Reviewing Bram Stoker's "Dracula"

This book is best served on a dark and stormy night. Unless you, I don’t know, want to sleep at night or something. Written as if it were the combined accounts of several witnesses, Dracula begins with a young man, Jonathan Harker, who gets lost in a Transylvanian village. Finding shelter in a solitary castle with its lone inhabitant, an enigmatic Count, Harker soon finds himself in a living nightmare, captured and used as a source of food by three female vampires. Harker barely escapes the castle and rushes home.

Meanwhile Dracula senses a richer hunting ground in England than in his Romanian homeland. He ships himself—dead, in his coffin—over the channel and infiltrates London society. There he makes the acquaintances of Wilhelmina Murray (Harker’s fiancée) and her friend Lucy Westenra. Mina is an intelligent, accomplished, and modest lady who symbolizes pure womanhood. Lucy, on the other hand, is beautiful, vivacious, impetuous, and rash—all things looked down upon in a female during the Victorian Era. It is Lucy’s very immodesty that seals her fate. Dracula makes her his first victim, and slowly she herself becomes a vampire: wasting away by day and attacking children and stalking around parks by night.

But this is not just a Victorian morality tale meant to keep women “in their place.” If it were, then Lucy and any other victims would have gotten what they deserved, and the story would end there. Yet it doesn’t: Dracula goes after the innocent Mina this time. A vampire may require an invitation to enter someone’s home, but evil is indiscriminate, and innocents fall victim to its power just as much as the guilty.

As Mina slowly weakens, Harker recruits the three rival suitors of Lucy’s and a professor named Abraham Van Helsing to protect Mina and find a way to reverse the transformation.  Van Helsing asserts that the only way Mina will survive as a human is if they find Dracula himself and drive a stake into his heart. 

It has been said before, and will be said again: Vampires have been ruined. They used to not only be awesome villains. They used to be legitimately scary. Now what do we have? They can go out in the day, they just…sparkle? They can go out in the day, they just need a ring or something (Dear “Vampire Diaries:” J.R.R. Tolkien called, he wants “his precious macguffin” back). They fall in love? They are the heroes? 

What. Is up. With that?!

In the original folktales vampires had a lot of weaknesses: garlic, sunlight, holy water, crosses, wooden stakes, and the inability cross water or to enter a house uninvited.  A lot of these factors made their way into Bram Stoker’s novel. The reason vampires had that many weaknesses in the first place is because their evil was so pervasive, so powerful, that even with that many flaws they were still nearly unbeatable. Nowadays those weaknesses aren’t as crucial to the story, since the vampires aren’t as evil and therefore don’t need chinks in their armor like garlic or crosses.

Part of what made the vampire folktales scary was that they were unapologetically, unreservedly evil. They were corpses brought back from the dead by the devil himself. These folktales weren’t about zombies—cadavers reanimated but mindless by some scientific abnormality. “Vampires vs. humans” wasn’t about the scientific battle between life and death: it was about the spiritual battle between good and evil, virtue and sin, God and Satan. 

Our modern-day vampire stories have taken the good/evil dynamic out of play, making the vampires heroic. They’ve discarded most aspects of God and Satan, settling for conflict between vampires and werewolves. All that is left is virtue/sin, and even this by our society’s blatant mocking of virtue and acceptance of any types of depravity. Vampire stories, then, have become more about “giving in” than “fighting against” immorality. And that is a truly horrific thought.

 

Recommended Reading Age: High School at least

Parental Notes: Violence against men, women, children, and animals, evil crazy people, crazy evil people, superstitions/witchcraft and demons, and sexual symbolism. Also there’s wine. But Dracula nobly abstains.

Adaptations: Heaps and loads: IMdb lists two hundred. Lucky for you I’ve only seen three: the original starring Bela Lugosi, and the pretty-true-to-the-book “Count Dracula” starring Louis Jourdan as the bloodsucker himself (after which you’ll never see the movie Gigi again, I can tell you from experience).Also, ripping off Dracula in everything but name is “Nosferatu.”