July 16, 2019
Five Questions about Dracula Answered
Let’s do something fun this time. Or rather, let’s combine fun with knowledge and – horror of horrors – the academia. Before you run away from this page, shrieking in horror, hold your breath and wait: I’m planning to take the five most popular questions about Dracula as they appear on Google searches and answer them.
As you probably already know, Google’s autocomplete feature reveals the most common questions about a certain topic as you begin typing. Now, this also reveals some incredible stupidity out there. For instance, if you begin typing “is the moon”, the first results include “is the moon a star”, “is the moon a planet”To be absolutely fair, there might be a legitimate question there., and even – brace yourself – “is the moon made of cheese”.
At this point, I have no idea what I’ll get if I begin typing questions about Dracula, so I’m ready to be surprised myself. Let’s get started!
Questions about Dracula you were always afraid to ask
A note on methodology: I began typing the questions as you see them (e.g. “Is Dracula…”) but the results you see might differ, depending e.g. on your location. Furthermore, let’s not forget that I do introduce a slight bias by choosing how to begin my query.
Is Dracula real?
This does have a ring of “Is the moon made of cheese” to it, but I’m willing to be open-minded and think people meant to ask whether the character of Dracula was based on a real person.
The first answer should be no, Dracula is not “real” – as in, there was never a vampire called Dracula, because vampires are not real. The second, more elaborate answer is that Bram Stoker based Count Dracula on a variety of sources.
Research generally accepts Vlad Tepes as the model on which Dracula was based, and there’s obvious merit in this approach. However, we shouldn’t forget that Stoker’s vampire was not the first literary vampire, and he indeed stood on the shoulders of such authors as Polidori or Le Fanu – the latter being an excellent example of associating homo-eroticism with vampirism.
Why Is Dracula so Popular?
Contemporary critics of Bram Stoker’s Dracula mentioned a feeling of transgression reading the book. They also stated they weren’t sure what was the source, adding that they weren’t sure Stoker was sure, either.
The thing is, Dracula – like the Gothic in general – is popular because it relies on ambiguity that facilitates symbolism. In other words, Gothic works are particularly suitable for conveying repressed thoughts. You have popular fiction suited for unpopular ideas
And so, Dracula is popular because the novel talks about issues that were literally unspeakable in the Victorian era, and even today. Class struggle, religion, gender, existential anxieties, you name it.
Why Is Dracula Gothic?
Following the methodology I outline in my article on the differences between the Gothic and other non-realist modes, the easy way out is to say the novel displays many of the traditional Gothic generic markers.
For example, Dracula is a story with a castle, with supernatural creatures, with a sense of dread and threat lurking in the air, and with issues related to patriarchy.
And yet, it’s Gothic not just because of these elements alone. If it were, there would be little to differentiate Dracula from, say, Hamlet. Bram Stoker’s Dracula is Gothic because it relies on ontological ambiguity. That is, it displays an insistence on not taking a stance in relation to what is real and what is a dream, illusion, or reverie.
Furthermore, an additional element that speaks in favor of Dracula being a Gothic story is precisely the presence of repressed thoughts, as described further above.
Another reason Dracula is Gothic is because my Gothic Meter program says so. 😛
How Is Dracula Killed?
The short answer is that Dracula is killed by Jonathan Harker’s and Quincey Morris’s knives.
But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan’s great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris’s bowie knife plunged into the heart.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Chapter 27, Mina Harker’s Journal
It was like a miracle; but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumble into dust and passed from our sight.
The longer answer is that Dracula isn’t really “dead” because he was not alive either – he was undead. In case you think this is just some linguistic trickery, let me remind you the convenient truth everyone seems to forget: Dracula’s blood lives on, inside Mina Harker and her child.
