|
The rhetoric of reform in Stoker's 'Dracula': depravity, decline, and the fin-de-siecle "residuum." - novelist Bram Stoker.
Like the aristocrat/begger nexus embedded in late Victorian culture, Dracula's network of lower-class allies which extends from Transylvania to England signals his ties to the lumpenproletariat. These allies aid in his battle against the Crew of Light and, at the same time, share a telling family resemblance. The Szgany gypsies are Dracula's closest allies and protectors who "call themselves by his name" (41). Their loyalty flames the narrative, for in the first chapter they hand over Jonathan's desperate shorthand letter explaining his imprisonment in Castle Dracula (an act without which the Count might have been prevented from entering England), and in the last chapter stab Quincy Morris, the Crew of Light's only casualty, as he attempts to charge the Count's carriage. With his uncanny mastery of the animal kingdom (especially the London Zoo's best-behaved wolf) and his proclivity for animal transformation, the Count himself fits contemporary descriptions of the gypsy, a skillful animal tamer and, to many English citizens, disgustingly animal-like in demeanor and disposition.(19) In his ability to hypnotize and cast the "evil eye" upon his enemies Dracula also resembles a gypsy. He hypnotizes Lucy and Mina before biting them, and even Jonathan, after Mina's gruesome exchange of blood with Dracula, must be awakened from "a stupor such as we know the Vampire can produce" (283). And en route to Dracula's castle, the crowd at the door of Jonathan's inn makes the sign of the cross and points two fingers toward him upon his departure, a gesture one of Jonathan's fellow passengers identifies as "a charm or guard against the evil eye" (6).(20)
The dock attendants at Whitby (where the Count begins his invasion) and at Doolittle Wharf (where he begins his escape) also contribute to the Count's mission by transporting his dirt boxes. In fact, the dockhands at Doolittle Wharf speak Dracula's language, generously sprinkling their language with the oath "bloody" (or "with blood," as Van Helsing records it). And they are all hesitant to tell the Crew of Light what they know about Dracula; only alcohol, or money for alcohol, will loosen their tongues. In this way they are parasites like Dracula, cadging "drinks" off of the upper-classes. The pairing of working men's drinking and vampirism earlier in the century, in an 1858 temperance tract entitled "The Vampyre, by the Wife of a Medical Man," indicates that Dracula's allies' drinking may be more than incidental.(21) In that tract, the "Vampyre Inn" sucks in the working class, turning them from industrious teetotalers to spend-thrift lushes - and moving them, in Victorian terms, from the respectable working class to the residuum. Vampirism even before Stoker's novel, then, can represent the temptation to acquire the vices of the lumpenproletariat.
If the dockhands appear at first glance to be the "industrious" poor (they are working, after all), undermining the argument that Dracula only allies himself with the wandering and dissolute, it is because dock work had a very different social valence for the Victorians. Dock work was itinerant labor, and the London quays were the socially and racially charged space of the Lascar and the vagrant. In fact, the Vagrancy Act of 1824 which, with a few amendments, dictated the legal treatment of vagrants throughout the nineteenth century, treated as a particular category of vagrant those "suspected persons or reputed thieves frequenting or loitering about a . . . dock, or basin, or quay or wharf."(22)
In England, Dracula also allies himself with Renfield. In addition to his status as "madman," which places him squarely in the Victorian residuum, Renfield is, according to Seward, a "selfish old beggar," his straitjacket one from which "Jack Sheppard himself couldn't get free" (102). In these off-hand remarks, Seward reinstates the class hierarchy Renfield so flagrantly dismisses - a dismissal that deeply troubles Seward. When Renfield treats a mere asylum attendant and Doctor Seward in the same manner, Seward attributes this to Renfield's "sublime self-feeling" (100). "It looks like religious mania," Seward conjectures, "and he will soon think that he himself is God" (10). Similarly, when Renfield acts the part of a gentleman - speaking in a "courtly" (244) manner of "seconding [the former Lord Godalming] at the Windham," and praising suavely Arthur, Quincy, Van Helsing, and Seward in turn - Seward calls this "yet another form or phase of his madness" (245). Seward's indignation regarding the madman disguised as an aristocrat recalls Dickens's disdain for the "idle tramp who pretends to have been a gentleman." Like Dracula, Renfield has an uncanny ability to mask his place in the social residuum, and this ability frustrates and confuses the Crew of Light, for whom class status is crucial. It is important to them, for instance, that Jonathan is a "solicitor," not a "solicitor's clerk" (15), and that Arthur is a gentleman with "blood so pure" (122). Seward himself finds it "soothing" on the rare occasion that Renfield treats him with more respect than the asylum attendants (107).
