande, “Drácula y Don Juan: Confrontación de Dos Mitos”, in Héroes, Mitos y Monstruos en la Literatura Española Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela: Editorial Andavira, 2009, 243.



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Dracula is characterized in Stoker’s novel as a civilized aristocrat. Jonathan Harker, Mina’s fiancé, describes the Count as: … a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without a chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open space. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture. 16

Dracula is the proud descendant of a long-lasting aristocratic tradition. Jonathan Harker reports on his conversation with the Count: I asked him a few questions on Transylvania history, and he warmed up to the subject wonderfully. In his speaking of things and people, and especially of battles, he spoke as if he had been present at them all. This he afterwards explained by saying that to a Boyar the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate. Whenever he spoke of his house, he always said “we”, and spoke almost in the plural, like a king speaking. 17

Don Juan shares with Dracula a noble origin. He belongs to the upper-class: his father, Diego Tenorio, is a minister of the Spanish King, and his uncle, Diego Tenorio, is the ambassador of the King of Naples. For those who meet Dracula and Don Juan, the first feelings they experience are enthusiasm and spontaneous attraction to their magnetism, but soon all the characters feel troubled by these singular men. Jonathan Harker’s first impressions, in Stoker’s novel, are very disturbing: Count Dracula “moved impulsively forward, and holding out his hand grasped mine with a strength which made me wince, an effect which was not lessened by the fact that it seemed cold as ice, more like the hand of a dead than a living man”. Jonathan tries to hide his emotions, observing the Count’s welcome and his “charming smile”: “The light and warm and the Count’s courteous welcome seemed to have dissipated all my fears and doubts. Having then reached my normal state, I discovered that I was half famished with

16 17

Stoker, Dracula, 29. Ibid., 53.



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hunger.”18 But just a few minutes later, Jonathan’s first emotions return. Dracula is a terrific creature, whose effect of fear is reinforced by his teeth: “The Count smiled, and as his lips ran back over his gums, the long, sharp, canine teeth showed out strangely.”19 Later, Mina comments on Jonathan’s feelings about Lucy’s metamorphosis and the Count’s presence: He was very pale, and his eyes seemed bulging out as, half in terror and half in amazement, he gazed at a tall, thin man, with a beaky nose and black moustache and pointed beard, who was also observing the pretty girl. He was looking at her so hard that he did not see either of us, and so I had a good view of him. His face was not a good face. It was hard, and cruel, and sensual, and big white teeth, that looked all the whiter because his lips were so red, were pointed like an animal’s. Jonathan kept staring at him, till I was afraid he would notice. I feared he might take it ill; he looked so fierce and nasty. I asked Jonathan why he was disturbed, and he answered, evidently thinking that I knew as much about it as he did, “Do you see who it is?”20

Although Dracula’s physical portrait is much more frightening than Don Juan’s, the social and sexual threat which the vampire poses brings him and Don Juan together. In Stoker’s novel, for instance, the names of the ships carrying the vampire to London – Demeter – and back home – Czarina Catherine – suggest his voracious sexual appetite. In Tirso de Molina’s The Trickster of Seville, Don Juan is known as the “lobster of women”. Since Tirso’s play, Don Juan is, like the vampire, understood as sexually – and hence socially – dangerous. They both show contempt for authority through the assertion of the most self-centred of all powers – sexuality. They both manipulate women and their seduction method follows identical motivations: Dracula answers Lucy’s desire to escape from the repressive existence of an aristocratic woman; Don Juan, though obsessed by individual desire, liberates women from religious and domestic authority. Don Juan and the vampire also share fantastic traits which make them particularly noteworthy in this literary genre. If the vampire is 18

Ibid., 51. Ibid., 40. 20 Ibid., 310. 19



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defined by his almost supernatural ability to live forever and to perpetuate his existence by sucking the life of another human being, the destiny of Don Juan is, since The Trickster of Seville and until the end of the nineteenth century, marked by many fantastic moments: first, Don Juan’s meeting with a talking statue who invites him for a meal; secondly, the protagonist’s interview with God’s messenger; thirdly, the skill of the Stone Guest to hold Don Juan’s hand and push him to Hell. This dramatic and supernatural outcome closes a sequence of fantastic episodes. Significantly, Zorrilla subtitles his Don Juan Tenorio “Fantastic-Religious Drama”. Although minor in contemporary versions, the fantastic nature of the Don Juan myth remains. In Portuguese literature, José Saramago’s Don Giovanni or the Dissolute Forgiven witnesses the return of a Stone Guest.21 Saramago describes him as a grotesque character totally unhelpful to bring back social rules after the seducer’s death. In Saramago’s version, Don Juan’s death provides, as in all Donjuanesque texts since the Baroque, … the occasion for the marriage of victims and rivals, which amounts to a reconfirmation of faith in the institutions that define the community. His immolation, that of the sacrificial victim in primitive societies, sets the stage for the restoration of social order.22

In 1963, José Cardoso Pires publishes Jogos de Azar, a collection of short stories. 23 The “Ritual of the little vampires” presents a group of four boys under fifteen, whose only purpose is the rape of a girl. Later, they try to justify the act with misogynous arguments, among which stands out the idea that they are attractive seducers who accordingly deserve sexual favours. The boys are the narrator’s mechanism to condemn the assumption of male superiority in sexual matters, which was all too common in the sixties. As we have seen, Don Juan and the vampire arouse in the reader ambivalent emotions. Both characters are seductive and terrifying. For a short moment, they can trick their victims and look fascinating. But fear almost immediately becomes the sole reaction to their presence. 21 José Saramago, Don Giovanni ou o Dissoluto Absolvido, Lisboa: Editorial Caminho, 2005. 22 Judith Hepler Arias, “Doubles in Hell: ‘El Burlador de Sevilla y Convidado de Piedra’”, in Hispanic Review, 58, 1, 1990, 365. 23 José Cardoso Pires, Jogos de Azar, Lisboa: Publicações Dom Quixote, 1999.



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Indeed, those who meet Don Juan or Dracula are eventually destroyed: in the vampire myth, this destruction is death; in the Don Juan myth, women lose their reputation; boyfriends and husbands lose women; and parents lose social dignity and honour. In a certain way, all of them (seduced women and cheated men) die symbolically. The concept of psychological horror (typically associated with the Gothic narrative, starting with Horace Walpole’s novel, The Castle of Otranto, 1764) becomes relevant when the reader watches the physical and psychological changes of a disturbed character. Dracula is a dark and fascinating creature. Don Juan is also a charming character, but the punishment of his excesses through a condemnation to Hell troubles the reader and raises a deep feeling of horror. In the Don Juan myth, the re-establishment of social order is committed to a divine messenger just because humans – authority figures, ashamed parents or offended husbands – are unable to restore the Law. Since the Baroque play The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, an extensive part of society tries to remove his main corruptor. From a Girardian point of view, Don Juan is a scapegoat:24 his death becomes crucial for everyone and gives society an illusion: order and law will come back. That is why a group of insulted husbands and parents decide to get rid of Don Juan. Thus, his death fulfils a social function within a patriarchal structure: on the one hand, Don Juan unifies society against him and seems to assume collective guilt; on the other hand, he allows the restoration of social peace.25 Similarly, Dracula is portrayed, in Stoker’s narrative, as an awful being who incites a group of detractors: Jonathan, Mina, and Van Helsing. Each one plays a specific role, but all of them have the same purpose. In Mina’s journal, we can see that Count Dracula is a threat to established rules and the social structure: When we met in Dr. Seward’s study two hours after dinner, which had been at six o’clock, we unconsciously formed a sort of board or 24

René Girard, La Violence et le Sacré, Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1972, 9-62. The author argues that primitive societies shift all members’ aggressiveness to just one person, which is excluded or killed. This act removes internal violence and reestablishes social order. 25 Following René Girard, Mandrell says that “Don Juan’s scapegoating is and can be the only solution to a world thrown into chaotic disorder” – James Mandrell, Don Juan and the Point of Honor. Seduction, Patriarchal Society, and Literary Tradition¸ University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, 92 and 231.



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Maria do Carmo Mendes committee. Professor Van Helsing took the head of the table, to which Dr. Seward motioned him as he came into the room. He made me sit next to him on his right, and asked me to act as secretary. Jonathan sat next to me. Opposite us were Lord Godalming, Dr. Seward, and Mr. Morris, Lord Godalming being next the Professor, and Dr. Seward in the centre. The Professor said, ‘I may, I suppose, take it that we are all acquainted with the facts that are in these papers.’ We all expressed assent, and he went on, ‘Then it were, I think, good that I tell you something of the kind of enemy with which we have to deal. I shall then make known to you something of the history of this man, which has been ascertained for me. So we then can discuss how we shall act, and can take our measure according” …. We resumed our places, and Dr. Van Helsing went on with a sort of cheerfulness which showed that the serious work had begun. It was to be taken as gravely, and in as businesslike a way, as any other transaction of life. 26

Female vampirism, or, the rise of Donjuanesque women The vampire was a “fatal man” in the context of satanic romanticism. But in the second half of the nineteenth century the figure of the vampire turns into a woman – an agent of social disorder. The vampires of Baudelaire’s “L’amour et le crane”, “Metamorphoses du Vampire” or “Poison”, Gautier’s Clarimonde (both angel and demon), Swinburne’s Faustina or Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Hyacinthe are women. Although briefly, I would like to reflect on the “femme fatale” myth, and its links to vampirism, following Virginia Allen’s assertion: “like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned all the secrets of the grave.”27 The femme fatale is an important classical legacy. Some biblical and mythological characters (Eve, Salome, and Delilah, for instance) are a mixture of sensuality, erotic strength, beauty, and death. This link becomes a fundamental trait of female figuration in Western art (in literary texts and paintings). The vision of the woman as manipulative in sexual games, present though it may be in the early Romantics (e.g. Keats), only develops in the mid-nineteenth century. Paintings show images of female beauty in a diabolical light which 26

Stoker, Dracula, 425, 429. Virginia Allen, The Femme Fatale. Erotic Icon, New York: Whitston Publishing Company, 1983, 2.

27



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recreate both pagan and biblical myths (Eve, Venus, Helen of Troy, Judith, Sirens, or Cleopatra). The disturbing power of the femme fatale is a recurrent pattern in Symbolist and Decadent literature and painting,28 and in some nineteenth and twentieth century texts, the power of the femme fatale is steadily connected to Satanism (e.g. Gautier, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle Adam). Allen links the development of the femme fatale myth to the rise of feminism in the nineteenth century: That need for independence clearly indicates that the development of the imagery of the femme fatale was associated with the nineteenth century growth of feminism. The years during which the femme fatale acquired her essential attributes were also the years during which the female emancipation movement gathered strength.29

The female vampire of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) is at the same time a rebirth of the mythic fear women inflame and a feminist reaction against those who look upon them as parasitic, ornamental, and weak. As Nina Auerbach states, … in Stoker’s influential literary myth the apparently helpless woman assumes male, female, and preternatural powers, taking away from the now-paralyzed Dracula the magus’ potency, … it seems more plausible to read the novel as a fin-de-siècle myth of newly empowered womanhood, whose two heroines are violently transformed from victims to instigators of their story. Aggrandized by her ambiguous transformations, Mina, and by implication womanhood itself, grows into the incarnation of irresistible Truth …. By the end, these seemingly supine women assume the authority of personifications, the guiding spirits of their novels’ action. The power of Dracula himself narrows to the dimensions of his vulnerable coffin, for despite his ambitious designs on the human race, he seems to be the world’s last surviving male vampire.30

28 “Visual images of the femme fatale form the last decades of the nineteenth century can be found in England, France, Germany, Austria, Scandinavia – and in some form of art at all times during the last century or more”. Ibid., 186. 29 Ibid., 191. 30 Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon. The Life of a Victorian Myth, Cambridge, Massachusetts and London: Harvard University Press, 1982, 24.



