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At first, you might consider the question “How did Dracula become a vampire?” meaningless. The obvious reason is that Bram Stoker’s novel doesn’t offer a clear answer. However, not only is there actual meaning in this deceptively simple question, but it’s one that is fundamental for the way ethics and accountability are presented in the novel.

After all, ethics as well as accountability are not consciously dealt with in Dracula. Rather, there is only an attempt by the text to explain (away) some uncomfortable truths. Of course, in a true Victorian Streisand effect, the more the novel wants to hide these uncomfortable truths, the more they emerge.

How did Dracula become a vampire?

This question – which I’m using as a starting point and metaphor – allows us to talk about a crucial aspect of the novel. Indeed, one containing another question: Is Dracula evil?

“How Did Dracula Become a Vampire?” Hides Another Question

Note: the following are based on several excerpts from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the main Home for Fiction website and the relevant page there.

One of the most fascinatingly ambiguous characters in Dracula is none other than Mina Harker. In the context of how Dracula became a vampire – which, in our case, is an ethical assessment – her thoughts are almost unspeakable:

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 too, though it may not hold your hands from his destruction.

D, 328

In essence, the question “How did Dracula become a vampire?” hides another question in it: Is Dracula really evil?

The question is as uncomfortable as Mina’s utterance. After all, the entire narrative is based on this given fact, for without an evil Dracula the story takes a wholly different turn.

Metaphysical Questions

While the Crew of Light attempts a metaphysical explanation of the undead Count, Van Helsing offers an intriguing detail: The victims of a vampire are released from the curse once their creator ceases to exist. This assumption, proven true later on when the killing of the undead Lucy removes the vampiric curse from the children she had bitten, raises a number of important questions related to Count Dracula’s own vampiric nature and, in particular, his pre-vampiric existence.

Van Helsing only mentions some scattered pieces of information – themselves rather unreliable, as they are based on folklore and given to Van Helsing from his friend Arminius – about Count Dracula being “that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk” (D 256).

There is not even a hint, however, as to how or why Count Dracula became a vampire originally. The possibility that he was the proto-vampire should be excluded, as Van Helsing speaks of vampires in ancient times, in Greece and Rome (D 254). Therefore, it is valid to suppose that Count Dracula himself was the victim of another vampire, a point that the text conveniently ignores almost entirely with the only exception of Mina – who, as mentioned earlier, profanely affirms that Count Dracula is to be pitied, too.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation offers another interpretation that circumnavigates the problem of a creator vampire. The film implies that Count Dracula becomes a vampire as a result of blasphemy against God and the cross. Perhaps a rather weak suggestion which, however, introduces the notion of hamartia – that is, in a dramatic context, a protagonist’s error or flaw – and hence alludes to Count Dracula being a tragic hero.

What If Dracula Is not really Evil?

It becomes particularly interesting that Mina’s later transformation is conveniently implied to be a result of Dracula’s attack. Actually, however, it can be noticed even prior to it, namely a couple of days earlier, on September the 30th, when she writes in her journal that “one ought to pity any thing so hunted as is the Count” (D 243). This and a number of other, increasingly disconcerting habits for a proper Victorian woman, such as writing and especially editing men’s texts, come back to bite her, if the pun may be allowed.

In this framework of increasing ambiguity, that Mina pities Dracula undermines the neat separations the text strives to display. What Mina implies with her speech asking her companions to pity Dracula, goes against the Victorian tendency toward convenient categorization. Moreover, it suggests that the distinction between good and evil is fallacious.

How Did Dracula Become the Vampire?

Stoker’s novel, by trying (and failing!) to portray Count Dracula as an obviously evil character who must be destroyed, effectively attempts to shift accountability. Whether consciously or subconsciously, as a result of historical pressures related to modernity and the inevitability of history, Bram Stoker evades the question, “How did Dracula become a vampire?”

However, the novel inadvertently does answer another question: How did Dracula become the vampire? In other words, how did Dracula become the vampire figure that threatens to invade the heart of the British Empire? It is precisely this question that helps us understand the reasons behind Stoker’s decision (conscious or subconscious, individual or latently societal – a form of structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams would perhaps call it) to leave questions behind Dracula’s past and thus ethical makeup unanswered.

Dracula became the vampire precisely as a result of the British Empire; it was the Empire that created him in the first place.

Dracula, as a bulwark between Christendom and the Ottomans, becomes a champion of the former against the latter. However, as he increasingly imitates the methods and essence of the Ottomans, for example, by mimicking their savagery, he eventually becomes an Other himself and threatens “the heart” as well as “the veins” of the empire, London: “It is necessary therefore to purge him from the very empire that produced the vampire as its guardian at the border in the first place” (Kujundžić 2005, 92).

Works Cited

Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. American Zoetrope &
Columbia Pictures Corporation & Osiris Films, 1992.
Kujundžić, Dragan. “vEmpire, Glocalization, and the Melancholia of the
Sovereign”. Comparatist: Journal of the Southern Comparative Literature Association. 29
(2005): 82–100.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. London: Penguin, 2003. Cited as D.