[T]he strangest and most chilling ambiguity of the novel comes in the novel’s final ‘Note’ by Jonathan Harker. Writing seven years after the events of the story … he tells us of the joy he and his wife Mina feel that their young son’s birthday ‘is the same day as that on which Quincey Morris died’ …
Hindle, Maurice. Introduction. Dracula. By Bram Stoker. London: Penguin, 2003, xxxv-xxxvi; emphasis in the original.
Harker goes on to confide that Mina holds the ‘secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him’, conveniently forgetting that something else has ‘passed into’ the body of little Quincey too: Dracula’s blood. Of all Dracula’s victims, it is Mina alone who has been forced to drink his blood, having made her, as he gloatingly boasts, “flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my beautiful wine-press for a while’.
How Are Dracula and Frankenstein Similar?
Well, apart from both being Gothic novels (see replies further above), there is a very interesting point to be made, pertinent to Dracula and social classes. I’m not the author of this argument, but I definitely subscribe to it.
Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes: the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital
[ … ]
The literature of terror is born precisely out of the terror of a split society and out of the desire to heal it. It is for just this reason that Dracula and Frankenstein, with rare exceptions, do not appear together. The threat would be too great, and this literature, having produced terror, must also erase it and restore peace. It must restore the broken equilibrium – giving the illusion of being able to stop history – because the monster expresses the anxiety that the future will be monstrous. His antagonist – the enemy of the monster – will always be, by contrast, a representative of the present, a distillation of complacent nineteenth-century mediocrity: nationalistic, stupid, superstitious, philistine, impotent, self-satisfied. But this does not show through. Fascinated by the horror of the monster, the public accepts the vices of its destroyer without a murmur, just as it accepts his literary depiction, the jaded and repetitive typology which regains its strength and its virginity on contact with the unknown. The monster, then, serves to displace the antagonisms and horrors evidenced within society to outside society itself. In Frankenstein the struggle will be between a ‘race of devils’ and the ‘species of man’. Whoever dares to fight the monster automatically becomes the representative of the species, of the whole of society. The monster, the utterly unknown, serves to reconstruct a universality, a social cohesion which in itself would no longer carry conviction.
Moretti, Franco. “The Dialectic of Fear”, New Left Review, 136 (Nov.-Dec. 1982), 67-85; emphasis in the original.
Questions about Dracula Are Questions about Ourselves
There were some other questions there that I had to filter out. One reason was they were repetitive. No point answering something I just referred to.
Another reason was I just couldn’t deal with them. I don’t know how to properly answer a question like “Is Dracula still alive?” If you can, feel free.
Also feel free to ask something about Dracula (or even the Gothic in general) using the comments below.
2 Comments
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I’d like to propose a reframing of the first question. I know this is my take on it, because, as you said, stupidity reigns free. But the exercise of questioning retains its value despite that. I’d like to think the question “is Dracula real?” can be understood to mean: how has Dracula affected our lives/the world? I mean, if we take something’s reality as its capability to interact and affect, then Dracula is far more real to me than all the anonymous faces I see on my everyday bus ride downtown. Now, yes, I won’t take it at face value, I know it’s just a “social media ontology”, but I find the thought worth the effort. It starts to point towards interesting directions when we think phenomena like cosplay, fan art, adapted and derived artworks, etc.
You’re making a very intriguing point regarding the deeper nature of reality, in terms of subjectivity and phenomenology. In fact, it immediately reminded me of a part in my dissertation (p.153) where I analyze A Christmas Carol and Scrooge’s time travels:
Reality is tricky. I don’t remember who was the physicist that said something in the direction of “talking about the nature of reality and the composition of matter stops once you stub your toe on the table”. Assumingly, there is a physical reality of some sort “out there” (though Descartes and Berkeley, to name two, would have something to say about that). But at the same time, as you aptly put it, there are things – such as, yes, Dracula – that feel more real to us in some deeper, perhaps more fundamental way. I also liked your example of cosplay. We are the center of the universe by definition, since “we”/”our mind”/”the thing floating over our head” (another grand discussion) is the only thing through which we have whatever insignificant epistemic access to this universe.