Above all, Renfield's assistance in the vamping of Madame Mina allies him to the Count. His earlier dealings with the Count have, of course, empowered the latter to enter Renfield's window and to travel through the asylum to Mina's room (280). If unwittingly, Renfield assists in the novel's ultimate violation of bourgeois space and the ultimate and most starkly depicted - spread of vampirism.
Having pointed out Dracula's rhetoric of reform, and demonstrated the Count's resemblance to and alliance with the poorest of the Victorian poor, the most important questions still remain: Why would Stoker connect vampirism with extreme poverty in the first place, and what are the effects of that connection on our interpretation of Stoker's text?
Behind Stoker's use of the residuum lies what seems to be a common fin-de-siecle anxiety: that the English as a nation will become, like the residuum, weak, sensual, and undisciplined, and that this transformation will bring about England's decline. Social commentators of the nineties counted among their worries - along with waning global influence, the questionable legitimacy of the colonial project, and the concept of British "civilization" itself - complex changes in the middle-class moral fabric. While moral norms shifted at all levels of society, commentators focused on the poorest of the poor, since they offered the most striking portrait of domesticity, motherhood, female sexual purity, and masculinity gone awry. The vagrant and the slum-dweller lacked the orderly, comfortable home Victorian domestic ideology designated as source of family values and general moral health - and they lacked the supposed center of that home, the virtuous mother, who was often absent or, according to some, herself depraved. In the slums and "on the tramp," women did not always observe the rules of middle-class sexual virtue - be chaste, or, if married, be monogamous. Nor did men observe the rules of middle-class masculinity - be decisive, be earnest, and be a reliable provider.
Some commentators actually considered the lumpenproletariat, more than merely a portrait of deteriorating norms, a source of the nation's moral deterioration. If the disregard of motherhood, domesticity, masculinity, and female sexual purity had been part of representations of lower-class culture for decades, that disregard seemed in the nineties for the first time to be "spreading" to the middle- and upper-classes. The infamous Wilde trial of 1895 and the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 (which uncovered a homosexual brothel catering to gentlemen) (Spencer, 206) made it clear that alternative versions of masculinity were being imagined and even acted upon by the aristocracy. Moreover, the aesthetic movement's emphasis on male sensitivity and introspection provided evidence that the "virile" ethos, the hallmarks of which were decisive action and the absence of emotional expression (Walkowitz, 17), was coming into question - at least among a vocal minority. The largely middle-class New Women who valorized women's education and work outside the home, demonstrated that, like older versions of masculinity, the cult of domesticity and its idealized version of motherhood might not prevail. More radical New Women, professing that women were entitled to the same forms of sexual expression as men, illustrated that even female chastity was not an irresistibly permanent norm. Because the middle- and upper-classes began to sanction these views long after they were sanctioned among the lower-classes (or so, at least, it seemed), commentators conceived of these views as a moral malaise spreading from the lowest ranks of the social body upward.
To this end, many myths were created. First, some claimed that vagrancy and its attendant idleness, promiscuity, and disregard of domesticity were contagious, that "any contact between intractable vagrants and respectable workers posed the danger that [wandering] impulses might be activated."(23) Others claimed that the mentally ill could spread a "contagion of moral leprosy," "multiplying a progeny" of the morally and mentally diseased, if allowed to mix with the sane of any class (Booth, 205). Slum-dwellers too were said to imperil the moral health of England. Even if their vice were somehow spatially contained, they could "rear an undisciplined population" made up of "not . . . exactly the most promising material for the making of the future citizens and rulers of the empire" (66). It almost goes without saying that, above all of these, the prostitute was believed to infect the women and men of the bourgeoisie. In addition to spreading venereal disease, the prostitute inspired "lust" in men and, in the mere spectacle of her vice, imperilled the chaste female observer.
