INTRODUCTION

When exploring the Gothic, it is difficult to isolate psychologicalfactors from social issues.In a form which focuses soclosely on complex models of identity it is not surprising that arange of different issues are addressed. However, arguably one of the most telling characteristics of the Gothic from the 1790s to the 1890s concerns the progressive internalization of evil. It would bedangerous to generalize about this trend, but it would neverthelessbe true to say that a new focus on psychology indicates that a predominantlysecularized version of monstrosity began to appear.Monsters are not, as they were with Walpoles animated giants, orLewiss demons, externally manifested sources of danger. Instead,by the mid-nineteenth century such horrors had largely been internalized. The roots of this can be discerned in Frankenstein in thedoubling between Victor and his creature, but it is given freshimpetus in the mid-nineteenth century Gothic, as indicated by theemergence of the ghost story as a popular form from the 1840sonwards. Typically in the ghost story the monster lives with you,invading your domestic spaces, so that evil acquires a proximity tothe self which it did not necessarily have in the earlier Gothic. Thisnew departure is a matter of emphasis rather than a revolutionary break.The roots of this internalization of evil are to be found inmuch of the Romantic Gothic, whilst their mature development can be observed within the later Victorian Gothic. On a formal level the Gothic typically transgresses models of realism by dwelling on fantastical experiences.On a more sophisticated level it also transgresses notions of conventional values, whether social, cultural, or sexual. However, often the transgressor (monster, vampire, ghost, and so on) is associated with evil, which renders the moment ambivalent because of a hesitation between the pleasures of transgression and a demonizing language of evil. The Gothics use of doubling is a clear indication of the internalization of evil. Indeed in the new, predominantly secularized context of the mid- to late nineteenth-century Gothic, evil seems a misnomer because such inner narratives can be explained in psychological and social, rather than strictly theological, terms.A post-Romantic
1

conceptualization of unease which has played a significant role in the critical analysis of the Gothic was the Uncanny. Sigmund Freuds essay The Uncanny (1919) examined feelings of unease as they appear within seemingly commonplace experience. Feelings of uncanniness (the unheimlich) are initially contrasted with ideas of the home (the heimlich) and the domestic security that it represents. However, the Oedipus complex suggests that the home is where sexual secrets are propagated, so that the home becomes traumatic, or uncanny, as a result. Freud initiallyregarded the double as indicating the emergence of our adult conscience.However, this conscience, which has a positive role in regulatingbehavior, turns into a dangerously powerful form ofcensorship that, for Freud, stifles the development of the self sothat the double becomes the uncanny harbinger of deathbecause it psychologically kills (or represses) the self.This trauma is manifested as a repetition compulsion, and Freud explores how a culture repeats the past in tales of the dead in which the past comes back to life (or is repeated). This conclusion has relevance for a consideration of the ghost story and the images of the double (the living and the dead) in the Gothic. Gothic so often focuses on issues of gender and identity it meansthat sexuality and politics are frequently foregrounded.Preeminent features of Gothic fiction include terror(both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothicarchitecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets, and hereditary curses. The characters of Gothic fiction include tyrants, villains, bandits, maniac, persecuted maidens, madwomen, demons, fallen angels, and the Devil himself.Gothic literature has a long history behind it, and there are many books today still being written in that style.

CHAPTER I

GOTHIC LITERATURE

The Gothic was considered a predominantly prose form.However, the roots of the Gothic are to be found in earlier theatrical and poetic traditions. Radcliffe, for example, is heavily indebted to Shakespearean tragedy and in The Italian often begins her chapters with a quotation from his plays. However, her interrogation of Romantic concepts, such as the sublime and the role of nature, is firmly rooted in the poetry of the period. In addition the Gothic more generally owes some debt to the Graveyard Poetry of the 1740s and 1750s. Edwards Youngs Night Thoughts (1750-55), Robert Blairs The Grave (1743), James Herveys Meditations amongthe Tombs (1745-47), Thomas WartonsOn the Pleasures ofMelancholy (1747), and Thomas Grays Elegy written in a CountryChurchyard (1751) all made a significant contribution to developing a Gothic ambience (by dwelling on feelings of loss), and provided an investigation into life and death that constituted a peculiarly Gothic metaphysic. The Gothic novels link to Romantic poetry was noted by Sir Walter Scott when he proclaimed Radcliffe the first poetess of romantic fiction 1 . The Romantic interest in exploring non-rational (anti-Enlightenment) states led many of the Romantic poets to write in the Gothic mode. This explores how a Romantic Gothic tradition of poetry developed themes (concerning sexuality, art, and the imagination) which influenced a later poetic tradition here represented by Christina Rossettis Goblin Market (1862). It is important to note that after the Gothic heydayof the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Gothicdoes not disappear but subversively infiltrates other forms ofwriting, including poetry, and the realist Victorian novel.

Sir Walter Scott on Novelists and Fiction, ed. Ioan Williams (London: Routledge, 1968), p. 103.

1.1 Hidden Identities: Ghosts

The Gothic culture has drawn attention in terms of various aspects related to the same.Amongst the many facets, Gothic literature is known the world over due to the particular distinct qualities associated with this form of writing.This literature has even influenced other different genres of writing styles. There are certain prominent traits about Gothic literature that set it apart from the rest. In Burkes Philosophical Enquiry he developed, as we also saw inthe discussion of Frankenstein, a theory of sublime terror which is stimulated by our more dangerous encounters with the world.Burke attempts to explain this within a philosophical language which is dogged by an empiricist view of the world, which is why he is so systematic in his itemization of causes and effects. However, we can also say that Burke is addressing psychological issues within a philosophical approach which cannot properly account for theorigins of terror as an emotion. As discussed in the Introduction, Burke does not have a language of psychology with which to explore unconscious or subconscious factors because, historically speaking, this language was unavailable to him.If Burkes Philosophical Enquiry represents an attempt to account for new types of emotional experience, then Freud provides a more person-centered, critically nuanced account of the selfwhich helps us to explore such changes as they appear in the Gothic tradition. This may seem like a historically perverse claim (that the Victorian Gothic which pre-dated Freud can be historically explained in Freudian terms), but it relates to an essentialquality of the Gothic which has been addressed throughout: that it is an interrogative rather than intellectually or culturally passive form. As the Romantic Gothic treated Burkean ideas with skepticism, so that skepticism generated a new version of the self which was more complex than Burkes empiricism would allow. Indeed it developed a version of the self which appears to be strangely Freudian before Freud. This relationship is not a tenuous one, as evidenced by the fact that Freuds essay The Uncanny2 gains most of its conclusions from a reading of E.T. A. Hoffmanns short story The Sand Man (1816).

Is a Freudian concept of instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange or uncomfortably familiar

For Freud, the key terms of the uncanny relate to the home. The home is a place of family, domesticity, and therefore safety. However, Freud famously notes that linguistically the two terms of his argument heimlich(homely) and unheimlich(unhomely, or uncanny) merge, leading him to conclude that unheimlich3is in some way or other a subspecies of heimlich. This is not just because of some lexical slippage between the terms; it is because for Freud the home is a sinister place. In keepingwith his theory of the Oedipus complex (which underpins hisreading of The Sand Man), the home becomes a dangerous placebecause it is the site where sexual secrets are harbored and propagated.The childs feelings about their parents influence infantilesexual development, meaning that the home is not a safe, or innocent,place to be.Because the home can become the place which generates sexualanxieties it is therefore no surprise that the Gothic of the late nineteenthcentury also suggests, in the ghost story, that the home is adangerous place. Trauma, however, should not be solely seen inpsychological terms because, as we shall see, the ghost story also referencesan anxiety about the wealth invested in the home andmiddle-class concerns about who really owns such places.Dickenss A Christmas Carol (1843), J. H. Riddells The UninhabitedHouse (1875), and Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw (1898) helpto clarify these issues.Dickens wrote a number of long ghost stories which he referredto as my little Christmas Books, indicating that he saw them as seasonalwinters tales intended as light entertainment. However,these Christmas Books often contain quite sinister narratives concerningloneliness, anxiety, despair, and poverty. The best-knownof these books is A Christmas Carol, and although it was written in1843 it nevertheless gives a good sense of the kinds of issues whichtypified the ghost story (and by extension the Gothic) during themiddle of the nineteenth century and onwards.Scrooges lodgings can be read in terms of the uncanny. This isapparent by how he lives in his chambers a wealthy man living inself-imposed poverty (in which he is not properly homed) andin the more obvious sense that his home is subject to ghostly visitations.The invasion of Scrooges chambers by ghosts represents a direct invasion into his life. The ghost of Jacob Marley illustrates not only what he could become (a soul tormented)

Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny in Art and Literature: Jensens Gradiva, Leonardo Da Vinci and Other Works, trans. James

but also what he is (a spectral inhuman figure). The point is to make Scrooge realize that in order to change his fate he has to change who he is, and this is effected by bringing Scrooge back to life (or back to the present). The three ghosts which confront Scrooge all illustrate certain points of his history, past, present, and future, and thus the ghosts have an inherent connection to Scrooge, rather than appear as external manifestations of evil (indeed they are there to help him).A Christmas Carol relies on the uncanny in its representation of ghosts and in how the ghosts are used to illustrate the workings of Scrooges inner life. Whilst this effects a psychological transformation in Scrooge, this psychological factor should not be separated from social issues. Uncanniness might appear to be a purely psychological phenomenon but it represents a model of anxiety whichneeds to be seen within the social context that gives rise to it. InScrooges case the context clearly concerns anxieties over money.The tale was written in the 1840s during a period of economicdepression known as the hungry forties. Scrooge is a miser whocontributes to the presence of poverty because he hoards his wealth.At the end of the tale he buys Christmas presents and this suggeststhat he is putting money back into circulation. The conclusiontherefore contains a paradox, because it implies that Scrooge needsto become a better capitalist, one who uses money when, arguably,it was capitalism which caused the problem in the first place.The issue of money is important because ghost stories often foregroundconcerns about class and wealth. However, given that theyare also about invaded domestic spaces (which are also economicspaces) it is understandable that many women writers producedmajor collections of ghost stories, novellas, and novels in the period.Amelia B. Edwards published many significant ghost stories in the1860s and wrote the important long tale Monsieur Maurice in 1873.Mary E. Braddon in the 1870s and 1880s produced many influentialtales, as did E. Nesbit in the 1890s and onwards. Vernon Lee(real name Violet Paget) wrote the novella A Phantom Lover (1886), addresses the conjunctions between gender and various forms ofsocial and economic power.One prominent ghost-story writer of the time, although one nowsomewhat neglected, is J. H. Riddell (or Charlotte Riddell). Likeother women writers in the ghost-story tradition she examined therelationship between class and gender (a theme that is implicit inDickenss account of money). She also wrote several non-Gothictexts which testify to her interest in financial matters. Her best knownnovels set in the financial sector are City and Suburb (1861),Mitre Court (1885), and The Head of the Firm (1892). She alsoproduced a series of Gothic novellas, Fairy Water
6

(1873), TheUninhabited House (1875), The Haunted River (1877), and TheDisappearance of Mr. Jeremiah Redworth(1878), as well as thecollection of tales Weird Stories (1884), which includes many ghoststories.The Uninhabited House initially seems to lampoon the kind ofmaterialism that we find in Dickens as it focuses on the legal practicalitiesof letting out River House, which is reputedly haunted.The owner of the house loses her case against her tenants who claimthat they had not been informed about the ghost when they rentedthe property. A clerk who is involved in the letting of the house, andwho narrates the story, stays in the house in hope of explaining themystery. It transpires that it is haunted by the previous owner, Mr.Elmsdale, a wealthy but unscrupulous money-lender who, for avariety of reasons, wished to financially ruin a Mr.Harringford, whoowed him money and who subsequently murdered him. The novellamoves beyond the largely psychological issues later suggested byFreud in The Uncanny by implying that money is uncannybecause it appears to possess a vitality (a life) which either enhancesor destroys the people it touches. The ghost of Mr.Elmsdale is likea version of Scrooge. One witness recounts seeing a manseatedcounting over bank-notes. He had a pile of them before him, and Idistinctly saw that he wetted his fingers in order to separate them.4The ghost of Mr.Elmsdale is, like Jacob Marleys, still attached tothe business world. When Mr.Harringford murders the wealthyElmsdale the curse of financial success is passed on to him, as henotes From the hour I left him lying dead in the library every devil. His wife and children die and he becomes lame andprematurely aged. The moral appears to be simple enough moneycomes by dishonestly makes you inhuman. Money, like the ghost, isboth present and absent because it represents both a material realityand a moral emptiness. As in A Christmas Carol, the solution appearsto lie in the proper redistribution of wealth, which occurs whenHarringford dies and bequeaths his wealth to Elmsdales daughter,who then marries the narrator.This seemingly bizarre tale of ghosts and ill-begotten wealthillustrates again the essentially middle-class anxieties of the form.The anxiety is that a class could, under certain circumstances, gainand lose everything within a generation5.In addition Riddellsadoption of a male narrator does not disguise the fact that thepoverty with which he is threatened, unless he makes a
4

J. H. Riddell, The Uninhabited House, in Five Victorian Ghost Novels, ed. E. F. Bleiler (New York: Dover, 1971), pp. 1118,p. 31. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition. 5 Henry James, The Friends of the Friends, in The Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories, ed., Michael Cox and R. A. Gilbert(Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1986] 2002), pp. 15071.

financiallyadvantageous marriage, in reality captures the experience of manywomen at the time. Both Dickens and Riddell therefore address issues about moneyand class, and in Riddells case gender. Their narratives indicatethat ghosts are not quite so otherworldly after all, indeed they seemto be more heimlichthan unheimlichin the prosaic class-bound anxietiesthat they articulate. Suggest that all such stories are focused on money and power.However, Riddells love plot is intimately related to financial concernsbecause they govern the expectations that characters haveabout their chances of marrying.Love, money, ghosts, and suggestions of insanity are centralissues in Henry Jamess The Turn of the Screw (1898), which can beread as a fin de sicle version of Jane Eyre, centered upon a governesss feelings for her employer. Jamess novella made an importantcontribution to the ghost story because it casts doubt onwhether the ghosts are real or merely projections of the governessssomewhat overwrought imagination.The novella begins in a kind of ghost story competition in whichDouglas, the narrator, presents the governesss story. If love inRiddells novella is in part conditioned by certain financial expectations,in James it is associated with a possible delusion that controls the governess, Yes, she was in love. That is, she had been. That cameout she couldnt tell her story without its coming out. Douglasalso goes on to note, The story wont tell not in any literal, vulgarway. Jamess syntactically complex novella bears stylistic testimonyto this oblique approach in which the governesss perceptionof the ghosts of Quint and Jessel is central because their very existenceis open to question. Whilst Dickenss and Riddells ghostsfulfill a purpose because their presence is meant to create a better life(for Scrooge) or because they result in economic advancement (forRiddells narrator), Jamess ghosts appear to represent the projectionsof the love-struck and anxious governess.The governesss unrequited feelings for her employer becomedramatized in the relations between the spectral Quint and MissJessel, who also appear to have been involved in a doomed relationship.In addition, the governesss perception of the children,Flora and Miles, is influenced by her anxiety that Quint and Jesselcould represent an immoral influence over them. This means thatall the characters, real and spectral, are forced into a series of relationshipsforged by the governess. Miles, for example, because ofsome undisclosed problems at school, appears to the governess asa potential Quint, and so she attempts to protect him from Quintsinfluence.
8

However,

Mrs.Grose,

the

pragmatic

housekeeper,undermines the governesss claims about the presence of theghosts. In one scene the governess points at Jessel, but Mrs.Groseresponds with Where on earth do you see anything?Aview supported by Flora: I see nobody. I see nothing. I never have. The governess rationalizes away such claims (at least toher own, if not necessarily the readers, satisfaction), but thismeans that the novella operates at two levels: as a tale about ghostsand as a tale about the governesss projection of her feelings aboutpossible rejection.The narrative develops some of the aspects of the uncanny whichrelate to doubling. The problem is that the governess is necessarilyunable to see that the ghosts are (or at least can be read as) projectionsof herself. The Turn of the Screw thus dramatizes the interior(emotional, psychological) origins of the types of horror that anearlier, less secular, Gothic tradition located externally. These three stories of ghosts are quite different in emphasis andin their development of uncanniness. It is important to note that theghost story has often posed problems for critics because their verystructure, in which a survivor tells or focalizes the tale, signals inadvance that any horrors are likely to be overcome. However, inJamess complex tale of psychological influence and spectrally (atheme he also developed in the short story The Friends of theFriends,1896), the surviving governess arguably does not overcomethe trauma of what happens because she is the principal agentin its generation. However, when reading ghost stories it is alsoimportant to consider how they express class-bound issues, becauseghost stories, with their accounts of haunted middle-class houses,are also articulating class anxieties which obliquely touch upon theperils of home ownership.Jamess novella explores issues about projection and doublingwhich appear in other Gothic tales. How the other functions as ameans of awakening is, as we shall see, a central aspect of RobertLouis Stevensons tale of doubling, The Strange Case of Dr Jekylland Mr. Hyde (1886), and is a feature of many mid-nineteenth centuryGothic tales which touch upon sexuality.