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In Jonathan Harker’s journal we can witness the ambivalent emotions which the woman vampire awakens: There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth .... I could feel the soft, shivering touch of the lips on the supersensitive skin of my throat, and the hard dents of two sharp teeth, just touching and pausing there. I closed my eyes in languorous ecstasy and waited – waited with beating heart.31

This description brings to mind the female protagonists of Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories: Berenice’s eyes and teeth arouse mixed emotions: fear and attraction, disgust and fascination: The forehead was high, and very pale, and singularly placid; and the once golden hair fell partially over it, and overshadowed the hollow temples with ringlets, now black as the raven’s wing, and jarring discordantly, in their fantastic character, with the reigning melancholy of the countenance. The eyes were lifeless, and lustreless, and seemingly pupilless .… From the disordered chamber of my brain, had not, alas! Departed, and would not be driven away, the white and ghastly spectrum of the teeth …. They were here, and there, and everywhere, and visibly and palpably before me; long, narrow, and excessively white, with the pale lips writhing about them, as in the very moment of their first terrible development.32

Like Berenice, Ligeia is a mysterious woman who fascinates the narrator. She comes and goes away without being noticed, suggesting the behaviour of a ghost. Her beauty has a sign of unreality (analogous to the beauty of a fairy). According to Tobin Siebers, Ligeia’s link to the vampire is also present in Madeleine, the protagonist of The Fall of the House of Usher: “Ligeia is a superb example of a ‘Dead Alive’, and her premature death seems an unnecessary twist in Poe’s plot, for the woman’s real beauty consists in her cadaverous complexion. She

31

Stoker, Dracula, 52. Edgar Allan Poe, The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Running Press, 1983, 160. 32



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is already dead in life, and in death, she wills to live.”33 Ligeia’s odd appearance can be indeed taken as resembling a vampire: She came and departed like a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study, save by the dear music of her low sweet voice .… In beauty of face no maiden ever equalled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream – an airy and spirit-lifting vision more wildly divine than the phantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos .… Although I perceived that her loveliness was indeed “exquisite”, and felt that there was much of “strangeness” pervading it, yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of “the strange”.34

The evolution of Don Juan shows, near the end of the nineteenth century, the weakening of his ability to spread charm and the shift of his former erotic achievements to women, who became the seducers instead of the seduced. The formula of the “trickster tricked” is dominant in contemporary Donjuanesque versions: women employ the same mechanisms to seduce and abandon men. Max Frisch’s Don Juan Oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie (1963) is a good example of female Donjuanism.35 Leo Lowther argues that “For Frisch, Don Juan is the victim of his own undeserved reputation”.36 Kieser Rolf follows this perspective, in a paper with a suggestive title: “Wedding Bells for Don Juan: Frisch’s Domestication of a Myth”.37 The growing female domination, in literary Donjuanesque versions, shows that, by the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century, women boast satanic characteristics and a strong tendency to destroy men who try to seduce them.38 Beauty, absolute authority and forbidden sexuality are attributes that 33

Tobin Siebers, The Romantic Fantastic, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984, 148-149. 34 Poe, The Unabridged Poe, 480. 35 Max Frisch, Don Juan Oder Die Liebe zur Geometrie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1963. 36 Leo Lowther, Don Juan and Comparative Literary Criticism. Four Approaches, PhD dissertation, Michigan: University of Utah, 1971, 232. 37 Kieser Rolf, “Wedding Bells for Don Juan: Frisch’s Domestication of a Myth”, in Perspectives on Max Frisch, eds. Gerhard F. Probst & Jay F. Bodine, Vol. I, Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982, 119-123. 38 Mario Praz, La Carne, la Morte e il Diavolo nella Letteratura Romantica, Firenze, Sansoni Editore, 1976, 141.



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build the image of the femme fatale. In Western literature, their presence contributes to undervaluing Don Juan. George Bernard Shaw’s play Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (1903) perfectly parodies the Don Juan myth: a pale seducer is subjugated by a powerful, independent and brave woman, Ann Whitefield. For the English writer, a modern Don Juan is not worried about morality, but about the future of mankind: Instead of pretending to read Ovid he does actually read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, studies Westermarck, and is concerned for the future of the race instead of for the freedom of his own instincts. Thus his profligacy and his dare-devil airs have gone the way of his sword and mandolin into the rag shop of anachronisms and superstitions .... My Don Juan is the quarry instead of the huntsman. Yet he is a true Don Juan, with a sense of reality that disables convention, defying to the last the fate which finally overtakes him. The woman’s need of him to enable her to carry on Nature’s most urgent work, does not prevail against him until his resistance gathers her energy to a climax at which she dares to throw away her customary exploitations of the conventional affectionate and dutiful poses, and claim him by natural right for a purpose that far transcends their mortal personal purposes. 39

John Tanner, Shaw’s seduced Don Juan, says: “She’ll commit every crime a respectable woman can; and she’ll justify every one of them by saying that it was the wish of her guardians. She’ll put everything on us; and we shall have no more control over her than a couple of mice over a cat.”40 The metaphors of Shaw’s play show the shifting of functions: woman is “a boa constrictor”; man is “the pursued, the marked down quarry, and a destined prey”. In Portuguese literature, the connection between Don Juan and the female vampire is present in a few significant texts. In the dramatic poem Don Juan’ Death (1874), by the realistic author Abílio Guerra Junqueiro, Satanism defines Impéria, the femme fatale: she is a “vampire of passion”, an irresistible woman who fascinates and annihilates all the men she seduces. Don Juan is simply a victim of her 39 George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman. A Comedy and a Philosophy, Cambridge, Mass: The University Press, London, New York: Penguin Books, 2004 [1903], 14-16. 40 Ibid., 54.



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predatory personality.41 Likewise, Aquilino Ribeiro’s novels Jardim das Tormentas (1913), and A Via Sinuosa (1918) show the contemporary tendency to satirize Don Juan through the ascendancy of a powerful and fascinating femme fatale.42 In the short novels by the post-realistic writer Guiomar Torresão, male behaviour reflects weakness of character; men become victims of satanic women. Lola, the protagonist of “Saints and Sinners”, loves with “sickly sentimentality, feverish, crazy love”.43 The zoomorphic similes show the aggressiveness of the female erotic desire; Lola manipulates men and lives to accomplish her sexual desire, absorbing men “in vampire kisses, with a mocking laughter”. João de Barros, the neo-romantic poet, proposes an “unorthodox” adaptation of Don Juan in 1920.44 This assertion anticipates a version intended to be original (in contrast to “orthodox” versions, the ones that reduce Don Juan to a relentless pursuer of erotic achievements). In the poem “Don Juan”, the protagonist recognizes he is obsessed by a desire as strong as a violent fire. In a moment of intimacy with Dulce, the text displays satanic connotations and a clear confrontation with Christian values, expressed in blasphemous exclamations. Don Juan’s “psychic vampirism” is described by José Carlos Seabra Pereira as “the highest point of erotic possession”:45 D. Juan did not kiss her, only, biting her with frantic haste. He became a flame of desire, rising, burning, and involving naïve Dulce. And she is abandoned, finally, by the furious lustful lover .… I have you in my kiss. You are mine. God cannot steal you!46

Drawing apart Don Juan and the vampire Notwithstanding the numerous similarities between the two characters under focus, which I have tried to highlight so far, it is also important 41

Abílio Guerra Junqueiro, A Morte de D. João, Porto: Livraria Moré – Editora, 1874, 188. 42 Aquilino Ribeiro, Jardim das Tormentas, Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1984 [1913]; Aquilino Ribeiro, A Via Sinuosa, Lisboa: Livraria Bertrand, 1985 [1918]. 43 Guiomar Torresão, A Comédia do Amor, Lisboa: Empreza Litteraria de Lisboa, s/d, 77. 44 João de Barros, D. João. Poema, Lisboa: Livraria Aillaud & Bertrand, 1920. 45 José Carlos Seabra Pereira, O Neo-Romantismo na Poesia Portuguesa (1900-1925), Tese de Doutoramento, Universidade de Coimbra: Faculdade de Letras, 1999, 23. 46 João de Barros, D. João, 37.



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to discuss their differences and idiosyncrasies. One of them is their dissimilar methods and purposes of seduction. The vampire’s relentless desire to take lives (in order to perpetuate an unnatural existence) is indeed quite distinct from Don Juan’s art of seducing. The steps of the vampire action – capture of the victim’s will (through hypnosis), snatching of the body (through neck biting), shutting off of the blood flow, and transformation of the victim into a vampire – do not reflect either a Donjuanesque strategy of seduction, or any technique of Don Juan’s repertoire. If we look at Lucy Westenra’s metamorphosis, which according to Judith Weissman transforms her into a “sexual monster”,47 we must conclude that the vampire act is far removed from Don Juan’s: Lucy was breathing somewhat stertorously, and her face was at its worst, for the open mouth showed the pale gums. Her teeth, in the dim, uncertain light, seemed longer and sharper than they had been in the morning”. I went back to the room, and found Van Helsing looking at poor Lucy, and his face was sterner than ever. Some change had come over her body. Death had given back part of her beauty, for her brow and cheeks had recovered some of their flowing lines. Even the lips had lost their deadly pallor. It was as if the blood, no longer needed for the working of the heart, had gone to make the harshness of death as little rude as might be. We thought her dying whilst she slept.48

Auerbach emphasizes the consequences of Mina Harker’s metamorphosis: The word “change”, sometimes modified by “strange” and “terrible”, almost always accompanies Lucy in the text; along with “beloved” it is her epithet. After her first transfusion, “she looked a different being from what she had been before the operation”, and in her fluctuations between passivity and prowling, consciousness and dream, innocence and experience, pallor and ruddiness, she can be said to be “a different being” every time she appears.49

47

Judith Weissman, Half Savage and Hard and Free: Women and Rural Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Novel, Middleton: Wesleyan University Press, 1987, 39. 48 Stoker, Dracula, 287, 291. 49 Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 23.



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As to Don Juan, speaking of his “victims” (to use the terminology of vampire criticism) may be arguable, since the idea of female victimization is far from clear in The Trickster of Seville. On the one hand, women belong to a society where arrogance, deceit and occultation characterize all characters, not just the seducer. On the other hand, Don Juan’s seduction, unlike Dracula’s, has usually the women’s approval: Don Juan has no need to mesmerize or create a parasitic tie of fidelity with his prey. Indeed, while the vampire disgraces the victim, Don Juan does not want either to humiliate or to transform the woman into a vampire. Don Juan is not a cold-hearted seducer. Sometimes (from Romantic versions until now), he is even able to love women. Vampirism is, as seen above, strongly connected to sex. In Stoker’s novel, this connection is obvious not only in Dr. Seward’s words – “no man knows, till he experiences it, what it is to feel his own lifeblood drawn away into the veins of the woman he loves”50 – but also in the moment where Mina describes her sucking of Dracula’s blood: When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth, to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some to the… Oh, my God! My God! What have I done?51

Another good example of the centrality of the sexual script in Bram Stoker’s work takes place at the Count’s castle, when one of Dracula’s brides expresses the sexual connotation of her desires: “He is young and strong. There are kisses for us all.”52 However, sexual intercourse is not essential to define the literary myth of Don Juan. Actually, since The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest, sex becomes a minor motivation for Don Juan. His real drive is the “burla”, the Spanish term for cheating someone. What gives him pleasure is the challenge of legal, social and domestic rules. That is why Nicolas Round says that “[w]hat makes Don Juan a candidate for damnation is not his sexual desires but his will to do

50

Stoker, Dracula, 231. Ibid., 521-522. 52 Ibid., 69. 51



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evil”.53 The Trickster himself announces the pleasure of mocking society (men, women, and king) and his ever-increasing reputation: “Sevilla loudly calls me The Trickster and my greatest pleasure is deceiving and dishonouring a woman.”54 A third major distinction to draw between the two literary figures regards the concept of mental disorder. In Bram Stoker’s novel, three facts suggest that vampirism is, in fact, closely related to a psychic illness: Dracula’s disciple is mentally disturbed; the Count’s house is in the neighbourhood of a hospice, allowing for a close link between the two places; and Van Helsing associates vampires with “obscure diseases”. This bond can be thought of as an attempt to rationally explain vampires’ behaviour, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Don Juan has been submitted to clinical research since the end of the nineteenth century: some argued he has a pathological compulsion and a kind of sexual obsession. Both would represent a mental disorder. Following this perspective, we can think about Donjuanism as a clinical behaviour, a matter of psycho-sexual disorder. That is how the famous Spanish physician Gregorio Marañon analyses the myth.55 He underlines the contrast between Don Juan and the Shakespearean Othello: the first is a cold manipulator of emotions; the second, an innocent, spontaneous, and naïve lover. From a clinical perspective, Marañon states that Don Juan has no other occupation or skill than to seduce women. He is mentally disturbed: as an effeminate teenager, a liar, and a manipulative creature, he tries to hide homosexual tendencies. His choice of the night and the obscure places for seduction shows, according to Marañon, the hunt of both men and women. His “instinct of travel” and his chaotic method of seduction disclose the performance of a teenager. Marañon’s point of view is perceptible in some Portuguese, Spanish and French contemporary versions.

