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Note: the following article on immortality in Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 64-67) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

(Note: Also take a look at the article on immortality in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol)

Immortality in Dracula acquires ominous tints. The curse is not only construed as the inability to find peace, but also as the pressing need to attack others for nutrition. The suggestion of a possible reversal of the ageing process appears for the first time in Dracula’s castle, when Jonathan Harker sees the Count in his box “but looking as if his youth had been half renewed” (D 59).

When Jonathan relives the experience on English soil later on, the Count has “grown young” (D 184) – an oxymoron of sorts, as it includes two meanings with conflicting arrows of time.

Immortality in Dracula: Linguistic Considerations

Not surprisingly, however, the person who presents the most intriguing references to immortality and longevity is Professor Van Helsing. After his query as to why Methuselah lived almost a thousand years while Lucy “with four men’s blood in her poor veins” did not live one day (D 204), he adds “there are men and women who cannot die” (D 205; my emphasis).

By using “cannot” instead of “do not” or “would not” Van Helsing implies lack of volition in the process. The implicit assumption here is that Count Dracula, had he had a choice, would perhaps prefer to die.

Van Helsing’s hypothesis becomes even more explicit later on, when he speaks of “the curse of immortality”, repeating that a vampire cannot die but must live on “age after age” (D 229).

Dialectics of Ambiguity and Ethics

The vampiric nomenclature in Dracula is also revealing. Count Dracula is neither alive nor dead: he is undead, which is telling with respect to the puzzling and ambiguous ontological status of the Count. What it signifies is a reluctance to define a creature like Dracula as alive, a fact that facilitates certain ethical assumptions to be made.

More particularly, the dehumanization of Count Dracula and later Lucy as beings that are not really alive, effectively offers the excuse to annihilate them without any apparent moral problem.

In addition, immortality in Dracula emphasizes the existence of different “kinds” of immortality. The point is made rather explicitly by Mina who, having essentially become a dormant vampire after Dracula’s bite, asks that her companions will not hesitate to kill her. In a scene saturated with sentimentalist tones, she says:

[W]ere I once dead you could and would set free my immortal spirit, even as you did my poor Lucy’s … I cannot believe that to die in such a case, when there is hope before us and a bitter task to be done, is God’s will. Therefore, I, on my part, give up here the certainty of eternal rest, and go out into the dark … This is what I can give into the hotch-pot … What will each of you give? Your lives I know … that is easy for brave men. Your lives are God’s, and you can give them back to Him; but what will you give to me? (D 351)

The text explicitly acknowledges two different kinds of immortality: a spiritual and a bodily one. Clearly, the kind of immortality promised by Dracula is not deemed worthy of consideration, as it does not even enter the discussion, while God’s will and possession of the men’s lives is mentioned twice.

The Varying Kinds of Immortality in Dracula

However, the scene is highly problematic, precisely due to its insistence on clear-cut differentiations. Mina herself stands between two worlds when she delivers her speech, sentimental to the point of sarcasm.

Dr. Seward, who keeps notesDr. Seward kept notes of what Mina said after he was instructed to do so by Jonathan Harker. The layered authoring of the scene reaches such depths that it becomes hard to properly assess the overall narrative authority. of the meeting, affirms that nobody was surprised when Mina asked to see the men a little before sunset, as “sunrise and sunset are to her times of peculiar freedom”, ostensibly free from other forces and presumably Dracula’s spell (D 350).

Not only is Mina caught in a temporal tug-of-war between day and night and what they signify (good versus evil; Crew of Light versus Dracula), but she is also in a no-man’s-land without distinct borders.

Despite Dr. Seward’s wishful thinking that Mina is “her old self” in those moments, he admits that her state appears “some half hour or more before actual sunrise or sunset”, adding that “[a]t first there is a sort of negative condition … [W]hen, however, the freedom ceases the change-back or relapse comes quickly” (D 350).

The Hypocrisy of Progress

After all, marking time by the sunrise and sunset are two characteristically older ways of time-measurement, in direct contrast with the accurate, technologically advanced Victorian context. Mina’s insistence on God and “eternal rest” – not eternal life – appears woefully old-fashioned in its sentimentalism, and completely out-of-sync with the secular, cutting-edge late Victorian technology that pervades the novel.

Count Dracula and his undying status is not approached as a scientific wonder – as Victor Frankenstein’s monster was by his creator, albeit somewhat unwisely. Even Van Helsing appears enigmatically reluctant to study the being who “cannot die”.

As Elmessiri argues, “[v]ampiric embodiment and affirmation of the porosity of boundaries between life and death may be terrifying, but Van Helsing’s … adamant insistence on maintaining clear demarcations between the dead and the living, [is] also terrifying” (1994, 108–109).

Immortality in Dracula: Aspects of Regression

To some extent, what occurs is a temporal reversal of sorts. The new and modern becomes old and obsolete: the men and Mina (the only woman; Lucy is swiftly removed from the picture early on) appear to have surrendered to the fact that “old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D 43). What they cannot however consciously accept is that the temporal reversal they have undergone has also worked on Dracula as well:

Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the progressive characters who track him … Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts … [He is] less of a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own. (Auerbach N. 1995, 63; emphasis in the original)

Several scholars connect Count Dracula with modernity, through the concept of the eternal now. Dracula, like other Gothic texts, presents a temporal model in which “[c]hronological time is … exploded, with time past, present and future losing their historical sequence and tending towards a suspension, an eternal present” (Jackson 1981, 47).

Read more: Angelis, Christos. “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic. Doctoral Dissertation. Tampere, Finland: Tampere University Press, 2017.Available from the repository of the Tampere University Press.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Elmessiri, Nur. “Burying Eternal Life in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Sacred in an Age of Reason”. Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics. 14 (1994): 101–35.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion. London: Methuen, 1981.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003. (Cited as D).