1.2 Gothic Doubles

Gothic double refers to an essential duality within a single character on the further presumption that this duality centers polarity of good and evil. In fact we could say that the single most interesting device used by Gothic writers is that of the double. The roots of the double can be found in Coleridges Christabel. By paying close attention to how Coleridge and Rossetti used languageit is possible to see how it enabled them to both articulate andconceal notions of sexual awakening. Both Christabeland GoblinMarket represent images of lesbianism and in their different waysstruggle to both show and disguise this (perhaps more so inRossetti, but it is there in Coleridges attempt to allegories suchdesire in Bracys dream). It is not just the issue of lesbian desirewhich is important but also the representation of fragile, becausepermeable, models of subjectivity. Geraldine might appear as anexternal threat but she affects an inner awakening. Laura and Lucyare sisters but iconically lovers because the Goblins also bring abouta (premature) sexual awakening the antidote to which transfersthe awakening from men to women.This Gothic strand links lesbianism with sexual discovery, andsexual discovery in a wider sense is an issue in the Gothic duringthe period, as well as being central to Freuds account of subject formation.Le FanusCarmillais a good example of a text from theperiod which explores lesbianism, sexual awakening, and nationalidentity, all within an account of the self and its vampire desires.Le Fanu, an Irish writer of mixed Protestant and Catholicdescent (although a graduate of the Protestant Trinity College,Dublin), was a well-known novelist famous for Uncle Silas (1864),Wylders Hand (1864), and Guy Deverell(1865), as well as an influentialGothic short-story writer. Carmillawas published in the collectionIn a Glass Darkly (1872), which contained a number ofGothic short stories, including Green Tea, The Familiar andMr. Justice Harbottle. The prologue to

Carmillaclaims that thetale has been subject to some scientific scrutiny by Doctor Hesselius (Le Fanus investigator into paranormal activity), who had concludedthat the case represented some of the profoundest arcane of our dual existence.Laura, who lives with her English father in Styria, narrates thetale. Her mother has died, and this, typically a feature of theFemale Gothic, leaves her peculiarly vulnerable. Their world istransformed when they are asked to look after Carmilla, a youngwoman who has been involved in a carriage accident on
10

their estate.Laura seems to recollect Carmilla from a childhood dream, adream that Carmilla also recalls and which establishes an apparentpsychic link between them. The two are drawn to each other, whilstin the neighborhood there are a number of mysterious deaths ofyoung women (who seem to have died from vampire bites). Lauraalso appears to become a victim of these assaults, but then Carmilladisappears. A General Spielsdorf, who some time before had seeminglylost his daughter to a vampire that resembled Carmilla,arrives and helps track Carmilla to her tomb, where she is stakedand decapitated. In the Gothic tradition evil is often defined by the threat it poses to civilization. Jekyll and Hyde, like Carmilla, problematizesthis by raising questions about the origins of evil within civilization.The novella can easily be caricatured as merely being aboutwarring factions within Dr Jekyll, but a closer examination revealsthat Stevenson emphasizes that any notion of conflict needs to beseen within the context of what constitutes civilization. The novellaopens with an account of the weekly walk taken around London byUtterson and his distant relative Enfield. Utterson is a lawyer andtherefore ostensibly associated with a respectable bourgeois profession, But a closer look reveals the presence of a Gothic mood. He isdescribed as a man of rugged countenance, that was never lightedby a smile; cold, scanty and embarrassed in discourse; backward insentiment: lean, long, dusty, dreary, and although this is qualifiedwith and yet somehow lovable, this somehow suggests that thegrounds for the claim are unclear. 6It is then noted of Utterson andEnfield that:It was reported by those who encountered them in theirSunday walks, that they said nothing, looked singularly dull,and would hail with obvious relief the appearance of a friend.For all that, the two men put the greatest store by these excursions,counted them the chief jewel of each week. The opening of the novella thus implies that a meaningless attachmentto middle-class rituals (here the Sunday walks) empties experienceof pleasure and significance. It is out of this emptiness thatHyde is generated. This specifically middle-class emptiness isapparent in the isolated and lonely lives of all the main characterswho are successful members of bourgeois professions such asmedicine and the law. As in some theories of degeneration, the precarious nature of social bonds indicates a crisis within notions ofcivilization. Hyde might appear to be a Darwinian throwback withhis ape-like tricks, but there is at least, so the novellaimplies, a vitality about him which is sadly
6

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories, ed. Jenni Calder (Harmondsworth: Penguin,1984), p. 29. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition

11

lacking in the othercharacters, and thus Hyde becomes the double of them all.The Uncanny with its analysis of dangerous doubles providesone critical approach to the text. Hyde, seen within the context ofa seemingly moribund civilization, can also be interpreted as anevolving creature. Hyde physically becomes bigger as the novelladevelops, and this coming into being is also apparent in the languagethat Jekyll employs in his seemingly explanatory narrative,Henry Jekylls Full Statement of the Case. Jekylls first-personaccount slips into a third-person narrative voice Henry Jekyllstood at times aghast before the acts of Edward Hyde which indicates a struggle for control within the narrative; later theview that Jekyll was now my city of refuge suggests thatHyde is narrating. The final sentence claims that I bring the life ofthat unhappy Henry Jekyll to an end , which is also ambivalentbecause we cannot be sure if Jekyll has killed Hyde or Hyde haskilled Jekyll.Jekyll and Hyde, like Carmilla, is ostensibly about doubledselves, but it never loses sight of the social conflict that Jekyll andHyde represents. Jekyll and Hyde are associated with differentclasses and in this respect dramatize the social tensions whichcharacterized London at the time. The idea of leading a doublelife has also suggested to Elaine Showalter that the novellaincorporates a covert narrative relating to homosexual relationsbetween Jekyll and Hyde, in which Hyde blackmails his sociallysuperior lover7. Such images can also be discerned in WildesThe Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which plots the developmentof a secret life within an apparently respectable society. The complexitiesof these Gothic narratives lend themselves too manydifferent readings and theoretical approaches. Theories of degenerationhave a predominately European flavor to them andprovide one way of looking at how these texts generate models ofidentity. How identity was explored in the American Gothicduring the period helps develop a critical counterpoint to thisBritish tradition. To critically read narratives such as these it is crucial to explorethe specific cultural contexts which generated them. They allprovide important evocations of the horrors of slavery and indicatehow the Gothic conditions such representations. They also play animportant part in shaping later Gothic texts which explore similarthemes, such as Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987), which will be discussedin the following chapter. As mentioned earlier, the Gothic inBritain develops

Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Sicle (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1990). See Dr. JekyllsCloset, pp. 10526.

12

ideas of racial and national otherness in quite adifferent way than in America: a reading of Dracula helps to illustratethis.