53

Nicholas Round, “Sex, Lies, and Dinner with the Dead”, in Selected Interdisciplinary Essays on the Representation of the Don Juan Archetype in Myth and Culture, ed. Andrew Ginger et al., Lewinston, Lampeter: The Edwin Mellen Press, 7-34, 2000, 23. 54 Molina, El Burlador de Sevilla, 132. 55 Gregorio Marañon, Don Juan. Ensayos sobre el Origen de su Leyenda, Buenos Aires: Editora Espasa-Calpe Argentina, S.A., 1946.



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But I am not totally convinced by Marañon’s arguments. From my point of view, in Tirso de Molina’s play, Don Juan’s excesses are, instead, a social phenomenon, shared by nearly all community members: dishonesty and bribery characterize the poor and the rich, nobles and servants in the Spanish society of the Golden Age. Besides, in Romantic interpretation, the seducer’s condemnation is replaced by acceptance and divine rescue. Because he knows what he is doing and he feels that he can be forgiven, he is not mentally disturbed in Romantic versions. Ageing, physical weakening and a ridiculous selfconsciousness all seem to work as good reasons to make clear Don Juan’s failure as a seducer through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Therefore, the diagnosis of any mental disorder is helpless to explain Don Juan’s myth. In fact, modern and contemporary Donjuanesque versions highlight the idea that Don Juan’s myth is dead. This death is a consequence of the persistence of the motifs of ageing and “entrapment” in female ruses. As Gilles Lipovetsky argues, … the emancipation of women, the sexual revolution, the leisure culture, the autonomy and the authenticity … have ruined the old protocols of seduction, now seen as hypocritical, sexist and conventional .… We live in the time of relaxed, minimal, and postromantic seduction.56

Don Juan and Dracula emancipate themselves from the common morals of their time and offer the possibility of a complete gratification of individuality and of the senses. So, both myths symbolize a confrontation between Nature and Culture57: Don Juan was born into a deeply oppressive cultural milieu and he offers the experience of desire and the defiance of social constraints. Dracula too is a symbol of his time’s contradictions about sexual issues and an expression of rebellion against the oppressive Victorian society. As Auerbach says, “[i]t is fashionable to perceive and portray Dracula as an emancipation of Victorian sexual repression”.58 In other terms, 56

Gilles Lipovetsky, “L’Eve nouvelle et l’adieu à Don Juan”, in La Troisième Femme. Permanence et Révolution du Féminin, Paris: Gallimard, 53-61, 1997, 53-54. 57 González de Sande, “Drácula y Don Juan”, 245. 58 Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 24.



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Carol A. Senf argues that “Dracula’s thirst for blood and the manner in which he satisfies this thirst can be interpreted as sexual desire which fails to observe any of society’s attempts to control it – prohibitions against polygamy, promiscuity or homosexuality”.59 Don Juan and Dracula share, last but not least, immortality in literature, cinema, and popular culture, both appearing in a great number of sequels, pastiches and outright farces. And it is curious to notice that, in literature and on the screen, Don Juan and the vampire are always related to darkness. At first sight, darkness helps Donjuanesque seduction and defines the vampire’s survival: “Dracula’s powers are limited to noon, sunrise, and sunset”.60 Don Juan’s meetings with women happen by night in lonely places. Sometimes, he disguises and confuses women who are waiting for their boyfriends or fiancés. In a metaphorical sense, darkness illustrates the metaphysical dimension of the two heroes. Their enormous versatility, that is, their capacity to undergo imaginative changes in literary texts, in films and in popular imagination, surely has contributed to their remarkable survival as literary myths.

59 Carol Ann Senf, Daughters of Lilith. An Analysis of the Vampire Motif in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, PhD dissertation, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1979, 208. 60 Auerbach, Woman and the Demon, 23.



DESTROYING AND CREATING IDENTITY: VAMPIRES, CHAOS AND SOCIETY IN ANGELA CARTER’S “THE SCARLET HOUSE” INÊS BOTELHO The image of the vampire has changed throughout the centuries. It no longer represents a figure of absolute horror but a somewhat sentimentalized one; it has lost some of its otherness. However, the vampire remains a taker. Whether male or female the vampire is a parasite, requiring a second person on whom to feed. Simultaneously victimizer and victim the vampire establishes a symbiosis with the prey, be it a willing or coerced one. The vampire cannot exist without this second part. At the same time, feeding on someone’s blood also seems to mean feeding on someone’s soul. Therefore, some recent art represents the vampire as a taker of vital force. In Angela Carter’s The Scarlet House, a male power figure called the Count aims to generate chaos into the female protagonist’s mind by introducing and erasing memories, trying to force her to lose the grip of who she is. Memories are thus established as essential for creating an identity. This article argues not only that the Count develops a violent vampiric relationship with the protagonist but also that most inhabitants of the Scarlet House are vampires of sorts. It investigates how vampirism becomes a premise, a necessity, a fact, even a way of resistance and rebellion. Considering that the three memories described by the protagonist exemplify prevailing narratives, frequently used by literature and cinema, the article examines how those memories, full of elements well known to the Western society, also function as a form of vampirism.

In Angela Carter’s fiction there are some recurrent motifs that arise in one way or another, such as the circus, music-hall, puppets, fairy tales, houses, cannibalism, lycanthropy, vampires. Sometimes they are suggested rather than frontally used, implicit rather than obvious, but still they are there, an essential part of the narrative. Such is the case of vampires and vampirism in “The Scarlet House”. Vampires have long been part of our common imagination. Before they became figures associated with the Gothic, they were already present in superstitions, legends and folklore, a combination of history

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and fiction.1 In fact, vampires are highly ambivalent figures, frequently associated with sexuality and desire, with both a ravenous appetite and a constant lack of something not quite precise, variable from case to case but ultimately representing the nonexistence of a whole nature. Being neither entirely dead nor exactly alive, they blur the borders between humanity and divinity, they become simultaneously beasts and humans, and they can be of any gender and any sexual orientation. In their indeterminacy lies the potential for transgression, allowing them to act out both what we desire and fear, while also rendering them not quite human. Consequently, the vampire, belonging to a nocturnal world of excess, horror and complex darkness, embodies the Other. However, vampires are mutable and adaptable; they change according to the time, place, politics and culture.2 And so the vampire’s image has lost some of its otherness, gaining even a certain sentimentality.3 Nonetheless, the vampire remains a taker, a parasite requiring a second person on whom to feed. Simultaneously a victimiser and a victim, the vampire establishes a symbiosis with the prey, be it a willing or coerced one. Such a relationship is essential because the vampire cannot exist without this second part. At the same time, vampires and vampirism summon up ideas of carnality, promiscuity and most significantly of contamination. If at the end of the nineteenth century the concern was mainly with syphilis, by the end of the twentieth century AIDS was everyone’s worry. To drink one’s blood is then a way of both spreading disease and stealing an elementary essence. As Sarah Sceats summarizes: Critics have claimed that the image [of the vampire] suggests plague, the spread of syphilis, general fears about contagion, and immigration – especially from the East – and even that the loss of blood betokens the loss of the soul.4 1

Fred Botting, Gothic, London and New York: Routledge, 2003, 145-146; Sarah Sceats, “Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter”, Tulsa Studies in Woman’s Literature, 20/1 (Spring 2001), 119. 2 Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995, 3-5. 3 Actually, many critics consider Francis Ford Coppola’s film Bram Stoker’s Dracula pivotal in turning a figure of absolute horror into a somewhat romanticized one. Fred Botting expresses exactly that idea in Gothic, 177-180. 4 Sceats, “Oral Sex”, 108.



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Feeding on someone’s blood seems to mean feeding on someone’s soul; it is a way of draining something essential. And in fact one can find several representations of the vampire not necessarily as bloodsucking but as a taker of vital force. These entities, often described as psychic vampires,5 are most commonly portrayed as nourishing on energy and arousing such devotion that their victims do not even realize what is happening or, if they do, they promptly and willingly step forward for the sacrifice. But not all psychic vampires prey on submissive victims, nor do they restrict to drinking energy. Instead, their feeding habits comprise a great diversity of elements, such as emotions, mind-control, memories, ideas, talent or creativity.6 5

Some defend that psychic vampirism truly exists, considering it a condition more accurately named psychic parasitism and further arguing that the human beings afflicted by it generally do not know they possess such abilities or at least cannot control them. However, there is no actual scientific proof to support these claims. Additional information on the subject from a believer’s point of view can be found in Brian J. Frost, The Monster With a Thousand Faces: Guises of Vampire in Myth and Literature, Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1989. 6 Literature’s psychic vampires are too many to be listed. Notwithstanding, some significant examples can be provided. Count Stenbock’s “The Sad Story of a Vampire” (first published in 1894 as part of the short story collection Studies of Death) and Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman’s “Luella Miller” (initially published in the December 1902 issue of Everybody’s Magazine) both deal with extremely alluring psychic vampires who drain the energy of those around them thus eventually killing them. Fritz Leiber’s “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” (published in the anthology The Girl with the Hungry Eyes and Other Stories in 1949) and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s “The Mindworm” (originally published in the December 1950 edition of Worlds Beyond) provide interesting variations on the theme, the former vampire consuming life – experiences, thoughts, longings, dreams, in a word, souls – and the latter exacerbated emotions. Harlan Ellison’s “Try a Dull Knife” (first published in the October 1968 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) offers a curious hybrid of psychic and bloodsucking vampires. As for psychic vampires with more extravagant feeding habits, it is important to remember George Sylvester Viereck’s The House of the Vampire (1907) in which the vampire, Reginald Clarke, can steal abilities and talents. In “Torch Song” (initially published in The New Yorker on 4 October, 1947) John Cheever presents yet another kind of vampire: one who feeds on death. Also worth mentioning is Dan Simmon’s Carrion Comfort (originally published in 1983 as a novella and later developed into a large epic volume with a first edition in 1989), where mind-controlling vampires not only prolong their lives by extracting sustenance from the people they manipulate but also have a predilection for prompting violence and disseminating hate. Some of these stories, as well as many others, figure in Elle Datlow’s two anthologies entirely dedicated to psychic vampires: Blood Is Not Enough (1989) and A Whisper of Blood (1991). A more detailed analysis of “Luella Miller”, The House of the Vampire, “The Girl with the Hungry Eyes” and Carrion



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Besides, psychic vampires mingle into the social tissue, camouflaged, not so obviously monstrous or undead. No garlic or holy water scares them away, no fangs single them out, no restraints confine them to a nocturnal life. They thrive anywhere, knowing exactly how to move around in each society, assuming all kinds of forms and never looking like foreigners.7 Compared to their blood eager siblings, their actions may lack graphic impact; yet they remain frightening and terrible. Perhaps psychic vampires even instil a greater dread for they are inconspicuous enemies who provoke horrors impossible to prevent and difficult to battle. It is in this tradition that Carter’s “The Scarlet House” becomes a vampiric tale,8 one profusely immersed in vampirism. So much so that to comprehend how this component operates within the plot proves pivotal in understanding the story – precisely what this article aims to do. The first section expands on the manifestations of psychic vampirism in the text and clarifies its articulation with the more obvious themes of the narrative: memory, chaos and identity. It closes by demonstrating why the tale’s victimizers are all vampires. The second part continues this reasoning and applies it to the protagonist, examining how she uses her recently acquired vampiric nature to survive her ordeals and rebel against them. Finally, the third section explains the way in which the tale suggests that such a kind of vampirism extends to society itself. Psychic vampirism in “The Scarlet House”: memory loss as a way to destroy identity “The Scarlet House” never quite adopts the supernatural; instead, it uses its imagery for creating an environment permeated with occultist elements – quills deepened in blood, tarot cards, wizardly robes, a mystery book with purple pages written in black ink. Likewise, the story certainly does not exhaust itself in the realms of psychic Comfort, as well as of other works not addressed here, can be found in Nina Auerbach (1995). 7 Auerbach, Our Vampires, 101, 109. 8 It should be noted that many of Angela Carter’s vampires do not feed on blood, instead preferring emotions which they avidly and coldheartedly manipulate. Furthermore, their vampiric nature is also generally suggested by physical characteristics or even by something in their clothes or accessories. On Carter’s vampires, though surprisingly “The Scarlet House” is not included, see Sarah Sceats (2001).