toker imports this model of moral contagion into his own text, for moral depravity is there represented as spreading from the vampiric residuum to the respectable middle- and upper-classes. In fact, the central anxiety among the Crew of Light is precisely the sort of lumpen takeover imagined by social commentators. Just as the slum-dweller can produce an infirm ancestral line unfit to be the "future citizens and rulers of England," Dracula can produce "a new and ever widening circle of semi-demons" (51), an entire nation of morally depraved vampires. Significantly, the spread of vice in Dracula occurs among those explicitly named or curiously resembling lumpen types - vagrants, madmen, prostitutes. Following the nineties commentators who believed vagrancy was contagious, Stoker depicts Dracula, a spatial nomad, as tempting Lucy to stray in Whitby cemetery, she in turn tempting the children of Hampstead to "stray from home" (177). Following the commentators who considered madmen morally dangerous, Stoker makes Renfield responsible for Mina's assault. And following the commentators who treated prostitutes as morally infectious, Stoker casts Lucy as a prostitute of sorts. Before being vamped, Lucy's nocturnal walks, alone and scantily clad, at worst suggest prostitution, at best, as Mina remarks, a serious risk to Lucy's "reputation" (92). After being vamped, Lucy's publicly sexual behavior includes the aggressive gaze and provoking deportment reformers attributed to the prostitute (Walkowitz, 23): she gazes unabashedly at the Crew of Light, her eyes "blaz[ing] with an unholy light" (211), and openly propositions Arthur, "Come to me. . . . My arms are hungry for you."
In addition to casting lumpen types as the transmitters of vice, when Stoker specifies just what Dracula's "semi-demons" look like, he focuses on the same vices journalists and reformers associated with the lumpenproletariat. For example, some writers castigated the "bad mother" (or absent mother) of the slums, selfish and inattentive, for causing slum conditions (Walkowitz, 120). Far less accusatory than many, William Booth comments in this vein that the lumpenproletariat "needs a great deal of mothering, much more than it gets" (219). Stoker similarly associates vampirism with deviant motherhood. The Count repeatedly separates mother from child: the pleading Transylvanian peasant woman from her vamped baby (45), Mrs. Westenra from Lucy (thanks to the shock occasioned by Dracula's appearance [143]), and a host of Hampstead mothers from their "straying children" intent on following the "bloofer-lady," Lucy (177-78). The Weird Sisters at Castle Dracula vamp rather than nurture the "half-smothered child" (39) Dracula throws at their feet. And after being vamped, Lucy contracts their strain of bad motherhood. When Van Helsing and Seward spot her in the cemetery, the babe at her breast is not being suckled, but sucked for blood (211).
Like the journalists of the eighties and nineties who repeatedly lamented the dust, rags, and lack of furniture in the living quarters of the very poor, Stoker adds to his picture of bad mothers the perversion of domesticity. Most of the rooms at Castle Dracula are locked or in disarray, its one comfortable chamber only a snare laid for Jonathan (16); Carfax Abbey, as mentioned before, looks and smells like a slum dwelling; and the house at Piccadilly "smells vilely," containing a wash-basin of bloodled water (301). When Dracula invades England, filth and disorder seem to spread to the Crew of Light's dwellings. At the Westenra's, the air assumes the foul smell of Dracula's quarters (Van Helsing's garlic makes Lucy's room "awfully stuffy" [133]) and the servants become drugged and debilitated (one even grows disloyal, stealing the cross that her mistress wears in death). Similarly, at Seward's asylum, Renfield actively collects the vermin that plagued the slums (68-69, 115). Finally, though this raises eyebrows among neither the Crew of Light nor any of Dracula's critics, Mina, Arthur, Jonathan, and Van Helsing have by mid-novel made an insane asylum their home a compromise of blissful domesticity to say the least.
Vampirism also entails the compromised masculinity of the lumpenproletariat. Reformers depicted the male casual laborer, like the slum-mother, as an inadequate parent - lazy, ineffectual, incapable of supporting a family (Walkowitz, 44). According to Booth, the slum-dwelling male is "impotent," his surroundings "manhood destroying" (Booth, 24). "Would it not be more merciful to kill [the very poor] off at once," asks Booth, rather than, by letting them remain in the slums, "crushing out of them all semblance of honest manhood?" (61). Jonathan and the captain of the Demeter echo Booth's sentiment: the captain wants to "die like a man" (85) rather than suffer the Count's presence; Jonathan vows that he will jump from the castle even to his death for "at its foot man may sleep - as a man" (53). While Jonathan owes his gender anxiety in large part to the aggressively sexual behavior of the female vamps and his near-miss at penetration (38), he owes it also to Dracula's advances. Dracula has, after all, exclaimed within earshot of Jonathan, "This man belongs to me! ... Yes I too can love" (39). Van Helsing too suffers the erosion of his masculinity. Otherwise free of the taints of vampirism, he begins to laugh and cry "just as a woman does" when he reflects on the ironic events surrounding Lucy's vamping and death (174).