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CHAPTER II

TWENTIETH CENTURY

2.1 The ghost story as the end of the gothic The ghost stories ofDickens, Henry James, and J. H. Riddell illustrate how evil wasinternalized in the Gothic. Their writings also address social andpolitical considerations relating to money, class, and gender. Howto gauge the political vision of the ghost story in the early part ofthe twentieth century appears to be more difficult. Much of thecriticism on the form is colored by a response to the writings ofM. R. James, whose highly influential ghost stories were publishedin collected form between 1904 and 1931. Jamess writings bearan imprint on the ghost stories of E. F. Benson, his brotherA. C. Benson, Edmund Gill Swain, A. N. L. Munby, and RichardMalden, who had contact with James at Cambridge University;many of them were present there when James read out his tales inhis college rooms at Christmas. However, other writers in theperiod, such as Algernon Blackwood and May Sinclair, producedtales in a slightly different, less heavily stylized, and key. This sectionexplores some selected writings of M. R. James, Blackwood, E. F.Benson, and Sinclair. How some of these writers can be linked tomodernism provides a closing context in which a reconsiderationof the ghost storys apparent formalism can be re-evaluated.The ghost story has posed a problem for scholars working on theGothic in its unsettling of the relationship between the living and metaphysical, questions about identity. However, the structure ofthe ghost story often appears less unsettling, as its conventionalityand easy-going fireside ambience creates, at least in the late nineteenthand early twentieth centuries, a mood which is antitheticalto grand metaphysical debate. David Punter in The Literature ofTerror argues that during the early part of the twentieth century theghost story entered a highly mannered phase8 which culminatedin the shockingly bland tones of M. R. James. Indeed, forPunter, Jamess settings are often little more than

David Punter, The Literature of Terror: The Modern Gothic (London and New York: Longman, 1996), vol. 2, p. 67. All subsequent references given in the text are to this edition

14

Gothic stereotypes, and although his formulaic constructions mightpossess a certain Gothic style, they are fundamentally devoid ofradical content: They work well, but they mean almost nothing (emphasis in original). For William Hughes, Jamess talesconstruct an almost idyllic lateVictorian and Edwardian worldconsisting of the quiet College Combination Room, the library, orthe cathedral close. 9 Even the Gothics fascination with extrememental states is absent because, as Julia Briggs claims, in Jamesstales psychology is totally and defiantly excluded.10 This version of James implies that his writings are dominated bya narrative mannerism which excludes any troubling Gothic elements,or political or cultural conflicts.This has ledClive Bloom toargue that Jamess tales refer to a world both slower and morestable than the modernistic period in which he was writing. 11 Thisissue of the retrospective nature of Jamess writing and how itrelates to modernism will be returned to. However, the idea thatJamess tales represent stable worlds is difficult to reconcile with theprevalence of death, abduction, and demonic hauntings which sooften characterize them. The past is a dangerous place in his tales,but, as we shall see, this is related to a response to modernism whichrelocates its apparent amorality within the seemingly urbane narratorialvoices.M. R. James was provost of Kings College, Cambridge, andprovost of Eton, a classical scholar and a medievalist historian. Thisacademic background plays a crucial role in his tales, which so oftenrevolve around scholarly discoveries which bring the past back tolife. That this background informed his tales is clear from the titleof his first collection of ghost stories, published in 1904, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. Three further collections were published,A Thin Ghost and Others (1919), A Warning to the Curious(1925), and Wailing Well (1928), before a collected edition was publishedin 1931. Jamess tale The Mezzotint (1904) describes how a group ofCambridge dons observe an unfolding narrative concerning theabduction of a baby from a

Williams Hughes, The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p.143. 10 Julia Briggs, The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 135, cited at p. 85 in Punter,Literature of Terror. I am conscious that this implies that theGothic is an inherently radical form, whereas it can often beused to conservative ends. However, the critical material onJames suggests that the Gothic simply fails to appear as Gothicat any politically discernible level (whether radical or reactionary). 11 Clive Bloom, M. R. James and his Fiction, in Creepers: British Horror & Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Clive Bloom(London: Pluto, 1993), pp. 6471, p. 69.

15

country house, which is recounted on amezzotint engraving being considered for purchase for theirmuseum. Historical research reveals that the mezzotint wasengraved by Arthur Francis and the tale illustrated by the mezzotintrelates to an incident involving his family. The tale concernshow the ghost of a figure named Gawdy, who had been executed forkilling one of Franciss gamekeepers, enacts his revenge by abductingand then murdering Franciss only child. This chilling narrativeis at odds with how the dons respond to it. Theirs is a cozy,cloistered world which is only temporarily upset by this narrative.Their conversation revolves around middle-class sporting activities,and in one instance tea was taken to the accompaniment of adiscussion which golfing persons can imagine for themselves 12 .Later, over Sunday morning breakfast, Hardly a topic was leftunchallenged, from golf to lawntennis. These commentsillustrate the moral vacuity of the lives of the dons who unconsciouslyunderstand that their vacuity is, at a symbolic level,generating the horror which is manifested in the mezzotint: as oneof them notes, it looks very much as if we were assisting at theworking out of a tragedy somewhere . The tragedy isturned inwards because what is really tragic, so the tale implies, istheir inability to empathize with the human drama staged by themezzotint.M. R. James is more complex than critics have allowed, and histales can be read as a critique of blandness, rather than as an exercisein narrative form. He was to return to these issues in the laterThe Haunted Dolls House (1925).13In the tale a Mr.Dillet purchasesan antique dolls house which is a mocked-up version ofHorace Walpoles Gothic folly, Strawberry Hill. At one oclockevery morning it stages the murder of an old man, and his subsequentghostly return and murder of two young children. Some research reveals that the dolls house was made by JamesMerewether, who had murdered the old man (his fatherin-law)because he intended to exclude the family from his will; the murderedchildren were Merewethers. Dillet suffers an emotional breakdown but such is the structure of the tale (in which the tale isheavily mediated through the narrator) that the reader is kept at adistance from Dillets private drama, and this curiously places thereader as a passive voyeur of his despair and forces the reader tooccupy the same amoral position as the dons in The Mezzotint. Both tales implicitly address a horror of an emerging amoralitywhich, as we shall
12

M. R. James, The Mezzotint, in The Collected Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, [1931] 1970), pp. 3653,p. 40. All subsequent references in the text are to this edition.I develop these arguments in M. R. Jamess Gothic Revival ina special issue of Diegesison Horror, ed. Gina Wisker, 7(Summer 2004), 1622. 13 M. R. James, The Haunted Dolls House, in The Collected Stories of M. R. James (London: Edward Arnold, [1931] 1970),pp. 47289.

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see, can be linked to a somewhat conservativeview of modernism. The modernist cry forinnovation subtly influenced the development of the ghost story.The new technical innovations of radio and film in the period werealso to provide opportunities for the development of the Gothic. 2.2 Gothic - postmodernism In the twentieth century the term Gothic tends to becomereplaced with Horror, at least where popular literature is concerned.In part such a change in nomenclature is a recognition thatthe various associations that Gothic has with formulaic plotsinvolving aristocratic villains amid ruined castles, set withinsublime landscapes, are not the stock-in-trade of writers such asStephen King, James Herbert, John Saul, Dean Koontz, or ShaunHutson, amongst many others.The post-war boom in mass-produced pulp fiction (so calledbecause of the poor quality of paper on which they were printed inthe 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s) is not confined to horror. The post-warera was also characterized in both text- and non-text-based mediaby other popular modes, most notably science fiction and detectivefiction.The popularity of these novels should not detract from the factthat, in keeping with the Gothic tradition, they still address culturalanxieties. In America the Southern Gothic of the 1940s and 1950s,of writers such as Carson McCullers and Flannery OConnor,reworks themes about region, murder, and insanity which arguablyhave their roots in the Gothic of Edgar Allan Poe.
14

In

addition,Stephen Kings novels repeatedly dwell on social problems generatedwithin small American towns where the social limitations ofsuch an environment become emblematic of wider issues relating tosocial and moral obligations. His novel Carrie (1974), for example,concerns the failure of family, peers, and schools to protect the vulnerable,and consequently it takes some delight in destroying much of the small town where it is set.52A figure of comparable standingin Britain is James Herbert, and his novel The Rats (1977) can, atone level, be read as a tale about inner city decay. 15 Such a popularform is not without examples of intellectual complexity. CliveBarkers work, for example, takes its place within a horror traditionbut also explores a set of complex postmodern ideas about thenature of

14

See A. Robert Lee on Southern Gothic in The Handbook to Gothic Literature, ed. Marie Mulvey-Roberts (Basingstoke:Macmillan, 1998), pp. 217-20, where he makes this link with Poe. 15 James Herbert, The Rats (London: New English Library, 1974).