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vampirism. Carter fully plays with the vampiric imagery, summoning it through language and narrative. Neither the word “vampire” nor its derivatives figure in the text, ever, and yet the story is imbued with vampirism and vampire tropes displayed at the Gothic setting of the Scarlet House itself. The edifice’s external aspect remains unclear. First the protagonist recalls it as hospital-like, later she believes it to be a red brick building resembling both a farmhouse and a country house, and afterwards she refers to it as a massive house with red doors.9 This mutability hints at a virtual ubiquity: the Scarlet House can be anywhere and look like any sufficiently large edifice. For that reason the outside’s actual form and characteristics have little importance. Moreover, the story truly happens inside the house, with such vivid interiors. The Scarlet House feels like a boarding school. In fact, the nevernamed protagonist refers to it as a school with a three-part programme where the girls first learn how to forget, next forget how to speak and finally cease to exist.10 But above all this house is a labyrinthine prison, a direct sibling of the Gothic castle that served as incarceration for so many heroines,11 a place holding similarities to hell, a sarcophagus that allows no escape and where people are buried alive. The prisoners, all of them females who can be as young as twelve, live confined within its walls, having no glimpses of the surroundings for the windows show them nothing. No one has ever been able to run away. And inside they can only mutter to each other whilst being tortured day after day into oblivion. Presiding over the Scarlet House is a male power figure entitled the Count, a name that immediately evokes Dracula. He aims to generate chaos and, curiously enough, has a method to do so. Indeed, despite his hatred towards order and all its manifestations, the Count is a scientist of sorts.18 So as to install the chaos into the girls’ minds that will lead them to forget language and consequently become shallow

9

Angela Carter, “The Scarlet House”, in Burning Your Boats, London: Vintage, 2006, 418, 421, 423. The tale was originally published in Giles Gordon, ed., A Book of Contemporary Nightmares, London: Michael Joseph, 1977. Henceforth the bibliographic references to “The Scarlet House” will be mentioned by the abbreviation SH. 10 SH, 426. 11 Botting, Gothic, 146. 18 SH, 419, 424.



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beings with no existence, the Count dedicates himself to the destruction of memory. According to him, Memory … is the main difference between man and the beasts; the beasts were born to live but man was born to remember. Out of his memory, he made abstract patterns of significant forms. Memory is the grid of meaning we impose on the random and bewildering flux of the world. Memory is the line we pay out behind us as we travel through time – it is the clue, like Ariadne’s, which means we do not lose our way. Memory is the lasso with which we capture the past and haul it from chaos towards us in nicely ordered sequences ….12

To remember is then to oppose chaos, to tame the swirling of time and fight time’s potential to confuse nature.13 It provides a way of making sense, of creating patterns and, as the Count explains,14 patterns battle chaos. Therefore memory proves essential, affirming itself as humanity’s defining and unique characteristic, even more so than language, which seems to withdraw from memory. In fact, the narrative establishes memory as fundamental for creating an identity: remembering provides the key to keeping on having an individuality. The Count is thus obviously draining the girls. In sacrificing and using their vital forces, he plays the vampire. The girls’ memories are his tools to create chaos into their minds. He fills each girl with a multitude of memories until they no longer know where the truth is, what the original memories are, nor what 12

SH, 418-419. The Count defends that time, with its chaotic essence, is the enemy of memory (SH, 420). Time renders past and future very much alike while memory tries to order them and set them apart, to distinguish one from the other. This theory also partly explains his love for pigs because like the Titan god of time Cronus they eat their own offspring. Of course, pigs do not merely consume their farrow; they also eat anything that crosses their ways, whether it is real food, paraphernalia, garbage or even ordure. Interestingly, Carter once argued that humans mimic this voracious habit. She went on to add that some believe human flesh to taste like pork. In that way, pigs and humans would bear a certain resemblance. Intersecting her own remarks with the Count’s theories, in which pigs represent chaos (SH, 420), would result in concluding that humans are already chaos incarnated. A tempting reasoning, probably an unwise one as well for Carter stressed the pernicious effects of anthropomorphizing animals by converting them into representations of beastliness, innocence or any other attribute. For Carter’s opinions see Angela Carter, “Little Lamb Get Lost”, in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writing, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998. 14 SH, 427. 13



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belongs to whom.15 In a way, the Count is promoting a series of transfusions, not of blood but definitely of something vital. The process implements multiple beings into the girls, and with all the pseudo-memories sometimes playing in their heads at the same time, past, present and future get mixed, confounding themselves. Moreover, these women have lost the notion of how they look like for there are no mirrors in the Scarlet House. Further and further their identities are destructed. As the protagonist states, “the harem becomes one single woman with a multiplicity of hands, and eyes, and no name, no past, no future – first, a being in void; and, soon, a void itself”.16 When not with the Count, or when his whip is not enough to discipline them, the women are handed over to Madame Schreck. The word “schreck” bears a resemblance to “shriek” and it is the German male noun for fright.17 Indeed, when the girls are too raucous, Madame Schreck actually screams for the Count because he loves the sound of it. Unlike music, which is orderly, screams sound like chaos and attest to the last phase of the Count’s process when the individual no longer remembers how to speak and is about to incarnate chaos. In addition, Madame Schreck both guards and torments the imprisoned women. She is the Count’s female arm. If his authority comes from mutilating the women’s bodies and minds, his power residing in violence, Madame Schreck only has power because she lines up with him, thus becoming a phallic murderous mother. As the Count’s accomplice she does not suffer; she causes suffering and in the process affirms herself. In order to retain her influence she needs both the Count and the girls. She preys on all of them and only through them does she ensure her strength. She is another vampire, feeding simultaneously on creator and victims. Madame Schreck also stands out as an accomplished torturer, an immense figure of fear with extravagant eating habits, her red mouth devouring little birds whole and rabbit foetuses. Even her robes are menacing:

15

419, 423. 426. 17 Inmaculada García Barrera, “Caos y (seudo-)memoria(-s) en ‘The Scarlet House’ de Angela Carter”, Philologia Hispalensis, 13/2 (1999), 139-140. 16

SH, SH,



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Again and again the women are faced with Madame Schreck’s hole. In fact, Jane Karen Engle argues this is the way the reader enters the Scarlet House19 but perhaps this hole serves more as an entrance for the protagonist herself, since in the majority of her memories Madame Schreck is her first contact with the world of the Scarlet House. And accepting the hole as the house’s entrance turns the interior into a womb-like bloody chamber, a womb that is also a coffin. Lorna Sage defends that Carter’s houses frequently function both as wombs and tombs, symbolizing mothers but remaining the property of patriarchal reality.20 The Scarlet House, a trap ruled by the Count and kept by Madame Schreck, is therefore the perfect image of Carter’s houses. One could even perceive this house as vampiric but that would imply a personification the tale never suggests. Although the horrors happen inside its walls and the conditions experienced there indeed promote vampirism they derive from the Count’s doings, not from any malice or manipulative ability inherent in the Scarlet House itself. The building is quite obviously not supernatural. Its architecture may be confusing, its decoration nightmarish, still whatever occurs and thrives within it is brought about by someone with clear purposes and quite aware of his doings: the Count. He is the orchestrator and the leader, the guide of a, for the moment, small group of followers. Among them, Madame Schreck most definitely has a preponderant role, but the other associates also seem to play important parts. Whoever they might be, they all gather at the house to play the Tarot Game, a random dance the Count uses to 18

424. Jane Karen Engle, “Through a Glass Darkly, or, intertextual travel and Angela Carter’s de/construction of identity”, Master’s dissertation, University of Alberta, 1999, 54, 56-58. Jane Karen Engle considers “The Scarlet House” a subversive feminist pornography and reads it in opposition to the conventions of heterosexual porno appointed by Carter in The Sadeian Woman. She also compares the tale with the Marquis de Sade’s characters. 20 Lorna Sage, Introduction to Essays on the Art of Angela Carter: Flesh and Mirror, ed. Lorna Sage, London: Virago Press, 2007, 25. 19

SH,



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invoke chaos. On such occasions, the girls stand in for the minor arcana cards, while the others represent the major arcana. But of those other collaborators, only the Fool inhabits the Scarlet House.21 He is both the Count’s adviser and his paradigm of perfection for the Fool no longer speaks, only screeches and drools. When he pleases the Count, he is allowed to take one of the youngest girls to the dungeons and kill her. Perhaps he does something else, maybe even eats her. The text is not clear, not even exactly suggestive. Notwithstanding, his clothes are described as speckled with food and body fluids, thus constructing an image that paints the Fool more as a cannibal than a vampire. However, taking into account that he also depends on the Scarlet House’s living mode, he too can be considered a sort of vampire, one who feeds on the situation the Count constructed. In fact, the predicates that sustain the Scarlet House turn vampirism into a premise. And, as so frequently happens with Carter,22 it is a very predatory vampirism. In order to accomplish his experiments and so create chaos, the Count needs to vampirize the women’s memories. Similarly, to retain their positions, in fact to survive, Madame Schreck and the Fool have to be vampires in one way or another. Therefore, once inside the Scarlet House, vampirism becomes a necessity. Acting the vampire one can not only endure but exist – and this is something the protagonist comes to understand. The protagonist’s rebellion: mnemonics as a basis for creating identity From the tale’s very beginning the protagonist painfully perceives that what she recalls is not exactly true, that she is no longer herself because no matter how hard she tries she fails to understand what the original memory is or where it hides. And it is precisely in such reasoning that lies the trap. The Count expects his women to search

21 It remains unclear how much each of these followers knows or understands. Madame Schreck obviously comprehends the whole situation and helps perpetuate it. In contrast, although the protagonist sometimes thinks he realizes more than he shows (SH, 418), the Fool appears to be limited to a malevolent idiocy. All the others, never named nor described, retain a certain mystery. Their importance must be substantial, once they represent the major arcana, yet their tasks or functions stay unspecified. Their only unmistakable attribute is to be the Count’s “fabulous retinue” (SH, 417). 22 Sceats, “Oral Sex”, 109.