The lumpen vice Stoker most obviously attributes to vampirism is female sexual impurity. As I have mentioned, Lucy's vampirism resembles prostitution. Even Mina, whose changes are far less extensive than Lucy's, becomes more openly amorous with Jonathan after being vamped (267). Furthermore, after being vamped both Mina and Lucy reject monogamy, another norm supposedly disregarded by the lumpenproletariat woman (Mayhew, 1:20): Lucy receives blood transfusions from three men besides her husband-to-be, the sexual symbolism of this noted later by Van Helsing (176), and Jonathan is cuckolded by Mina, whose intimate exchange with the Count takes place only feet away from him.
Wrapped up in this idea that the residuum will contaminate the upper-classes - and the vampire will contaminate the virtuous - is a preoccupation with the transgression of spatial boundaries. In fact, transgressing spatial boundaries could be identified as the controlling metaphor of Dracula. When the Count comes around, virtuous English citizens discover strange red marks on their necks, but, more striking, they experience a whole host of spatial transgressions, including invasions, escapes, and re-openings. The Count slips through windows and cracks of doors; "King Laugh" enters Van Helsing's body uninvited (174). The zoo animals, Lucy, and the children who follow her as the "Bloofer Lady" all escape the enclosed space they previously inhabited. Both Seward and Mina must re-open diaries they have definitively closed, the former stating explicitly, "everything is . . . now reopened" (190); even Jonathan's mind becomes "unhinged" (36) after his encounter with the vamps at Castle Dracula. And of course Stoker's choice of homeland for the Count - Transylvania, across or beyond the forest - signals his interest in the crossing of boundaries.
In the decade before Stoker wrote Dracula, perhaps not coincidentally, an intense interest in spatial boundaries crossed by the lumpenproletariat arose among social commentators and journalists. It concerned "the threatening appearance of the poor in the 'wrong' part of town, in the form of socialist-led demonstrations of the East End unemployed in the wealthy West End" (Walkowitz, 28). This motion from East to West seemed especially transgressive in a city that was, since the era of mid-Victorian slum clearance, spatially segregated according to class (Walkowitz, 26). (Journalistic exposes such as George Sims's How the Poor Live [1883] and Gustave Dore and Blanchard Jerrold's London: A Pilgrimage [1872], further rigidified class hierarchy into geographic separation.) The demonstrations included some violence (one ended, for instance, in sporadic looting and rioting in London's principle shopping district), and came to a head on "Bloody Sunday," 18 November 1887, with yet another attempt to transgress spatial boundaries: a group of itinerant laborers and unemployed attempted to enter Trafalgar Square and were brutally repressed by police.
Only with contemporary fears of lumpen invasion in mind do the spatial invasions of Dracula come fully into focus. The Count's movement from Transylvania in the East to England in the West shares the same trajectory of the lumpen "invasion" from the East End to the West End of London. But more remarkable, the Count invades London itself from East to West. Mr. Joseph Smollet - the only workman, incidentally, both employed by the Count and described as "decent . . . a good, reliable type" (260) - divulges the Count's plan, later recorded by Jonathan: ". . . the Count was fixed on the far east of the northern shore, on the east of the southern shore, and on the south. The north and the west were surely never meant to be left out of his diabolical scheme let alone the City itself and the very heart of fashionable London in the southwest and west" (261). When Quincy and Godalming destroy the dirt boxes at Bermondsey and Mile End, then wait with the rest of the Crew for Dracula's arrival in Piccadilly, they attempt to prevent an invasion of the "fashionable London" stormed by the lumpenproletariat a decade before. In fact, Van Helsing's enigmatic reference to "King Laugh" (whose invasion of Van Helsing's body roughly coincides with the Count's invasion of England) may very well allude to those demonstrators in the West End, whom contemporary journalists dubbed "King Mob."