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representation. His collection of tales, Books of Blood,includes Son of Celluloid (1988), which centers on an escapedprisoner, Barberio, who is suffering from cancer. He is mortallywounded in a shoot-out with the police, and hides in a cinemabehind the screen, where he dies of his wounds; however, the cancertakes on a life of its own as it searches for new victims, and does soby taking on the form of various film stars such as John Wayne,Marilyn Monroe, Peter Lorre, and Greta Garbo (thus suggestingthat an apparently pristine Hollywood golden age was not as pureas it seemed).
16

Barkers novel

Weaveworld(1988) also, as the titleimplies, looks at how worlds are artistically constructed through thebringing together of various forms of representation.17Barkers writings mentioned here can be regarded as exercises inpostmodernism. Whilst modernism focused on the fragmentednature of subjectivity (and so exploited the Gothic fascination withfractured selves), postmodernism represents a skepticism about thegrand narratives (such as religion, for example) which once providedsocial and moral norms. In a contemporary, postmodern ageone can no longer believe in coherent, universal, claims to truthwhich, so the argument goes, are replaced by moral relativism.Such a world is defined by the absence of absolute meaning, and inliterature this becomes manifested through stylistic play in whichnarrative forms are run together to create synthetic worlds whichforeground issues about representation above any moral or metaphysicalconcerns. In other words, postmodernism seems to bepeculiarly suited to the Gothic because it questions the notion thatone inhabits a coherent or otherwise abstractly rational world. Aswe shall see, some authors who have written in the Gothic mode andappear to incorporate elements of the postmodern, such as AngelaCarter and Toni Morrison, are in fact skeptical about postmodernismor certain aspects of it. Carter and Morrison are not horrorwriters in the way that King and Herbert are.Their self-conscious literary qualities distance them from such writers, even thoughtheir texts discussed here do refer back to an earlier Gothic tradition.To what extent there exists a postmodern Gothic is the issueaddressed in this section. One writer whose work has beendescribed as a forerunner to postmodernism, Shirley Jackson, helpsus to see how the issues of the older Gothic are reworked within newmodels of horror that appear to anticipate the postmodern.
16 17

Clive Barker, Son of Celluloid, in Clive Barkers Books ofBlood, vol. 3 (London: Sphere, 1988), pp. 135. Clive Barker, Weaveworld(Glasgow: Collins, 1988). SeeAndrew Smith, Worlds That Creep Up on You: PostmodernIllusions in the Work of Clive Barker, in Creepers: BritishHorror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century, ed. Clive Bloom(London: Pluto, 1993), pp. 17686

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CHAPTER III DRACULA: BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNISM 3.1 Dracula, myth and history In spite of all that we know about Vlad Dracula, he remains somewhat of an enigma. Not only there are still some unsolved mysteries about his life and death, but there has been much speculation about the exact nature of the connection between VladDracul and the Count Dracula of Bram Stokers classic novel.Most assume that Bram Stoker, inspired by accounts he had read or heard about the fifteenth-century Wallachian ruler, made a conscious decision to base the character of Count Dracula on the historical personage VladDracul.But this assumption is speculative.We know for certain only that Stoker borrowed the name Dracula and a few scraps of information about Wallachian history from William Willkinsons An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia(1820). First of all we must say that the name Dracula has a lot to do with the Roumanian word drac(derived from the Latin draco) which can mean both dragon and devil. Vlad adopted it as sobriquet derived from the Order of the Dragon which had been bestowed upon his father, VladDracul, in 1431. We know that Romanian historians have traditionally resisted referring to Vlad as Dracula for two reasons: it was used in late fifteenth century German documents, and of course it reinforces the connection to Stokers vampire Count. Dracula is the story of the Transylvanian Count Dracula, a vampirewho terrorizes a group of friends, led by Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, inhis search for victims in London. The novel uses letters, journal entries,newspaper articles, and other invented sources to structure itsnarrative; this technique heightens the sense of mystery surroundingthe story's events.Apart from its impact as a horror novel and comparisons to MaryShelley's Frankenstein, Dracula surprised literary critics, who hadgenerally disregarded Stoker's abilities as an author. Like his earlynovels, his more recent works, including The Walter's Mou'(1895) andThe Shoulder of Shasta (1895), were not very successful.The Dracula character was based on Prince Vlad V of Wallachia, a fifteenth-century Romanian tyrant better known as Vlad the Impaler.

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An infamous torturer and murderer, Vlad was known as "Dracula," becausehis father belonged to a society called the Order Draconis. Asthis made his father a "dragon," it made Vlad "Dracula," which means"son of the dragon." Stoker learned details of Vlad's life from a Hungarianprofessor named Arminius Vambery, who greatly influenced thenovel's central ideas.Dracula was also influenced by Carmilla, a horror novel by Irishauthor Sheridan Le Fanu. Although Stoker was known for writingvivid descriptions of landscapes he had seen, the writer had never visitedRomania, and only imagined the Transylvania in which Draculalived. Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) now seems to be everywhere, but itdid not come out of nowhere. It is one of the nineteenth century's mostlasting and influential examples of the Gothic novel, a gesture thatblends two distinct strains of fiction. One is the old-fashioned romance,with its fondness for the supernatural and the miraculous; theother is the realistic novel, with its painstaking detail of actual peopleliving ordinary lives. The Gothic novel created in the eighteenth century,only to flower in the nineteenthbrings together the fantastic elementsof the romance with the plausible psychology of real people.Bridget M. Marshall's "Stoker's Dracula and the Vampire's LiteraryHistory," the first contribution in the "Contexts" section of this volume, sets Stoker's most famous achievement in the context of that developing literary genre every conceivable variety: man-eating dragons, mermaids, zombies,gargoyles, demons. And vampires have been a recurring feature inmany of the world's belief systems: the Un-Dead, feasting on the bloodof the living, have shown up in ancient Persia, Greece, Babylon, Israel,and India, as well as in virtually every country in medieval Europe. Beforethe nineteenth century, though, despite their popularity in orallytransmitted folktales, vampires made few appearances in serious literature.The early English novelthe form developed in the first half of theeighteenth century, most famously by Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson,and Henry Fieldingdeclared its allegiance to the realistic depictionof everyday life. As fair as sophisticated eighteenth-century readerswere concerned, the supernatural was fit only for the nursery. Seriousgrown-ups did not bother with stories of giants, dragons, and devils.But the supernatural could not be excluded from serious fiction forever.On Christmas Day, 1764, Horace Walpole published a small bookcalled The Castle of Otranto, a tale of haunted castles, hidden dungeons maidens in distress, and animated skeletons. He called his work"an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and themodem. In the former all was imagination and improbability; in thelatter,
20

nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copiedwith success." This attempt "to reconcile the two kinds" of fictionresulted in what we now call the Gothic novel, a hybrid of the old-fashionedsupernatural tale and the new realistic novel.For several decades, Walpole's Castle of Otranto had the Gothicgenre almost entirely to itself In the 1790s, though, British culture rediscoveredthe attraction of the fantastic. That decade gave us dozensof examples of the Gothic, including Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries ofUdolpho(1794) and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796). From ourvantage point in the twenty-first century, though, the eighteenth century'sGothic experiments seem to be little more than warm-ups for theVictorian masterpieces that were to follow. Some of the nineteenthcentury's monsters are still with us: Robert Louis Stevenson's TheStrange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), Oscar Wilde's ThePicture of Dorian Gray (1891), H. G. Wells'sThe Invisible Man(1897), as well as less obviously monstrous figures like Heathcliff inEmily Bronte's Wuthering Heights (1847).Count Dracula, though, stands at the head of the list of nineteenth centurycreatures of the night, with only a single rival. And, as it happens,the two figures, English literature's most famous monstrosities,were conceived at the same time, at what may be the most famous singlegathering in English literary history. In the "wet, ungenial summer"summer of 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his lover Mary WollstonecraftGodwin, and her sister Claire Clairmont visited Lord Byron and hisfriend John Polidori in Switzerland, in the Villa Diodati on the banks ofLake Geneva. After passing some hours with a book of German horrortales, Mary (now Mary Shelley) recalled in 1831, "'We will each writea ghost story,' said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to"Percy, Mary, Byron, and Polidori all set to work on their own terrifyingNarratives.Only one ofthose tales is familiar today: Mary Shelley's depictionof the man of science who creates a living being and pays for his presumptionhas been famous since it was published in 1818 as Frankenstein:Or, The Modern Prometheus. But another member of the circleof friends, John Polidori, did complete his story; "The Vampire" publishedin 1819, became the first work of vampire fiction in Englishprose. Polidori's tale, with its portrait of the horrific Lord Ruthven, hasfew fans today, but it made the figure of the vampire available to laterauthors. Victorian fiction made much of Polidori's vampire, including,most famously, the anonymous Varney the Vampire: Or, The Feast ofBlood in 1847 and Sheridan Le Fanu'sCarmillain 1872. Marshall'ssurvey of the Gothic genre places Stoker's Dracula squarely in this tradition.Marshall looks forward as well as backward from 1897,
21