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for their pasts, their origins, and thus get lost23 because the implementation of pseudo-memories functions as noise, an interference that weakens the original memory’s authenticity, making it one among many and therefore equally prone to be erased.24 Nevertheless, while rethinking and retelling her memories, the protagonist becomes aware of certain common elements: a hawk, a man without a mouth, eyes belonging to no precise face.25 She holds to them and identifies them precisely as what they are: mnemonics. … I cling to my mnemonics like a drowning man to a spar .… I am beginning to reconcile myself completely to the fact that they may not contain any element at all of real memory. It was hard to bear, at first, but soon I understood how the hawk, the face without a mouth, the eyes without a face, are all the residue of the world I still carry with me that does not elude me, if they are not precisely memories, then they may be, in some sense, like those odds and ends that all refugees carry with them …. Small items, meaningless in themselves, and yet keys to an entire system of meanings, if only I can remember …26

She indeed comes to realize that the hawk symbolizes her capture, her memory of it crystallized in an image. And although she does not yet understand exactly what the other two elements stand for, she knows that she absolutely needs to preserve these images, that if she loses them she will fall into non-existence, her identity forever destroyed. So she stops looking for an origin; it matters only to remember something, to rebuild from chaos, to infinitely generate new sequences and patterns.27 In this way, the three images become another origin, the base for new pseudo-memories, ones not introduce by the Count but produce by the protagonist herself, truly arbitrary in content but methodically constructed out of chaos. Amidst the Count’s deconstructive process, while he tries to destroy, the protagonist finds a way of affirmation, of creating her own identity. Perhaps this identity differs from the original, but it is hers nonetheless. Furthermore, it gives her a new strength: 23

Engle, “Through a Glass Darkly”, 73. Barrera, “Caos y (seudo-)memoria(-s)”, 141-142. 25 SH, 417-418, 420-423, 425. 26 SH, 426. 27 Barrera, “Caos y (seudo-)memoria(-s), 142-144; Engle, “Through a Glass Darkly”, 74-75. 24



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… what if it’s only that the puppet turns against the puppet-master: Isn’t the puppet-master dependent on the submission of his dolls for his authority? Can’t I, in the systematic randomness of my connections, control the Game?28

Although it is correct to affirm that the protagonist is playing a never-ending game, not only remaining captive within the Scarlet House but also living in constant danger of getting lost in herself,29 it is equally true that she finds a way of battling the Count. She does not stop the game; she changes its direction, becoming both victim and victimizer. She realizes that in order for the fight to produce meaningful effects, she has to fully accept this reality and attack using its rules. Once escape seems impossible, only survival and hope remain. To survive she uses both what the Count took and gave, she builds from there, feeding on the mnemonic images that arouse from her capture and consequent life in the Scarlet House. Creating a new identity from broken pieces is the only way to resist and continue to exist. Thereby, in a way, she feeds on the Count’s predicates; she vampires the vampire. And her recently found vampiric nature is further affirmed by yet some other particularities. Remembering that vampires mix the frontier between beastliness and humanity and that according to the Count memory distinguishes humans from beasts, then the protagonist is accurately a vampire. She is not quite human for she has no past, no precise memories, she is making them up, and still she is not a beast either because even if she is creating them she does have memories. So she lingers on the border, a true vampire for she even possesses the ability to contaminate others. She not only refuses isolation she also identifies herself with the other prisoners, trying to connect with them.30 So maybe she can pass the word, teach the others what to do and consequently take the resistance further, possibly even discover how to evade the Scarlet House. Certainly the open end can be regarded as a form of resistance in itself31 but it is more than that, it is hope that revolution might come. Whatever happens thereafter, the protagonist 28

SH, 428. Engle, “Through a Glass Darkly”, 76-77. 30 Ibid., 69, 79. 31 Ibid., 80. 29



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rises without fear. She does not even dread Madame Schreck’s hole anymore, hypothesising that it may actually lead to freedom.32 Hence, vampirism proves once again to be a necessity within the Scarlet House. Furthermore, from the protagonist’s point of view, it also becomes a way of resistance. Considering that the protagonist is contradicting the Count’s wishes to subdue all his prisoners to chaos, vampirism even becomes a way of rebellion. And given the possibility of contamination, vampirism may be propagated further still, turning all the incarcerated women into vampires, completely transforming the Scarlet House into a vampiric nest where everyone preys and feeds on everyone. This, however, belongs to a speculation field, to a future that may come about but of which no account is given. At any rate, albeit hypothesizing the past over and over again, the tale truly unfolds in the present. And in the “here and now” these vampires rise as neither the personification of the Other nor a sentimentalized being. Vampirism disseminates too much to allow any great differentiation, and without any relevant differences no one embodies the stranger, that being of absolute otherness. Simultaneously, the situation proves so appalling, tense and intrusive that there is no opportunity for sentimentality. In “The Scarlet House” vampires are creatures full of violence and fragility, rather similar to humans. Frequent narratives and chaos: pseudo-memories as fragments of society As the story unrolls, there arises a greater realization that not only does every individual inhabiting the Scarlet House eventually become a vampire but also that each seems bound to both perpetuate and disseminate vampirism. Yet, the tale’s vampirism transcends characters and plot, emerging also as somewhat associated with society itself since the three pseudo-memories the protagonist describes exemplify prevailing narratives frequently used by Western literature and cinema. They stand respectively for events belonging to future, past and a relatively recent reality at the time of the tale’s writing that consequently may be associated with the present. The Count’s constant presence in all the memories, whether more or less evident, attests to his adaptability and invasiveness. He is an 32

SH,

428.



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immortal parasite. On the one hand because he can only live if attached to some other life, tearing it apart with insatiable appetite. Slowly consuming the girls’ minds and identities does not suffice, he has to erode them, torment them by intruding into their memories thus increasing his haunting presence. On the other hand because he walks comfortably in any historical time or under any circumstance. Whatever the scene, the Count, like so many psychic vampires, knows how to become a part of that society. In fact, more than portraying him as not dislocated, the pseudo-memories depict him as an authoritative figure, verging on the dictatorial, always menacing and in a sense operating behind curtains. Throughout these supposed recollections, the Count has the strength and illusiveness of threatening shadows, circling the protagonist closer and closer until she gets trapped. In the first pseudo-memory, she is among ruins of New Bond Street when captured by bikers with canines sharpened to resemble fangs. These men’s teeth immediately project a vampiric image and the second pseudo-memory, with its midnight environment, train journey, evil station master, shabby carriage and macabre coachmen without a mouth, resembles entirely the beginning of a vampire story set in the nineteenth century. The third memory has no obvious traces of vampires but seems removed from a story taking place in a Europe under military grip in a time of revolution.33 So the pseudo-memories present a dystopian future, an old literary fantasy and a violent invasion from wartime, a fiction triad soon identified by the protagonist: … if my first capture incorporates within it ruins that do not yet exist and my second capture resonates with too many echoes of books I might have read, then my third and by far my most moving capture might only recapitulate a Middle-European nightmare, an episode in Prague or Vienna seen in a movie, perhaps, or told me by a complete stranger during the exposed privacy of a long train journey.34

These are fragments, scenes frequently used by society, changed and reinterpreted by it. Dystopias assume different themes according to the concerns of each epoch and post-apocalyptic stories have been 33 34

SH, SH,

417-423. 424.



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as much used to debate scientific issues as to introduce into the everyday discourse elements usually belonging to the supernatural: zombies, vampires, wizards. Plots dealing with nineteenth century governesses’ misfortunes and adventures may end in a variety of ways depending on the authors’ intention. Correspondingly, they convoke a panoply of sceneries that, depending on needs and aims, can range from rural landscapes to urban settings and sometimes even enter the territory of steampunk. And war tales, whether written or filmed, have assumed many focus points, depicting a wide assortment of situations and personalities. Moreover, such narratives become immersed into people’s minds. If they both intrude our imaginaries and mould our ideas of certain subjects, they also fragment attention, dispersing it through a vast amount of concurring positions all claiming to depict the absolute truth. Fragmentation, of course, is a feature of postmodernism35 and Carter knew only too well that she lived in an “ironic postmodernist world”.36 In such a society there are no more absolutes, no more universal laws, no pure vision since everything depends on perception, on particular interpretation. Nothing stands out as the centre; there are multiple centres. So no one will comprehend the universe and no one will achieve the ultimate truth, the all-comprehensive answer behind the veil, because truth depends on perspective and it can reside anywhere.37 This creates both ambiguity and anxiety. Inhabiting a culture made of pieces, we try to organize them into patterns from which to withdraw meaning, even if all we produce is yet another fiction stuffed with what we are and put in it.38 We constantly try to make sense out of chaos. It is our way to establish an ideology, to create an identity.

35

Ihab Hassan, “Making Sense: The Trails of Postmodern Discourse”, New Literary History, 18/2 (Winter 1987), 445. Despite stating eleven of the most common traits of postmodern literary culture, Ihab Hassan’s objective in this essay is not to establish guidelines for understanding and deconstructing postmodern literature. Rather, his concern lies in proving that postmodernism may lead humankind to a greater spiritual unification. 36 Angela Carter, “D.H. Lawrence, Scholarship Boy”, in Shaking a Leg: Collected Writing, London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998, 532. 37 John W. Murphy, “The Importance of Social Imagery for Race Relations”, in Postmodernism and Race, ed. Eric Mark Kramer, 1997, 22-24. 38 Hassan, “Making Sense”, 453-456.



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It follows that from chaos an opportunity for liberation can arise. Similarly, in contradicting dominant discourses postmodernism destroys the hegemony of certain groups. The consequence is not necessarily disorder but the possibility for the individual to become free of castrating principles and for various orders to coexist.39 In such terms chaos would indeed prove to be a positive force,40 still the tale is so stifling and hostile that reading a shining message at its ending seems simply too benevolent and deceitful, perhaps even a little fraudulent. Despite learning how to construct a new identity, the protagonist does so out of necessity, forced by the aggressive circumstances surrounding her. She does not welcome chaos; she learns to contradict it so as to survive. Hope arises only due to the individual’s strength and resistance. Hence, from the tale’s perspective, and despite all the opportunities they may eventually allow for, chaos and fragmentation emerge as intimidating and terrifying. In addition, the pseudo-memories link them to society, a notion intensified by the Count’s assertion that “[s]oon, everywhere will be like the Scarlet House”.41 The characteristics of Postmodernism, the idea of turning the world into one enormous Scarlet House and the apparently shattered nature of the recollections, their potential mutability and their cultural significance all converge to paint society as vampiric. Furthermore, these fictional memories both mimic frequent stories and convey stereotypes. They can entrap people’s reasoning, lead them to misinformation, even foment false judgments and prejudices. The uncritical assimilation of stereotypes may threaten identity, impeding a true idiosyncratic development. Alternatively, their realization can 39

Barrera, “Caos y (seudo-)memoria(-s)”, 144-145. Murphy, “The Importance of Social Imagery”, 24-26. John W. Murphy advocates a more inclusive society where order, instead of imposed by dominant majorities that marginalize others, is achieved through the dialogue and confluence of different groups. Postmodernist imagery precisely comprises such a proposal of pluralism. 40 Barrera, “Caos y (seudo-)memoria(-s)”, 139, 144. While regarding the mnemonics as a liberating device, Barrera assumes that chaos will never become complete because the protagonist will keep on creating new memories, thus disregarding her fragile situation and turning chaos from a terrorizing force into a salvation path. Barrera further interweaves “The Scarlet House” with the reception of postmodernism in the United Kingdom. By equating postmodernism with chaos, she argues that both appear destructive but ultimately allow for reconstruction and liberation. 41 SH, 417.



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promote a better knowledge of one’s culture. Again, individuals have the ability to defy the constraints and by rebelling emerge unconquered, aware of who they are and what surrounds them. In her multilayered tale “The Scarlet House” Carter proposes society, its stereotypes and its multiple, sometimes contradicting, narratives that linger in our imagination, to be a form of vampirism capable of destroying our identities. However, she also advances hope. We can control the game, find a way not only of survival but of resistance and rebellion that will allow us to create our own selves. We need only to perceive vampirism and vampirize it instead of being vampirized upon. “The Scarlet House” is thus a vampiric tale both in the character’s microcosm and in the larger spectrum of society. In fact, Angela Carter seems to suggest that in a world so full of fragmentation and concurrent narratives, where chaos is always a menace, we all end up becoming vampires of sorts.