Vampiric and lumpenproletariat invasion share a spatial parallel even more striking: windows and doors act as the locus of entry for both. The Count's reliance on the open window to access his victims may seem rather banal for a monster of his supernatural caliber; he can change shape, command animals, and summon the "strength of twenty men" and the "aids of necromancy" (237), but has trouble with closed windows. Stoker's focus on windows and doors makes more sense, however, in light of contemporary representations of the lumpenproletariat. An 1850 Punch cartoon entitled "A Retired Neighborhood" [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] provides a fairly early depiction of a vagrant kept from the drawing room (and the female observer) by one thin pane of glass.(24) Like Dracula, this vagrant seems to be warded off more by a young woman's attitude than any physical barrier - she looks more disdainful than frightened. Doors and windows were associated with the lumpenproletariat in the nineties as well: Booth notes that "it is customary in the slums to leave the house door open perpetually, which is convenient for tramps, who creep into the hallways to sleep at night" (162); slum neighborhoods were distinguished from respectable working-class neighborhoods by, among other things, their open doors and broken windows (Walkowitz, 35); and the demonstrations of 1887 included, significantly, the breaking of windows in the fashionable Pall Mall district (Walkowitz, 28).
As the latter suggests, physical violence was certainly a part of late-century anxieties about the "invading" residuum. But in a decade when, as Martin J. Wiener demonstrates, novelists and journalists represent the poor as debilitated and pathetic much more often than powerful and wicked,(25) it seems clear that the anxiety generated by lumpen invasion extends much further than material risks to, as I have argued thus far, their ability to represent a decline in respectability that portends the decline of a nation. Booth's vagrant in the doorway does not threaten harm as much as stigma to the house's inhabitants. Punch's vagrant at the window is more embarrassing than menacing, the humor of the cartoon deriving in large part from the young lady's predicament - she cannot possibly include a tramp in her genteel description of aristocratic leisure. Even the shattering of Pall Mall windows, while threatening and costly, also suggests the disgrace of social discord - and this at a time when the products featured in those windows have newly entered into rigorous, discouraging competition with German and American products (Arata, 622). In Dracula, too, the fear that the vampiric residuum will compromise respectability at times eclipses the fear that they will physically harm anyone. When Jonathan cuts himself shaving and the Count lunges with "demoniac fury" at the blood on his neck, then smashes Jonathan's shaving minor in a fit of rage, Jonathan immediately remarks: "It is very annoying, for I do not see how I am to shave, unless in my watch-case or the bottom of the shaving-pot, which is fortunately, of metal" (26).
Given the fin-de-siecle preoccupation with crossed boundaries and the transmission of lumpen vice, the solution seems simple: the respectable and the unrespectable must be separated spatially. To this end, reformers of the last decades of the nineteenth century hatched schemes to segregate the unrespectable poor from the rest of the working class (Walkowitz, 26). The plan outlined in William Booth's In Darkest England and the Way Out clearly illustates this trend, and resonates suggestively with Stoker's solution for the Count seven years later. Booth opens his book analogizing the English poor to the African native for a full four pages, concluding that, since English soil "breeds its own barbarians," "pygmies" (11), and "savages" (12), attention should be focused not on colonization and conversion of foreign lands but on homegrown problems: ". . . think for a moment how close the parallel is, and how strange it is that so much interest should be excited by a narrative of human squalor and human heroism in a distant continent, while greater squalor and heroism not less magnificent may be observed at our very doors" (12). While Booth may mean well, selecting this particular analogy for its potentially powerful rhetorical effect on an audience enthralled with faraway lands and the "savages" found there, the analogy transforms the poor into foreigners who, not born in England, have no right ultimately to settle in England.
As mentioned above, Booth's image of the poor floundering in the sea off the shore of Salvation Army benevolence has the same effect. The very poor are not of our soil, this image seems to argue, but constitute a nuisance sufficiently urgent and proximate that they must be rescued. Once rescued, Booth argues, the poor should be settled in one of three colonies: the City Colony, the Farm Colony, and the Colony Across the Sea [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 2 OMITTED]. Booth's description of these programs makes it clear that the Colony Across the Sea is the final solution toward which the tripartite system moves. Some in the City Colony would be "sent home to friends happy to receive them on hearing of their reformation" - the respectable reformed, in other words, can stay - but the rest would be "passed on to the Colony of the second class" (92), the Farm Colony. Once there, some "would be restored to friends up and down the country" - again, the reformed remain in England - but the "great bulk, after trial and training, would be passed on to the Foreign Settlement, which would constitute our third class, namely The Over-Sea Colony" (93, emphasis added). The visual depiction of the colonies, included in the 1890 edition in an 11 x 17 color foldout, sets up this teleology along the axes of Christian salvation, from the depths of the dark sea to the heights of placid sky. Emigration provides, then, the final heavenly resting place of the lumpenproletariat.