glancing atthe long tradition of film versions of Stoker's storyfor most of us, ofcourse, the conduit through which the literary creation became a culturalarchetype. The vampire and Frankenstein's monster were conceivedtogether on the banks of Lake Geneva; it is fitting, then, thatthey were even more famously brought together in 1931, the year inwhich Universal Studios produced a pair of movies that have taught usto imagine our most notorious monsters. Camille-Yvette Welsch's "A Look at the Critical Reception of Dracula"addresses not the creative legacy of Dracula but the novel's criticalfate after its publication in 1897, including both the immediate reactionsto it in the press and its longer life as a cultural archetype. Thehistory of Dracula criticism, as noted in the headnote to this volume, iscomparatively short; only in the 1960s and 1970s did literary critics beginpaying serious attention to it. But in the last few decades it has beenthe subject of intense analysis. Welsch therefore helpingly explains theway critics of various schoolspsychoanalysis. New Historicism,postcolonial studieshas tried to make sense of Stoker's achievement.Monsters, it goes without saying, are unsettling. A pair of essays Allan Johnson's "Modernity and Anxiety in Bram Stoker's Dracula examine some of the many ways in which monsters can stand in forother things that we find unsettling. As Bolton puts it, "Dracula is importantless for any timeless literary merit that it may possess than forthe glimpse it offers a modem reader into the anxieties that preoccupiedthe Victorian mind." (He adds that, since we share many of thesame anxieties today, "the book may reveal as much about our ownculture as it does that of the Victorians.") "Every age," Bolton observes,"gets the monster it deserves," and the late Victorians deservedCount Dracula. Dracula is threatening because he is foreign, becausehe questions Victorian bromides about progress and science, but aboveall because of his perverse sexuality. Bolton calls the vampire figure "adistinctly Victorian monster in part because it represents the dangerousreturn of repressed sexual desire," and Count Dracula in particular "anembodiment of the repressed sexuality of the Victorian era." The novelis all about "vanquishing abnormal sexual desire, restoring a 'normal'order." Repression, vanquishingthese were much in the air, asBolton recalls, at the end of the nineteenth century when SigmundFreud was formulating his theories of the subconscious. Dracula'stransmutation from literature to myth makes it appropriate that manycritics have approached it with the same tools they would use to decodeother mythologies. In "Recreating the World: The Sacred and the Profanein Bram Stoker's Dracula,'' Beth E. McDonald uses the insightsof one of the twentieth century's most
22

influential theorists of religion,MirceaEliade (1907-86), to "illuminate the mythic patterns in the textand demonstrat[e] why it is important that Dracula be destroyed."McDonald reads the novel as a series of struggles between two varietiesof "sacred" power. On one hand is the "numinous" vampirethe"wholly other," the uncanny figure with his connections to the world ofspirits and devils; on the other is the strictly secular worldview of theEnglish characters"their own established secular power, which they perceive as sacred." For McDonald, Dracula is about the attempts topreserve Victorian English identity as it was threatened with the numinous."Perpetuating the sacredness of their own cultural world view,when that view is threatened," she writes, the characters "seek to fortifyits crumbling foundations through the reestablishment of its secularsacredness, rather than through an actual reunion with the divine."And yet it is impossible for them to forsake the numinous altogether; inresorting to the host and the crucifix, they must "engage in mythic ritualsin order to establish their relationship with the divine." Only by destroyingthe vampire can they avoid a confrontation with "their ownapathetic faith in God."Eliade's brand of criticism, though it once flourished in literaturedepartments, has in recent years fallen on hard times, but the attentionto archetypes and universal myths of the sacred has not disappeared entirely.Mythology today, though, is more often explored through thelens of the sciences, especially evolutionary psychology and sociobiology.What once were universal archetypes mysteriously rooted inour psyches have since been reconsidered as the product of evolutionaryforces. In "The New Naturalism: Primal Screams in AbrahamStoker's Dracula," Carrol L. Fry and Carla Edwards apply some of the insights of these developing sciences to the novel. Their account ofDracula explores the "primordial power ofthe story" and emphasizesthe way it plays on our deepest fears. The authors argue that "Stoker'snovel seems founded on four narratives: fear ofthe predator, territoriality,male bonding and cooperation, and protection ofthe female." Allof these impulses can be explained in terms of evolutionary advantages.We fear the dark and monsters under the bed, the socio-biologiststeach us, because such fears served our ancestors well: those whofeared monsters were less likely to be eaten by them, and they thereforelived to pass their genes on to us. It is no surprise that questions of evolutionaryfitness were prominent in the 1890s; this was the era, as Fryand Edwards point out, when "Darwin's findings caused spiritual indigestion"in the Victorian public. Dracula, late Victorian contexts were not only technological andpersonal; they were also political. In
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''Dracula: Righting Old Wrongsand Displacing New Fears," Jimmie E. Cain, Jr., relates Stoker's novelto anti-Russian sentiment, which was running high in Britain in the1890s, in the wake of the Crimean War of the 1850s. "Russia and herSlavic client states in the Balkans," Cain observes, "posed political, social,military, economic, and racial threats to Victorian middle classstability," and Dracula figures England's enemy as an Eastern Europeanwith a Slavic ancestry.

3.2 The sacredand the profane in BramStoker'sDracula

In her book Dracula: Between Tradition and Modernism (1998),Carol A. Senfcharacterizes Victorian citizens as looking "Janus-like . . .in two opposing directions". While many people looked forward tothe new century and to further progress, Senf writes that others looked"nostalgically to the past, a period that they believed [my italics] containeda clear synthesis of moral, religious, artistic, political, and socialthought". For many individuals, faith became a secular matter ofproduction, consumption, and profit margins; and nature, once an exampleof God's rational design for the world, seemed more of an arena"red in tooth and claw" (Tennyson, "In Memoriam" 176) in which humanscompeted with each other for the Darwinian glory of survival ofthe fittest. As many late-nineteenth-century individuals came to understandhow so many other species had lived and died out during the pastmillennia, they also had to accept their own mortality as a species; thisrealization called into question traditional religious promises of redemptionthrough Christ, leaving many individuals in a condition ofspiritual poverty characterized by doubt. However, the fact that menwere divided over whether the alleged progress of the present time orthe simpler ways of the past were best for society both morally and religiouslyseems to show that Victorian Britons were struggling to findsome spiritual quality in their lives.During the last decades of the nineteenth century, some Victorianssought reunion with divine mystery in study of the occult. Many turnedto metaphysical organizations like the Hermetic Order of the GoldenDawn, a secret society formed by William Wynn Westcott, a RosicrucianFreemason. Their mandate was to establish
24

connection betweenthe divine within man and the divine within the cosmos through thepractice of magic, ritual, and the occult sciences. 18 The Society for Psychical Research, whose search for a numinous connection with the divinetook place on a scientific level with the study of occult phenomenain nineteenth-century culture, also evolved during this period.Created in 1882 by a group of scholars fi-om Cambridge University,London, and other nearby cities, the Society's purpose was to discover"whether some of the strange and unacceptable eventstelepathy, clairvoyance, foreknowledgehad any basis in fact" (SidgwickForewordv). As nearly as possible a systematic and scientific method ofcollection, authentication, and analysis was followed; and in 1886 theinformation gathered by Edmund Gumey, Frank Podmore, and FredericW. H. Myers was published in two volumes as Phantasms of the Living.While Stoker would not have been aware of the numinous as such,since Rudolf Otto had not yet coined the word when Stoker was livingand writing, his family history seems to indicate that he would have understoodthe feeling. Charlotte Stoker, Bram Stoker's Irish mother, regaledthe sickly child with tales of ghosts and of the Irish banshee,whose keening cry, it was said, "presaged imminent death" (Roth 2) inthe family. With this oral tradition as part of his early upbringing,Stoker would have been well versed in the qualities of non-rational experience.However, as an adult Stoker also would have been aware ofthe mystical side of pagan religious belief through his acquaintancewith several people who practiced the art of magic.In her biography of Stoker, Barbara Belford notes the unsubstantiatedrumor that Stoker was a member of the Hermetic Order of theGolden Dawn. However, she also notes that he did have many fi-iendswho belonged to the organization and might have leaded the secrets ofthe society fi-om them, despite their pledge of silence on the subject.Further evidence of Stoker's awareness of the effect of an experienceof the numinous might be found in his personal reaction to HenryIrving, whose reading of Thomas Hood's "The Dream of EugeneAram" Stoker described in terms reminiscent of the hypnotic power ofthe Ancient Mariner, saying "so great was the magnetism of his genius,so profound was the sense of his dominancy that I sat spellbound". At the end of the reading, Stoker reportedly collapsed inapparent hysterics in the face of Irving's spellbinding power; and it isthis power to hypnotize that becomes an integral part ofthe vampire'sarsenal of supernatural weapons in

18

Known members of The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn include William Butler Yeats, Algernon Blackwood, and Aleister Crowley, among others.