 

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Rogers ASEMPASAH, PhD, received his doctoral degree in Literatures in English in 2014 from the University of Rome, Sapienza. Drawing on Benjamin, Fanon and Deleuze, his thesis explored the figuration of “treason” in J.M. Coetzee and Ben Okri. His publications include “The Fragile ‘Absolute’: Heremakhonon and the Crisis of Representation and Historical Consciousness” (2014) and “War on Terror: On re-reading Dracula and Waiting for the Barbarians” (2013). He is currently a lecturer of Literatures in English at the University of Cape Coast, Ghana. His research interests include postcolonial literature, the Victorian novel, critical theory, and the intersections of writing, orality, and visuality. He is working on a book length study on the exilic consciousness in the African novel. Carlos AZEVEDO is Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Porto, where he created and currently runs the American Studies programme. His doctoral thesis was on Ernest Hemingway and he has published several articles on this writer’s work, both in Portugal and in the U.S.A. His main research interests cover 19th, 20th and 21st century narrative fiction. He has also published, among others, on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, William Faulkner, John dos Passos, Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Ellison, Raymond Carver, Paul Auster, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy and Philip Roth. He was on the Board of the European Association for American Studies and is now Head of the Department of Anglo-American Studies, Faculty of Letters, University of Porto. Dorota BABILAS (Dr Hab.) is Assistant Professor at the Institute of English Studies at the University of Warsaw, Poland. Her academic

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interests include Victorian, Gothic, and Film Studies. She is the author of i.a. a monographic book on Queen Victoria’s cultural afterlife: Wiktoria znaczy Zwycięstwo (Warsaw 2012). She is also the co-editor of two volumes of essays on English-language literatures and cultures: We the Neo-Victorians (Warsaw 2013), Face to Face, Page to Page (Warsaw 2014). Inês BOTELHO holds a degree in Biology and a Master in AngloAmerican Culture and Literature from the University of Porto, having written her dissertation on Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber. Her main research focuses on utopian studies as well as folk and fairy tales and their use in literature, cinema, photography and dance. Other areas of interest include feminism, modernism, postmodernism, intertextuality, fantasy and science fiction. She has published articles and participated in conferences with papers on these subjects. She is a collaborator at CETAPS – Centre for English Translation and AngloPortuguese Studies, based at the Universities of Porto and Lisbon, and she is also the author of several novels and short stories. Eva ČOUPKOVÁ has been a Lecturer and Assistant Professor at the Language Centre of Masaryk University in Brno since 1997. She teaches Academic English and English for Specific Purposes. Her main field of interest is Gothic Literature and English Romanticism of the late eighteenth an early nineteenth century. She obtained her PhD in 2003 from Palacký University in Olomouc for her dissertation on Gothic Novel and Drama as two related genres of English literature. In the field of English literature her main research work is devoted to subversive aspects of Gothic Drama and the Gothic motifs in the Surrealistic novels of poet Vítězslav Nezval and other Czech writers. Her recent publications also include articles on ESP and on innovative approaches employed in collaborative learning. Marius-Mircea CRIȘAN holds a PhD from the University of Turin, Italy (2008), and is Senior Lecturer at the West University of  

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333

Timișoara, Romania. He is the author of The Birth of the Dracula Myth: Bram Stoker’s Transylvania and [in Romanian] The Impact of a Myth: Dracula and the Fictional Representation of the Romanian Space (Pro Universitaria, 2013 – nominated for the Debut Prize of the Union of the Romanian Writers – Timișoara Branch). He has written several articles on the Dracula myth, imagology, reception theories and didactics, and is co-author of, among others, An Imagological Dictionary of the Cities in Romania Represented in British Travel Literature (coordinators Carmen Andraș and Cornel Sigmirean Mentor, 2012). Isabel ERMIDA is Associate Professor (Dr Hab.) of English Studies at the University of Minho in Portugal. She holds a PhD on a linguistic approach to literary comedy. Her main research interests involve Humour Studies, namely the linguistic construction of humour not only in literary but also historical news texts, and Media Studies, especially computer-mediated communication and Internet discourse, where she has examined patterns of (im)politeness and the ideological construction of age, ethnicity and gender. She is the author of, among other titles, The Language of Comic Narratives (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008) and the co-editor (with J. Chovanec, 2012) of Language and Humour in the Media. She is currently the Chair of the Portuguese Association of Anglo-American Studies. Álvaro GARCÍA MARÍN is a Spanish scholar in the field of Modern Greek Studies. He has a PhD from the Complutense University of Madrid with a dissertation on the poetry of Greek 1979 Nobel Prize winner Odysseas Elytis. Apart from working for the Spanish National Research Council in different periods, he has been a visiting scholar at the University of Rome, “La Sapienza”, and the Capodistrian University of Athens. Between 2011 and 2013, he taught and researched in the Program in Hellenic Studies at Columbia University as a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow. His research is currently focused on the connection of the concept of ‘the uncanny’ with the  

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external and internal cultural discourses of Greek national configuration. Lea GERHARDS is a PhD candidate at the Department of British, North American, and Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. She studied English and German Language and Literature as well as History of Art in Trier and Liverpool and is currently working on her dissertation about contemporary vampire romances, their construction of gender and sexuality, and their intricate connection with ideas of postfeminism. Her publications and research interests relate to gender studies, popular culture, contemporary gothic fiction, the body, monsters, postcolonial studies, and feminism. Raphaella Delores GOMEZ earned her PhD in Literatures in English from the University of Rome, Sapienza, after obtaining her Masters of Arts in Literary Studies from The National University of Singapore and initially receiving her Bachelor of Arts in English with honours from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Having previously lectured in many disciplines of literature, she holds a key interest in the Victorians, Postcolonial Studies, and the Early Moderns especially centred on the English Reformation, the Tudors, John Milton and the Caroline Era. Her research area includes Christianity with focus on the Early Church Fathers. Currently on academic leave, she is researching and writing her first postcolonial novel, Footsteps to Little Gods. Fanny LACÔTE has completed a BA and an MA in French Literature and Languages at the University of Lorraine in France. She is currently working toward a PhD in Literature and Languages at the University of Stirling in Scotland and at the Université de Lorraine under the supervision of Dr Dale Townshend and Prof Catriona Seth. Her thesis focuses on the reception of the English Gothic novel in France and its influence on the French “roman noir” at the turn of the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries.  

Notes on Contributors

335

Maria Antónia LIMA is Assistant Professor at the University of Évora (Portugal). She completed her PhD in 2001 on the fiction of Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. She is also a Research Fellow of the University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES). She was President of the Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies (APEAA). Her current areas of research include gothic fiction and the relations between literature and the arts. Her publications include Impersonality and Tragic Emotion in Modern Poetry (2003); Brown, Poe, Hawthorne and Melville: Terror in American Literature (2008) and the novel Haunted Words (2011). Leslie McMURTRY earned her PhD (in English) from Swansea University in Wales in 2015, with a thesis entitled Revolution in the Echo Chamber: Audio Drama’s Past, Present, and Future. She had achieved her BA (in English and French) at New Mexico University and an MA in Creative and Media Writing from Swansea in 2008. Her creative writing credits have often explored Gothic elements, including The Mesmerist, a radio drama produced by Camino Real LLC (Albuquerque, 2010), and her short story “Five Theories,” shortlisted for the Jane Austen Short Story Competition 2014 and published in the forthcoming anthology Beguiling Miss Bennet (Honno Press). She is also a visual artist, having provided the cover image for this book. Maria do Carmo MENDES is Assistant Professor at the Department of Portuguese and Lusophone Studies, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Minho, Portugal. She has a PhD from the University of Minho with a dissertation on Don Juan’s myth. Her research is currently focused on Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies. Her most recent publications (2014-15) are: Don Juan(ism). The Myth; “Mythical Reception in Agustina Bessa-Luís”; “Paintings in Fiction: Agustina and Rembrandt”; “Literary Voices of Lusophone Countries”;

336

Notes on Contributors

“Colonial and Post-colonial Times”; “Identity and Memory: Detective Fiction in Portuguese Contemporary Literature”. Joana PASSOS is an assistant researcher at CEHUM – Centre for Humanistic Studies at University of Minho, Portugal. Her PhD research focused on women’s literature and postcolonial studies and her post-doctoral project was to compile a revised history of modern Goan literature in Portuguese. She co-edited two critical anthologies on postcolonial approaches to literatures in Portuguese: (2010) Brugioni, Passos, Sarabando and Silva (eds), Contemporary Africas, and (2012) Brugioni, Passos, Sarabando and Silva (eds), Journeys, Trajectories and Postcolonial Representations. She has published several articles, in Portuguese and English, concerning Goan literature, African writers from Portuguese speaking countries, postcolonial theory and gender studies.

 

 

INDEX

Agrippa, Cornelius 23, 40. Aiken, Joan 11. Aikin, Anna Letitia 152, 262. Aikin, John 152, 262. alien 13-14, 17, 25, 35, 37, 39, 86, 121, 225, 231, 266-269. alienation 5, 7, 257. Allatius, Leo 25, 40. ambiguity 110-111, 146, 158-160, 163, 175, 177, 199-200, 244, 261, 283, 306. America 6-7, 11, 14-15, 17, 43, 51-52, 57, 64, 75, 86, 96-97, 119-121, 123-125, 127-129, 133-134, 137, 139, 143, 145147, 150, 152, 154, 158, 169, 201-205, 210, 223, 237, 239240, 243, 245-249, 253, 257, 259, 261, 269, 272-273. Americanization 240, 247. Arefu 48, 52- 55, 57, 59, 67. architecture (Gothic architecture) 1, 17, 54, 191, 199-201, 203, 205, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215217, 300. art 1, 10, 12, 16, 145, 179, 216217, 221, 228, 268, 272, 282283, 288. ascesis 18, 249, 253, 256. attraction 48, 57, 62, 119, 148, 224, 252, 258-259, 261-263, 265-268, 278, 284. Austen, Jane 200-201. Balkans 13, 21, 36, 94.

barbarian 14, 91, 93, 95-112, 114117. Barker, Clive 17, 201-203, 206, 238. Barton, Charles 8. beast(ly) 7, 57, 63, 65, 80, 105, 111, 127, 150, 175-176, 225226, 294, 298, 303. Beckford, William 200, 211. Being Human 244, 254. blood 5, 27, 33, 80, 98-99, 115, 119, 132, 137, 144-145, 147, 150, 155, 166, 172, 174, 184185, 190, 203, 212, 224, 226227, 229-231, 235-239, 241244, 246, 248-250, 253-256, 260-261, 264-266, 269, 288, 292-296, 299. bloodcurdling 16, 157, 159, 161163, 165, 167, 169, 171, 173, 175, 177. bloodline 1, 73, 75-78. bloodsucking 4, 14, 100, 117, 152, 232, 252. bloody 55, 68, 176, 202, 213, 215, 300. True Blood 235, 246, 248-249, 261. Wise Blood 15, 121, 123-127, 129134. Boaden, James 16, 180, 187-190, 192, 194, 198. body 5, 6, 10, 12, 14, 18, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 32, 35, 36, 39, 76, 82, 91, 99, 100, 104, 107, 108,

338 110, 111, 117, 127-132, 145, 149, 172, 195, 196, 199, 203, 204, 208, 214, 215, 224, 225, 233, 235-240, 242, 245, 246, 249, 250, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 257, 270, 277, 288, 295, 301. Bradon, Mary Elizabeth 4. brides 137, 160-161, 176-177, 226, 289. Broadway 139, 152, 155, 158. Brontë sisters 3. Browning, Tod 8, 15, 138-139, 141, 143-145, 147-155, 158, 221, 229, 231. Buffy the Vampire Slayer 11, 226, 230, 236-237, 240, 261, 264268. Burke, Edmund 2, 282. Byron, Lord 3, 15, 31-32, 41, 147, 232, 259, 268, 275. Calmet, Augustin 29-30, 41. canon 2, 38, 231, 271. Carmilla 5, 16, 102, 157-158, 166, 168-174, 177. Carpathians 55, 67, 71, 78, 84, 97, 99. Carter, Angela 19, 293-294, 296300, 306, 308. castle (Dracula castle) 1-3, 7, 13, 16, 17, 36, 45, 47-51, 53-68, 71, 72, 78, 80, 97-100, 108116, 143, 148, 149, 150, 154, 159, 160, 169, 172, 180, 182187, 196-203, 205, 207-211, 213, 215, 217, 223, 225-227, 281, 289, 297. Catholicism 24-25, 29, 119, 121, 123, 125, 174. chaos 6, 19, 196, 296-302, 304, 306-308.