The three major phases of Booth's plan - the invasion of the poor, their stay in English communities, and their ultimate emigration - parallel the three phases of Dracula's movement. And in its final expulsion of the Count, Dracula's solution to vampirism bears a striking resemblance to Booth's. For purging England of the contagion of moral decay in the social residuum facilitates the restoration of middle-class virtue. Having sheared Dracula's throat and sired a child, Jonathan recovers his masculinity; Godalming and Seward each happily marry; even Van Helsing is drawn into the domestic circle, holding little Quincy on his knee in the novel's final tableau. And of course Mina redeems the bad mothers of the text, assuming her rightful position as the "brave and gallant . . . mother" who raises Quincy with "sweetness and loving care" and, equally important, provides an opportunity for male rescue - the novel's final line reminds us that the men "did dare much for her sake."
But as some critics have noted, the conclusion of Dracula is not as tidy and resolved as it might first appear.(26) For, as much as the Crew closes their windows permanently to the Count, and, as this reading suggests, as much as the late-century English close their windows to the corruption of the residuum, there seem to be complicated, somewhat inexplicable forces that let them in. Several critics have identified these forces with the unconscious, arguing that Dracula's victims - whatever their conscious professions and actions - unconsciously desire to be vamped(27): Jonathan wants to cross the threshold at Castle Dracula and later enter the locked drawing room to be vamped; Lucy walks in Whitby cemetery and opens her bedroom window hoping to meet a handsome vampire. While there is some justification for the assertion that the unconscious motivates these acts (Jonathan is, after all, an engaged man with the fruits of marital union no doubt on his mind, and Lucy has professed a playful wish to marry all three of her suitors at once [59]), these readings tend to impose an enormous amount of order and predictability on a disease that spreads in a highly disorderly fashion. It is never clear, for instance, why the supposedly innocent children of Hampstead want to be vamped, or why they will not themselves become vampires.(28) Moreover, it is completely unclear what unconscious desires, if any, explain Mina's vamping. It is not even nominally her act, as it is with Jonathan and Lucy, that admits the vampire; instead, it is Renfield, several rooms away, who admits her attacker.
There is an alternative (or an addendum) to the theory that vampiric desires are unconscious desires, and this alternative wholly jibes with one of the most crucial developments of late-nineteenth-century thought. In the midst of new theories of biological and social determinism, Stoker's text demonstrates that resisting or admitting the vampire is not - or at least not solely - a matter of free will. As David Glover points out in reference to Dracula, "particularly after 1880, the liberal presumption of individual autonomy came increasingly to be compromised by ideas and findings thrown up by the rapid expansion of the natural and social sciences" (Glover, 999). This ambivalence about autonomy characterizes Stoker's work, "the spheres of freedom and determinism . . . always cloudy, and even multi-accentual."
In this light, the unpredictability of vampirism's spread makes more sense; even a virtuous, middle-class woman like Madame Mina cannot completely control her fate. Indeed, if, as this readIng has suggested, Stoker means the spread of vampirism to stand in for the spread of cultural decline occasioned by lumpenproletariat vice, the novel seems somewhat skeptical of the control any individual English citizen can have over the normative cultural changes occurring at every turn. The erosion of domesticity, female chastity, and traditional male sexuality cannot be halted as simply and irreversibly as Dracula seems to be; nor can tough questions about new ideas - homosexuality and women's independence certainly among them - be, like Booth's lumpenproletariat, simply exiled across the sea.
On the surface, Stoker's text celebrates through the expulsion of Dracula the efficacy of sheer human effort to stem the tide of cultural change; the human will emerges from Dracula more than unscathed, triumphant. But as Mina's predicament shows, stealthily and inexplicably the vampire will come, whether we will or no even if the unconscious bids him stay away. With this understanding, when Bilder the zoo-keeper claims that the London Zoo's "nice, well-behaved" wolf "escaped simply because he wanted to get out" (139), we have the sneaking suspicion that he had no choice in the matter. When Van Helsing explains that King Laugh does not ask "May I come in?" but instead "I am here" (174), we might suspect that Stoker is really talking about cultural change.
University of Pennsylvania
Notes
I would like to thank Nina Auerbach and David J. DeLaura for helpful comments on earlier versions of this essay.