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Stoker's novel.Published in 1897, Dracula reflects the attitudes and ideas of the late Victorian period in regard to several important issues of the day,including the importance of professional and social advancement, thesignificance of their own culture in the minds of nineteenth-centuryBritons, and the concern over what the influx of foreign influencesmight do to that culture and to the competition for place in society. Juxtaposedagainst these attitudes is the sense that in Dracula faith hastaken second place to the professional advancement of many of thecharacters. As the men and women ofthe novel are confronted by thenuminousness of the vampire, the search for salvation becomes moreimportant; however, they approach their spiritual quest more as a community,or even a committee, than as individuals. Perpetuating thesacredness of their own cultural world view, when that view is threatened,they seek to fortify its humbling foundations through the reestablishmentof its secular sacredness, rather than through an actual reunionwith the divine on a higher level of spiritual awakening thatmight be signified by a change in their world view. Transforming the epistolary style of earlier, realistic novels, such asPamela (1740-42) and Clarissa (1747-48) by Samuel Richardson,Stoker's work transcribes a Gothic nightmare whose multiple versionsmight raise doubt as to the reliability of any ofthe versions, despite hisuse of realism. However, when Jonathan Harker finally realizes whatthe women of castle Dracula and Dracula himself represent, he feelsthe weight ofthe truth ofthe events that have transpired. Later, also,when Mina Harker compiles all of the characters' individual storiesinto one, acceptance ofthe situation as real must follow. Once the variousevents are put in perspective, the fears of the individuals becomethe fears of society. If society is to be protected, the individuals mustform a community and use their combined powers to destroy Dracula and his women. Their more secular search and destroy mission againstthe vampires becomes a spiritual journey that requires them to call ontheir faith, imagining themselves to be crusaders upholding the sacrednessof British society.Instead of forming a relationship with God and remaking the worldin a more cosmic context on an individual level, as the Ancient Marinerhas done, the group in Dracula works in a more communal, almost corporate,fashion, forming a small committee of dedicated men (and onewoman) banded together for the good of the larger British community.Although Dracula is, like the Mariner, a figure of the numinous condemnedto wander eternally, unlike the Mariner he is not allowed to tellhis story and can take no active part in the healing of society. InStoker's novel, the human characters are in
26

power, despite Dracula'sdivine status, because they control the narrative. While the Mariner isconstrained to serve the divine by becoming a vehicle for redirectionwith it, the humans in Dracula make a decision to serve themselvesand their larger society as protectors of the already established culturalsystem. For them, Dracula is not a vehicle of revelation or transformation,but a threat to the conservative, established order of British Victoriansociety that must be destroyed. Although the group calls on God intimes of danger, by denying the sacred, though negative, aspects of thevampire, they deny the divine a place in their secularized world; andwhile the Mariner answers the question of the human place in the worldby positing the unity of all things under God, the humans who destroyDracula answer the same question by choosing to believe in the righteousnessof their own established secular power, which they perceiveas sacred. In Dracula, the chaos of profane space is represented in severalways; however, writing in Our Ladies of Darkness: Feminine Demonologyin Male Gothic Fiction, Joseph Andriano argues that the"circle is . . . the most pervasive archetypal symbol in Dracula" (113)with the sacred circles formed by the heroes of the novel in oppositionto the unholy circles of the vampires represented by the "whirlpools,vortices, and circles within circles" (114). As Harker beginshis journey, he describes Transylvania in terms of watery chaos, asthe "center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool" (Stoker 2) of superstition;and later Dracula characterizes it as "the whirlpool of Europeanraces" (28). In Emily Gerard's The Land Beyond the Forest,which Stoker read while researching Transylvania, her discussionof Romanian superstition includes a reference to the whirlpool asa place to be avoided because it is considered the residence of awater spirit, "the water-man who lies in wait for human victims"(200).19 Further representations ofthe circle also show up repeatedly duringHarker's confusing journey from Borgo Pass to Dracula's castle. A"living ring of terror" (Stoker 13) surrounds him as the wolves gatherabout the coach and menace him while the driver is off searching forthe blue flames he and Harker have seen flickering in the darkness.Later in the novel, the chaos ofthe vampire is juxtaposed against theorder ofthe sacred as Professor Van Helsing and his band of men work to save Mina. When Mina has been partially turned to a vampire byDracula and wears the circular imprint of the Sacred Wafer on her foreheadas a sign of her profaneness. Professor Van Helsing places a"Holy
19

In Vampires: Lord Byron to Count Dracula, Christopher Frayling reproduces sections of Stoker's research notes from Emily Gerard's book. Stoker's working and research notes for Dracula are housed at the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia.

27

circle" (369) of the blessed wafers about Mina to protect herfrom the female vampires. Furthermore, at the climax of the novel, it isa "ring of men" (376), Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris, ArthurHolmwood, and Dr. John Seward, who do their sacred duty by riddingthe world of Dracula.

3.3 Vampirism, Russia, and the Slavs

Preparing to write Dracula, Stoker consulted a number of relativelycontemporaneous documents about the geography, peoples, andcustoms of Eastern Europe.20Excerpts from most of these sources areavailable in Clive Leatherdale'sThe Origins of Dracula: The Backgroundto Bram Stokers Gothic Masterpiece. Among the books "writtenby British official servantssoldiers, administrators, or their wives"(97) that Stoker consulted, William Wilkinson's An Account of thePrincipalities of Wallachia and Moldavia: with various Political ObservationsRelating to Them of 1820 gave Stoker the material for Dracula'sracial and ethnic identity, an identity with pronounced Russianand Slavic antecedents. Thus Stoker learned that in their inception, the Wallachians,' and by associationthe Moldavians, the predecessors of the modem Romanians,descended from Slavic peoples immigrating to the region from Russiaand sharing close blood relations with the Bulgarians.Dracula's genealogy reveals marked vestiges of Wilkinson's text.But more importantly, Dracula's heritage suggests clear Russian andSlavic antecedents.Stoker situates the castle "in the extreme east [...] just on the bordersof three states, Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina" (D 3) nearthe conjunction of the Prut and Siret rivers (D 417). This specific locationsuggests further allusions to Russia. First, it describes a disputedarea at the border of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Bessarabia,"* a territorythat Russia won from Turkey in 1812. After the Crimean War, Englandand France forced Russia to return the tract to Turkey. Russia subsequentlyrecovered the territory from Turkey after the war of 1878 onlyto lose it later that same year when the Congress of Berlina greatpower
20

In the interview with Jane Stoddard, Stoker singles out two of his most useful sources: "I learned a good deal from E. Gerard's 'Essays on Rumanian Superstitions,' which first appeared in The Nineteenth Century, and were afterwards published in a couple of volumes. I also learned something from Mr. Badn-Gould's 'Were-Wolves.