Index charm 4, 15, 77, 146, 148, 150, 184, 233, 260, 268, 270, 278, 281, 285. Christianity 25, 30, 32, 36, 40, 62, 70, 119, 124, 126, 143, 145, 196, 287. cinema (/film) 7, 8, 11, 12, 15, 1718, 51-52, 75, 111, 137-150, 152-158, 168, 177, 221-222, 227, 229-231, 235-238, 240243, 246-249, 258, 259, 269, 272-273, 292-294, 304, 306. civilization 13-14, 21, 24, 28, 35, 81, 89, 91-93, 95-97, 101, 106, 109, 114, 145, 224-225, 227, 229, 264. civilized 14, 18, 79-82, 91, 95-98, 101, 104-106, 109-110, 112, 116-117, 225, 235, 238, 246247, 256, 278. claustrophobia 126, 163, 165. clothes 15, 27, 83, 137-138, 142, 146-148, 162, 296, 301. Coetzee, J.M. (John Maxwell) 14, 91-93, 95-96, 99-112, 114-117. coffin 53, 80, 126-127, 131-132, 148, 152, 154, 167, 172, 246, 248, 283, 300. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 2. Collins, Wilkie 4. colonialism (see also “postcolonialism”) 14, 22, 37, 69-70, 72-75, 81, 83-89, 91, 94, 96, 98-100, 102, 105, 109, 111-112, 222, 227. colonization 12, 14, 37, 39, 73, 7576, 91, 93-94, 222. comic books 9, 199, 201, 205, 207-208, 211, 237, 273. community 13, 36, 38, 94, 111112, 116, 224, 244-245, 249, 280, 291.

 

Index conscience 92, 98, 184, 240, 249, 254. conservatism 8, 15, 151, 226. consumer culture 9, 15, 119, 132, 134, 239, 250, 251- 253, 256, 262. contamination 17, 33, 221, 224227, 229, 294, 303, 304. Coppola, Francis Ford 7, 17, 153, 222, 227, 230-231, 263, 272, 294. costume 41, 52, 137-138, 142, 147-151, 155, 195. Covel, John 21, 41. Covent Garden Theatre 181, 190. Crimean War 72-74, 77. curse motif 4-5, 23, 32, 112, 152, 202, 224, 269. Curtea de Argeș 48, 58. Dark Shadows darkness 8, 10-11, 31, 52, 59-63, 65, 78, 85-86, 92, 94, 99, 100, 108, 126, 130, 138-139, 152, 155, 157, 160-161, 165, 169, 171, 173, 182-183, 189, 194, 204-207, 213,-216, 233, 239, 253, 255, 259-261, 263, 266, 269, 281, 292, 294. Darwin, Charles 77-78, 80-83, 164, 173, 175. death 4, 12, 18, 25, 31-33, 37, 60, 68, 98, 108, 114, 120, 123, 126-128, 139, 142, 149, 187188, 193-194, 216, 221, 224, 237, 252, 257-258, 260, 263, 267, 276, 280-182, 284-286. 288, 291, 295. decadence 4-5, 7, 14-15, 19, 9798, 210-211, 222, 229, 272, 283. degeneration 5, 6, 14, 31, 89, 173, 210.

339 demon (see also “Devil”, “Satan”) 5, 26, 41, 98, 137-138, 142, 144, 172, 181, 186, 190, 192, 195-196, 211-212, 238, 262, 274-275, 282-283, 288, 291292. desire 51, 57-58, 79, 85, 110, 120, 212, 221-222, 229, 245, 252, 257, 258, 261, 263-264, 267, 269, 271, 277, 279, 287, 288289, 291-292, 294. Devil (see also “demon”, “Satan”) 27, 30, 46, 59, 98, 111, 127, 141, 143, 192-197, 226, 240, 242, 274-275, 282-283, 285287. Dickens, Charles 3, 146, 277. discipline 122, 241, 249-250, 252, 299. discourse 8, 14, 22-23, 25-26, 28, 35, 37-38, 89, 92, 96, 101-102, 105, 107-108, 114, 117, 148, 256, 306-307. disease 5, 10, 17, 27, 114, 144, 171, 221, 226-227, 271, 290, 294. domestication 17, 119, 235, 238, 240, 247, 248, 256, 285. domination (see also “submission”) 96, 148, 285. Don Juan 18-19, 138, 153, 192, 271-283, 185-292. dressing motif 10, 15, 52, 60, 97, 130, 137, 142, 146, 148, 150151, 154, 180, 184, 193,-195, 300. Drury Lane Theatre 181, 190-191. East(ern) 13-14, 22, 25, 28, 31-32, 35-36, 41, 69-79, 81, 85, 8788, 89, 96, 145, 150, 153, 162, 223, 225, 248. emancipation 19, 227, 283, 291.

 

340 empire (see also “imperial”) 13-14, 31, 62, 69, 71, 73-75, 82, 84, 86-87, 91-97, 99-101, 103-105, 107-117, 168, 225. Enlightenment 2, 24, 30, 35-37, 109, 180-181. epistolary novel 83, 159, 222. eroticism 137, 140, 148-149, 151, 153, 161, 168, 212, 222, 261262, 264, 266, 282, 285, 287. escape 54, 105, 127, 155, 185, 202, 223, 279, 297, 303. eternal youth 18, 233, 252, 257258. eternity 18, 67, 121, 140, 212, 224, 224, 233, 255, 265, 269-270, 273. ethnicity 5, 13, 32, 35, 37, 39, 94, 143, 239. evil 4, 11, 14, 18, 23, 27, 30, 51, 55, 58, 60, 78, 94, 95, 97, 98, 102, 106, 111, 113, 122, 131, 133, 137, 142, 189, 212, 214, 236, 238, 240, 242, 243, 254, 257, 259, 262, 266, 268, 274, 290, 305. fashion 10, 99, 142, 154, 209, 246, 253. fear 1-2, 5, 13-14, 17, 26, 37, 39, 54, 69-70, 72-74, 76-80, 83, 88, 95-96, 98, 103, 110, 126, 139, 143, 145, 148, 157, 188, 196-197, 206, 208, 210-211, 216-217, 221, 227, 232, 236, 240, 245, 249, 252, 256-257, 261-262, 264, 270, 277-280, 283-284, 294, 299, 304. female vampire 110-111, 226, 272, 282, 286, 293 feminism 5, 225-226, 228, 283, 300. Fenwick, Eliza 2.

Index Ferraris, Antonio de 22-23, 40. fin-de-siècle 5, 69, 74, 150, 221, 283. Fitzball, Edward 16, 180, 194-197. food 52-53, 236, 239, 248-249, 251, 298, 301 Frankenstein 3, 7-8, 32, 138, 143, 152, 176, 266. French Revolution 2, 232-233. Fresne, Charles du 24, 40. Freud, Sigmund 24, 34-35, 260. frontier motif 7, 14, 91, 93, 96101, 106-107, 112, 114-116, 247, 303. gender 5, 11, 20, 75, 91, 112, 142, 161, 226, 228, 238-239, 243, 246, 262, 264-265, 294. genre 2-3, 6, 8-9, 12, 15-18, 20, 25, 79, 92, 119, 121, 123-124, 137-138, 154, 157, 179-180, 186-187, 189-190, 193, 198, 200, 216-217, 221, 223, 227228, 232, 235, 238-240, 262, 279. ghost 3, 6, 16, 23, 59, 68, 153, 169, 179-187, 189-194, 196198, 244, 284. glamour 10-11, 265, 268. globalization 11, 117, 133, 228, 232. Greece 13, 21-23, 25-27, 29-39, 41, 43, 232. Greekness 24, 28, 30, 35. Guiley, Rosemary Ellen 51, 59. hallucination 10, 126, 142, 207. Harvey, Margaret 16, 180, 192193. haunting 3, 10, 22-23, 33-36, 60, 62, 111, 127-128, 148, 161, 168, 170, 186, 201-202, 205, 207, 212, 216, 263, 305.

 

Index Hellenism (see also “Philhellenism”) 23, 31, 37. Helme, Elizabeth 187, 194, 262. Hibbert, Eleanor 11. Hildebrand, Theodor 33, 42. Hillen, John Sean 46, 52. Hoffmann, E.T.A. (Ernst Theodor Amadeus) 194. Hollywood 138-140, 148, 152, 229. Hooper, Margaret Jane 4. Huet, Pierre Daniel 29, 41. humour (see also “laughter” and “parody”) 248, 264. hunting motif 14, 97, 105-108, 115, 144, 173, 243, 247. identity 8-9, 12-13, 17-19, 34-35, 37-38, 48, 68, 72, 77, 83, 84, 86-87, 89, 94, 104, 109, 122, 199, 205, 227, 235, 239, 243, 252, 263, 265-266, 270, 272, 293, 295-303, 305-307. ideology 14-15, 49, 101, 105, 120, 222, 225, 228, 306. immigration 5, 146, 222, 232, 294. immortality 113, 140, 144, 150, 152, 155, 232, 252, 257-260, 266, 277, 292, 305. imperialism (see also “empire”) 5, 69-70, 73-74, 76-77, 82-89, 94, 96, 101, 104, 142, 225. infection 27, 150, 153, 224. intertextuality 9, 92, 104, 107-108, 153, 300. Interview with the Vampire 236, 238, 240, 260, 265-266, 272. invasion 17, 54, 74, 76, 93-97, 99101, 105-106, 109-110, 112, 221, 225, 305. Ireland 12, 75, 122, 164, 166, 169.

341 Jack the Ripper 146, 166, 244, 253. Jephson, Robert 187. Jews 13, 66, 145, 164. King, Stephen 11, 238, 272. Kornmann, Heinrich 25, 40. Kostova, Elizabeth 46, 53, 57, 257. Kraus, Martin 23-24, 35, 40. laughter 7, 152, 160, 198, 287. Lee, Christopher 8, 155, 258-259. Lee, Harriet 16, 180, 184-185, 198. LeFanu, Joseph Sheridan 5, 16, 157, 168-169, 171-172. legend 7, 13, 49-50, 52, 54, 56, 212, 254, 261, 268, 293. Lestat 259, 264-265, 268. Lewis, M.G. (Matthew Gregory) 2, 200, 202, 211. location 3, 12, 14, 37, 45, 47, 51, 55, 72, 85, 89, 121, 207-208. loneliness 18, 60, 133, 174, 203, 207, 224, 257, 268-269, 292. Lovecraft, H.P. (Howard Phillips) 3, 6. Lugosi, Bela 8, 15, 137-140, 146147, 149-150, 152-156, 158, 229-230, 257, 259. lust 19, 80, 98, 150, 155, 226, 229, 253, 287. magical 7, 56, 82, 134, 240, 244. marriage 16, 39, 80, 89, 146, 184186, 196, 198, 276, 280. Maturin, Charles Robert 3. McGrath, Patrick 17, 201-202, 217. media 7, 9, 18, 20, 157-158, 162, 201, 233, 235, 237, 255, 258, 263.

 

342 melodrama 140, 180, 183-184, 194-195, 268. memory 7, 88, 116, 296, 298, 301303, 305. Meyers, Stephanie 18, 257. modernity 21, 24, 28, 34, 36, 84, 97-98, 113, 117, 142, 246, 277. Molière 273. Molina, Tirso de 19, 271, 274, 276, 279, 291. monster 3, 7-9, 14-15, 22, 25, 32, 34-35, 38-39, 76, 79, 87, 9395, 97, 99-101, 103, 105, 107, 109-113, 115, 117, 122, 123, 137, 139, 141, 152, 153, 155, 168-169, 173, 207, 212, 225226, 229-230, 241, 249, 262, 264, 266, 277, 295-296. murder 15, 33, 53, 66, 125, 131, 141, 144, 148, 153, 164, 184187, 192-194, 196, 199, 212, 242, 253-254, 264, 299. Murnau’s Nosferatu 7, 15, 17, 137-139, 144, 155, 221-222, 229, 231, 259. music 10, 139, 145, 148-149, 154, 159-163, 166-167, 169-173, 180-181, 184-185, 237, 246, 273, 285, 293, 299. mystery 60, 65, 121-122, 127, 129, 134, 165-166, 179-180, 210, 222, 259, 262-263, 267, 296, 301. myth(ology) 7, 13, 19-21, 32, 34, 46, 52, 56, 71, 75, 94, 102, 111, 119, 221, 222, 226, 228, 230-232, 236, 238, 240, 246, 257, 261, 264, 265, 271, 273, 275-277, 280-283, 285-286, 289-292, 295. Naifeh, Ted 17, 201, 205, 211. neo-Gothic 201, 208-210.