1. For recent attempts at historicizing Dracula, see: Stephen J. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist," Victorian Studies 33 (1990): 621-45; Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me With Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Representations 8 (1984): 107-33; Ernest Fontana, "Lombroso's Criminal Man and Stoker's Dracula," Victorian Newsletter 66 (1984): 25-27; David J. Glover, "Bram Stoker and the Crisis of the Liberal Subject," New Literary History 23 (1992): 983-1002; John L. Greenway, "Seward's Folly: Dracula as a Critique of 'Normal Science,'" Stanford Literature Review 3 (1986): 213-30; Marjorie Howes, "The Mediation of the Feminine: Bisexuality, Homoerotic Desire, and Self-expression in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30 (1988): 104 - 19; Daniel Pick, "'Terror of the Night': Dracula and 'Degeneration' in the Late Nineteenth Century," Critical Quarterly 30.4 (1988): 71-87; Carol Senf, "Dracula: Stoker's Response to the New Woman," Victorian Studies 26 (1982): 33-49; Kathleen L. Spencer, "Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis," ELH 59 (1992): 197-225; Jennifer Wicke, "Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and its Media," ELH 59 (1992): 467-93; Jules Zanger, "A Sympathetic Vibration: Dracula and the Jews," English Literature in Transition 34 (1991): 33-44. Further citations of these in text.
2. On criminality and degeneracy, see Fontana, Pick, and Spencer; on foreignness, Arata and Zanger; on homosexuality, Craft and Howes.
3. Kathleen Spencer, for instance, identifies the novel as part of the "urban gothic" and "romance" genres, both of which focus on the "preservation of boundaries," attempting to allay fears about cultural decline through "stabilizing certain key distinctions which seemed, in the last decades of the nineteenth century, to be eroding: between male and female, natural and unnatural, civilized and degenerate, human and nonhuman" (203).
4. While a few critics have explored the class dimensions of Stoker's novel, none has connected the Transylvanian nobleman with the lumpenproletariat, and none has explored in depth the Count's relationship to the poor in general. Franco Moretti identifies Stoker's Dracula solely with capital and the bourgeoisie, rightly emphasizing Dracula's parasitic nature, but ignoring his alliance (and the bourgeoisie's sometimes-alliance) with the lumpenproletariat. Burton Hatlen in the opposite vein rightly associates Dracula with the lower classes, identifying the threat of Dracula with "the threat of a revolutionary assault by the dark, foul-smelling, lustful lower classes upon the citadels of privilege." But Hatlen misses Dracula's distance from the so-called industrious classes, calling Dracula a "peasant" and a "worker." See Moretti, "The Dialectic of Fear," New Left Review 136 (1982): 67-85; and Hatlen, "The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula," Minnesota Review 15 (1980): 80-97.
5. To date, I have not found better terms than "lumpenproletariat" and "residuum" (the two are used interchangeably here) under which to group individuals such as beggars, gypsies, petty thieves, vagrants, and casual laborers "on the tramp." On the "residuum," a Victorian term, see Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1984), 356. On the particular stigma attached to casual labor during the latter half of the century, see generally Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London, A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (London: Oxford University Press, 1971).
6. William Booth, In Darkest England and the Way Out (London, 1890), 25. All future references to Booth are from this text.
7. Lionel Rose, "Rogues and Vagabonds": Vagrant Underworld in Britain 1815-1985 (London: Routledge, 1988), 91. Further citations in text.
8. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1968), 1:1. Further citations in text.
9. Of course Godalming is an aristocrat, but he participates in the Crew of Light's mission to uphold middle-class norms - female chastity, monogamy, medicine, technology, and the written word, among others - against Dracula's invasion.
10. At times, Mayhew becomes quite adamant about the distinction: "I am anxious that the public should no longer confound the honest, independent working men, with the vagrant beggars and pilferers of the country; and that they should see that the one class is as respectable and worthy, as the other is degraded and vicious" (3:371).
11. Bram Stoker, Dracula (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 251. Further references to Dracula are from this edition.
12. Quoted in Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 27. Further citations in text.
13. Reverend Andrew Mearns, "The Bitter Cry of Outcast London," in Peter Keating, ed., into Unknown England 1866-1913, Selections from the Social Explorers (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 110.
14. Mearns compares animals' lairs favorably to slums: "We do not say the condition of their homes, for how can these places be called homes, compared with which the lair of a wild beast would be a comfortable and healthy spot?" (94).
15. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 131-32.
16. Charles Dickens, "The Uncommercial Traveller - On Tramps," All the Year Round, June 1860, 232.
17. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York: International Publishers, 1963), 75.
18. Through Arthur, Stoker makes explicit the latitude accorded aristocrats based solely upon their social status, for only by using "Lord Godalming's" name can Jonathan gain information about Dracula's house in Piccadilly, and only by Arthur's request for a key can they enter the house - an invasion that mirrors Dracula's invasion of England. Social extremes meet in Arthur just as they do in Dracula - he is aristocrat and burglar, the former facilitating the latter.
19. While the English identified all vagrants and poor wanderers as somewhat animal-like, gypsies bore the brunt of this stigma for their supposed fondness of "unclean meat" and their willingness to live in close quarters with animals. J. Ribton Turner, A History of Vagrants and Vagrancy and Beggars and Begging (London, 1887), 496-97.
20. Even the history of the gypsies in Transylvania and England suggests connections with the Count. George Borrow's 1843 The Zincall, or An Account of The Gypsies of Spain explains that the first gypsies in Eastern Europe "made their appearance A.D. 1417 . . . and settled in Moldavia . . . a greater number of adventurers followed during the next succeeding years, making excursions into Wallachia, Transylvania, and Hungary." This entry of Gypsies from India to Dracula's own region coincides roughly with the lifetime of prince Vlad V of Wallachia, upon whom the character of Dracula is based, who lived from 1431 to 1476. A conflation of the nobleman and the gypsies who came to serve him, between Dracula and his Szgany, seems highly possible given that the Count lived in the historical period during which his country first became racially "impure." While Dracula would never admit to or even suspect gypsy lineage ("I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master" [20]), he himself remarks that his people exist in "the whirlpool of European races," that his blood, while strong, is not like Lord Godalming's, "pure." George Borrow, The Zincali, or An Account of The Gypsies of Spain (London, 1843), 1:14.
21. This tract is mentioned in Brian J. Frost, The Monster with a Thousand Faces: Guises of the Vampire in Myth and Literature (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Press, 1989), 43; and in Christopher Frayling, ed., The Vainpyre: Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978), 40.
22. Encyclopedia of the Laws of England With Forms and Precedents, vol. 14 (London: Sweet & Maxwell, 1909), 418.
23. George K. Behlmer, "The Gypsy Problem in Victorian England" Victorian Studies 28 (1985): 231.
24. The vagrant is more than likely Irish, given that he holds a shillelagh, a wooden cudgel that was a traditional Irish weapon. Moreover, the cartoon runs just a few years after the Irish Potato Famine, which brought an enormous influx of Irish immigrants to England, many of whom were forced to take up a tramping lifestyle. At the same time, the cartoon seems to parody Oliver Twist's illustration of Sikes and Fagin gazing through a window at Oliver, safe with Mr. Brownlow in the suburbs. (I am indebted to David J. DeLaura and Donald Gray, respectively, for these suggestions.)
25. Martin J. Wiener, Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law, and Policy in England, 1830-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 215ff.
26. Daniel Pick argues, for instance, that "the text . . . recognizes a certain sense of failure - an element of horror is always left over, uncontained" (71). Richard Wasson argues, "while on the surface Stoker's gothic political romance affirms the progressive aspects of English and Western society, its final effect is to warn the twentieth century of dangers which faced it. . . . It is Dracula's menace that is most memorable" ("The Politics of Dracula," English Literature in Transition 9 [1966]: 27). Christopher Craft argues that the "triple rhythm" of Stoker's novel (characterized by the Count's invasion of England, his involvement with English citizens, then expulsion) provides "aesthetic management" for the fears and anxieties raised by the Count, but does not ultimately allay them (217).
27. For example, according to Carol A. Senf, "Dracula reveals the unseen face in the mirror; and Stoker's message is similar to the passage from Julius Caesar which . . . might be paraphrased in the following manner: 'The fault, dear reader, is not in our external enemies, but in ourselves'" ("Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror," Journal of Narrative Technique 9 [1979]: 170). According to Burton Hatlen, Dracula is "the other that we cannot escape, because he is part of us" (125). Gail B. Griffin argues that "the roots of . . . Harker's experiences in the castle are, of course, in himself: uneasiness and fear mingle with 'longing': the 'dark and dreadful things' are in his own 'wicked, burning desire'" ("Dracula and the Victorian Male Sexual Imagination," International Journal of Women's Studies 3 [1980]: 455).
28. Van Helsing suggests that the staking of Lucy will prevent the children's transformation (215), just as the staking of Dracula prevents Mina's, but why then does he insist that if Arthur had been bitten by Lucy he would certainly after death "have become nosferatu, as they call it in Eastern Europe" (214)?
|