Index night 22, 24, 27-28, 51-52, 54, 5759, 63, 65-67, 84, 98, 115, 141, 143-144, 149, 165, 169-170, 183, 186, 188, 215, 224, 245, 257, 270, 290, 292. Children of the Night, 46, 50, 55, 60, London after Midnight 142, 153-154, The Night Things 207, 209-210, 214. nightmare 3, 8, 94, 128, 139, 297, 300. nihilism 123, 125-126. Nodier, Charles 33, 42. obsession 18, 126, 132, 137-138, 144, 150, 257-259, 279, 287, 290. Occident 13, 21-24, 34-35, 48, 7072, 76-78, 80-81, 83, 93, 222. O’Connor, Flannery 7, 14-15, 119, 121-134. Olalla 16, 157-158, 173-177. Orient(alism) 13-14, 21-23, 25, 30, 32, 35, 37, 69-73, 75-79, 81, 83, 85-89, 190, 196, 265, 294. Orthodoxy (Orthodox religion) 25, 29, 36, 39. otherness / othering / the Other 5, 9, 14, 19, 22, 25, 35-36, 38-39, 69-71, 77-78, 81-82, 84-86, 89, 91, 94-96, 98, 102-103, 107, 112, 114, 116-117, 152, 189, 210, 225, 244, 262, 268-269, 277, 293-294, 304. Ottomans 23, 25, 31-33, 36-39, 46, 49, 62. outsider 5, 10, 84, 141, 143, 146, 155, 259, 266, 268. paganism (see also “religion”) 164-165, 195, 221, 232-233, 283. painting 67, 180, 273, 282-283.

 

Index paradox 10, 13, 18, 23-24, 28, 30, 35-36, 121, 123, 152, 199-200, 251, 259, 261. parody 6, 8, 127, 154, 199-200, 228, 286. patent theatres 180-181, 190-191. patriarchy 148, 152, 226, 229, 232, 281, 300. penny dreadful 5-6, 148. Philhellenism 13, 21-22, 24, 32, 35-36. Planché, James Robinson 16, 180, 194, 196, 198. Poe, Edgar Allan 4, 124, 128, 284. poison 27, 145, 184, 192, 213, 282. Polack, Elizabeth 194. Polidori, John William 3, 5, 21, 32-33, 41, 147, 194-196, 200, 211, 239, 262, 266, 275, 277. politics / political 14, 18, 20, 26, 46, 49, 53, 69, 71-75, 77, 84, 86, 89, 92, 94, 96, 97, 98, 101, 116, 120, 140, 197, 211, 227, 238, 269, 277, 294. pop culture 12, 143, 198, 225, 232, 235-236, 239, 260, 265, 269, 273, 292. popular(ity) 2, 6, 9, 11, 16, 24, 33, 38, 73, 84, 134, 137-140, 144, 150, 155, 157, 177, 179-181, 183, 208, 216, 221-222, 226, 228, 230-233, 235-237, 253, 257, 259-260, 268, 272. postcolonialism 5, 13, 14, 39, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 100, 111, 117, 225, 226, 228. postmodernism 6, 9, 12, 15, 17, 18, 20, 119, 133, 221, 223, 225, 227, 228, 229, 231, 232, 233, 235, 239, 250, 252, 255, 270, 306, 307.

343 power 5, 14, 18-19, 26, 30 (empowerment), 31, 53,67, 71, 73-77, 85-86, 88-89, 94, 96, 98, 101-102, 104, 106, 108, 113-114, 116-117, 226. predator 5, 19, 105-107, 169, 224, 226, 229, 254, 271, 276, 287, 301. Preiss, Byron 272. primitivity 1, 77-82, 85-87, 97, 280-281. prison motif 10, 54, 80, 99, 112, 115, 131, 202-203, 207, 212213, 223, 297, 299, 303-304. psychic vampirism 19, 269, 287, 290, 295-296, 305. race (see also “white”) 71, 75, 77, 81, 94, 99, 249, 268, 283, 286, 306. racism 17, 75, 82, 221-222, 225, 227, 232. Radcliffe, Ann 2, 187-190, 197, 200, 202-203, 208, 211. radio 9, 12, 16, 45-46, 157-163, 165, 167-168, 171, 173-175, 177. rape 111, 115, 153, 163-165, 185, 192, 163, 180, 212. rationalism 13, 21-24, 26, 30-31, 36, 77-78, 82-83, 95-97, 99, 104, 114, 142, 144, 147, 181182, 197, 228, 290. rebellion 10, 19, 132, 241, 259, 268, 276, 291, 293, 296, 301, 304, 308. religion 7, 22, 25, 70, 89, 113-114, 117, 119, 123-129, 134, 142, 164, 173, 211-212, 239, 240, 245, 279-280. resistance 14, 19, 50, 57, 62, 69, 86, 197, 228, 231, 236, 254, 286, 293, 303-304, 307-308.

 

344 revenant 13, 23-24, 29, 31, 34, 37, 41, 174. Rice, Anne 11, 18, 125, 236, 238, 240, 249, 252, 257, 259-260, 265-267. Richard, François 25, 28, 40. Robinson, Mary 2. Romania 36, 45-46, 48-51, 54, 59, 62-63, 67-68, 72, 164, 223, 272. Romanticism 2-4, 7, 10, 16-17, 22, 78, 138, 148-149, 153, 155, 179, 182, 187, 228, 230, 232233, 243, 259-260, 264, 267269, 274-276, 282, 285, 287, 289, 291, 294. ruin motif 4, 7, 13, 45, 47-48, 5152, 57-62, 64-66, 120-121, 123, 150, 159, 199, 208-209, 291, 305. Russia 72-74, 77, 83, 85, 164, 200. Rymer, James Malcom 5, 239, 266. sadomasochism 10, 214, 263, 300. sartorial shift 15, 137-138. Satan (see also “Devil”) 226, 240, 242, 275, 282-283, 285-287. satire 8, 15, 119, 123-125, 127, 129, 154, 264, 287. Saulger, Robert 25, 40. Schauerroman 195. science 25, 48, 77, 114, 117, 142144, 164, 223, 240, 249, 295. seduction 18-19, 259, 271, 276, 279, 281, 288-292. self-control 110, 235, 237, 241, 254. sensationalism 6, 9, 185, 261. sex(uality) 5-6, 8, 10, 17-19, 76, 80, 104, 110-111, 126-128, 137, 140, 143, 149, 151, 153, 155, 161, 221, 224, 226-227,

Index 229, 231-232, 238, 243, 252, 257, 259, 260, 263, 267, 269, 271, 273, 276-277, 279-280, 282, 285, 287-292, 294, 300301. Shakespeare, William 79, 144, 180, 194, 290. Shelley, Mary 3, 143, 266. Sherlock Holmes 16, 157-158, 165-168, 172, 177. Siddons, Henry 187. Simmons, Dan 46, 50, 55, 59-60. sound (track / effects) 8, 16, 68, 139, 149, 152-153, 157, 159168, 170-171, 175, 177, 186, 189, 227, 299. Southern (American) Gothic 7, 15, 119, 121-123, 130. Southey, Robert 32, 41. Spain 150-151, 173-174, 272, 274, 278, 289-291. stage machinery 191. stereotype 45, 68-69, 79, 145, 202, 307-308. Stevenson, Robert Louis 4, 5, 16, 157, 166, 173, 175-176. Stoker, Bram 5, 12, 17-18, 21, 3233, 47-49, 55, 59, 69-70, 7375, 83-84, 100, 103-105, 108, 110-114, 117, 120, 147, 149, 153, 157-158, 160, 166, 176, 221-227, 240, 257, 261, 263, 265, 267, 269, 271-272, 278279, 281, 289-290. sublime 2, 182, 203. submission 39, 263, 290, 295, 303. supernatural 2-3, 5-8, 16, 59-60, 67, 70, 78-79.88, 139, 142, 144, 151, 153, 174, 179-183, 186-189, 191-192, 194-198, 201-223, 230, 232, 235, 244245, 247, 249, 252, 261, 267, 277, 280, 296, 300, 306.

 

Index

345

superpower 5, 73-74. superstition 1, 22, 25-26, 28-29, 32-32, , 36-37, 39, 55, 60, 63, 70-71, 78-80, 88, 96-97, 99, 143-144, 154, 164, 181, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 221, 230, 267, 286, 293. Swieten, Gerard van 30, 41. sympathetic vampire 5, 18, 168, 237-240, 242-244, 252-253, 262, 266-267.

140, 142, 147-149, 154, 157, 184, 223, 225, 272, 278. Transylvanian Society of Dracula 52, 57. travel memoirs 13, 45-46, 50, 5254, 57, 61, 65, 68. Tremayne, Peter 46, 55, 66.

taboo 39, 80, 222, 224. teenage 10, 17, 221, 230-232, 290. television / TV 9-11, 17-18, 199, 201, 229-231, 235-238, 244, 249, 251, 253-254, 258,-259, 264-265. terror 2-4, 9, 70, 92, 100, 104, 109, 111-112, 129, 133, 142, 146, 149, 151, 157, 160, 166, 179-180, 182, 186, 190, 222, 226, 262, 264, 279, 307. uncanny 4, 8, 13-14, 17, 24, 34-38, 91, 93, 216. theatre 12, 16, 21, 33, 42-43, 45, 132, 138-140, 148, 153, 158, 161, 163, 166, 179-181, 184, 188-191, 198, 201. torture 10, 14-15, 47, 49, 91-93, 108, 110-111, 114, 119, 125, 130, 175, 196, 216, 264, 297, 299. Tournefort, Joseph Pitton de 26, 28, 40. transgression 5-6, 11, 17-18, 39, 91, 93, 111, 123, 199, 212, 217, 247, 262, 266, 271, 276277, 294. Transylvania 13, 21, 39, 45-49, 5152, 54-57, 61, 66, 71-72, 78, 81, 84-85, 94-98, 103, 116,

vegetarian vampire 18, 235-237, 241, 247, 249 victim 3, 5, 11, 19, 38, 50, 108, 111, 129, 131, 137, 145, 151, 155 (vs. victimizer), 203, 223, 225-226, 229, 259-260, 263264, 276, 280, 283, 285-289, 293-296 (vs. victimizer), 299, 303 (vs. victimizer) Victorian 3-5, 10, 14, 17, 69-71. 73-74, 77-78, 81-83, 85-86, 88, 93, 142, 146, 167, 176, 191, 221-222, 227, 252, 266, 272, 283, 291. violence 7, 19, 36, 91, 93, 107, 109, 112-113, 122-123, 125126, 128-131, 133, 137, 145, 175, 188, 246, 260, 263, 281, 283, 287, 293, 295, 299, 304305. visual arts 179, 200, 202, 216. Vlad Țepes / Vlad the Impaler 13, 46-50, 52-54, 56, 61-62, 67, 74, 84, 230. Voltaire 30, 35, 41. Voyage of the Demeter 16, 157158, 163-164. vrykolakas 13, 21-26, 28-29, 31340, 43.

urban Gothic 3-4, 10, 17, 142, 146, 208, 216, 231-233, 264, 306. utopia 36, 91, 93, 112, 116.

 

346 Wallachia 13, 45-49, 51, 53-56, 64, 66, 72, 74. Walpole, Horace 1-2, 180, 182183, 186-187, 190, 194, 195, 197, 201-202, 281. werewolf 56, 224, 247. white (vs. non-white see also “race”, “racism” and “ethnicity”) 11, 75-77, 81-83, 85, 103, 121, 129, 161, 225.

Index Whitney, Phyllis A. 11. Wilkinson, William 46, 72 Wordworth, William 2. youth Gothic (sub)cultures 10, 225, 231, 264. Zorrilla, José 275, 280.