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conference dominated by England, France, and Germanydemanded that Russia cede the land to newly independent Romania(M. S. Anderson). Thus Castle Dracula rests not only on a site of manyancient "battles" (D 38) but also on a source of prolonged Russo-Turkish and Anglo-Russian hostility. As late as 1895, Vambery notesthat by mid-century from "the Isker in Siberia to the banks of the Prut,all became Russian," a position of strength that now allows Russia tofocus her ambitions south, toward India (4-5).Moreover, at the location of Castle Dracula a significant event in the career of Peter the Great occurred. Pares describes him as "a barbarianin his habits, direct and practical in his insistence on knowing everythingthat was to be learned, and with the kind of genius which consistsin extraordinary quickness of thought" (198). What Peter most wantedto learn was the military and bureaucratic practices of the West. So in 1697 he began a "journey of education to Europe" (Pares 197), takingin the secrets of the Swedish fortress at Riga and working incognito inthe shipyards of Amsterdam and London so as to master modem shipbuildingtheory, all the while trying to hire the best experts in the militaryand practical sciences each country could provide (Pares 198).Equipped with this new knowledge, he proceeded upon his return toprosecute successful wars of expansion on his neighbors to the north,west, and south. Fortunately for Europe, Peter was not always victorious,and one of his most famous defeats came at the hands of the Turks atthe Prut River, in the vicinity of Castle Dracula, in 1710 (Pares 206).This defeat at the Prut is but one parallel between Dracula and Peter,however. Dracula's reasons for sojourning to England are also verysimilar to Peter's, but much more sinister. According to JenniferWicke Draculas journeys were as to go to "London to modernize the terms of hisconquest, to master the new imperial forms and to learn how to supplementhis considerable personal powers by the most contemporary understandingof the metropolis" (487). However, Dracula visits Englandnot, as had Peter, to export innovation and expertise, but as an invaderwho plans to conquer and stay. Stoker, who at age twenty-five was elected auditor of the historical societyat Trinity (Ludlam 24), was much too thoughtful a student of historyto have been unaware of Peter's exploits in England, exploits thatresonate in his evil Eastern count.Since the 1970s, scholars have contended that in his research forDracula, Stoker happened upon Vlad Dracula, a Wallachian prince whose cruelty in battle earned him the sobriquet Vlad the Impaler, andmodeled Dracula after him. Although this

29

assertion is now a matter ofscholarly debate,21 Stoker may well have drawn inspiration from anotherinfamous impaler. In his first major study ofthe novel, Dracula:The Novel and the Legend, A Study of Bram Stoker's Gothic Masterpiece,Clive Leatherdale suggests that Stoker could have drawn a connectionbetween the historical Vlad Dracula and Ivan the Terrible. Accordingto Leatherdale after reading ofVlad Dracula's penchant forimpaling his victims, both domestic and foreign, Stoker added stakingto the list of measures for killing vampires. Stoker's itierited antipathy to Russia combined with the links hevery possibly discovered between Eastern vampire myths and Russiacould account for the prominent allusions to Russia and to Slavic vampirefolklore that the author placed in or considered for what somescholars believe to be the original opening chapter of Dracula. 22 Althougheventually excised from the novel, the chapter was publishedseparately by his wife after his death under the title "Dracula's Guest."The chapter contains close parallels with the vampire legends amongthe Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, and Serbians enumerated byOinas.

21

Elizabeth Miller, echoing Clive Leatherdale, categorically refutes the assumption,advanced most famously by McNally and Florescu, that VladTepes (aka Vlad theImpaler) was Stoker's model for Count Dracula. In Dracula: Sense and Nonsense, shewrites, "To state this as fact is irresponsible. All we know for certain is that Stoker borrowedthe name 'Dracula' and a few scraps of miscellaneous information about Wallachianhistory from William Wilkinson's An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia(1820). Out of such a mole-hill, mountains have emerged" (180). 22 Clive Leatherdale in the introduction to his definitive annotated edition of thenovel, Dracula Unearthed, contends that of "all the popular misconceptions surrounding Draeula, none seems more entrenched as the idea that 'Dracula's Guest' is the excisedopening chapter" (14). He rests his argument on the differences in the styles, narration,and characterization of Jonathan Harker between the two works. Leatherdalebelieves that "Dracula's Guest" was originally intended to be one in a set of threescenes taking place in Munich during Harker's trip east. Its excision from the finalpublished novel means that it "fell under the author's or editor's axe," most likely thelater, for "whole chunks of the early part of the novel were removed at a very late stage,after the manuscript had been submitted to the London publishers" (15).

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3.4 Phantasmagoria: The modern vampire

Today the vampire is no longer the feared being that he oncewas. In the hundred years or so post-Dracula the vampires transformationhas been like a star turning into a supernova; after thegradual evolution of the vampire being over thousands of yearsthis final chapter in the evolution has progressed rapidly. Thefear created by the vampire has dissipated, and the vampire himselfhas become a parody of what he once was. The reason forthis is quite simple: we no longer fear the vampire. It was societysfear of the vampire that allowed him to exist through theages. But how did the fear subside after so long? And what doesthis mean for the vampire in the twenty-first century?Although Dracula was the catalyst for the modern vampiremyth it was almost uniquely the theatre, cinema and televisionexploitation of the being that ultimately caused the shift towardsthe modern conception of the vampire. Whereas in the superstitionsand myths of the Middle Ages or within folklore it was thelack of knowledge that fuelled the existence of the vampire, thetechnological advancement and massmarket productions ofmodernity eradicated the unknown and transformed the vampireinto a household product. The vampire is used to promote everythingfrom breakfast cereals (Count Chockula) to childrenstelevision (Mona the Vampire), to tourism, and is the subjectof endless books, films and television programs. In fact, suchis the current widespread appeal of the vampire that the majority of people today has not only heard of the vampire, but could alsodescribe how he looks. And ninety-nine times out of a hundredyou can bet that the description will include a cape, fangs, batsand a thirst for blood. Why is it, then, that this imagery has beenadopted out of all the ones discussed? And how many people,although instantly recognizing Count Dracula, have actually readthe book or are at least familiar with the story? The answer tothese questions must be sought in the vampires progressionwithin cinema, a development that undoubtedly ended our fear,but that also created an entirely new vampire in the twenty-firstcentury.Dracula was a gruesome literary product that reflected lateVictorian England; London had witnessed one of the mostsadistic serial killings in its history through the infamous Jackthe Ripper murders. Although it is suggested that the incidentwas a media hoax, the report from the Central News Agency ofa woman being attacked by a well-dressed man who seized herby the throat again throws up parallels with

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Stokers creation.23At the time some even went as far as to suggest thatit is so impossible to account . . . for these revolting actsof blood that the mind turns as it were instinctively tosome theory of occult force, and the myths of the DarkAges rise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires,bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated throughout the course of centuriestake form, and seize hold of the excited fancy. 24The result of Dracula was a renewed scholarly and publicinterest in the vampire. Important works on the subject, suchas Dudley Wrights The Book of Vampires (1924) and MontagueSummerss The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (1928) and The Vampire inEurope (1929), sought to document the vampires history in variouscultures and provided first-hand examples of the superstition It was also during the 1920s that Dracula was adapted for the bigscreen, albeit somewhat illegally, in the Expressionist Germanfilmmaker F. W. MurnausNosferatu: eineSymphonie des Grauens(asymphony of horror) in 1922 starring Max Schreck: Nosferatu!Doesnt this name sound like the very midnight call of Death?Speak it not aloud, or lifes pictures will turn to pale shadows, andnightmares will rise up to feed on your blood, explains the openingcaption. Although the film is considered an adaptation fromStokers novel, the producers did not obtain copyright permissionand although the names of the characters and places have beenaltered it clearly follows Draculas plot. As a result, the courtsordered all copies of Nosferatuto be destroyed, although severalhad already been distributed, allowing the film to not only survivebut also to become a vampire classic and collectors item.There are, however, some quite striking alterations inNosferatufrom the original story, most notably the appearance ofthe vampire Count Orlok. The first time he appears in vampireform he is extremely sinister, has a huge form that fills the doorwayand his features are quite rat-like, with protruding teeth,pointed ears and long, pointed fingers; here the vampire is moreakin to the undead of folklore than the vampire of literature, inmany ways mirroring the image evident in Varney. It is really theonly example where the traditional vampire was preferred tothe Ruthven formula version, and may be one of the factorswhy the film proved so popular. Count Orlok is portrayed in thesame way as Varney (lonely, desperate and condemned), andthe viewer is encouraged to empathize with him an idea laterutilized by Anne Rice in her Vampire Chronicles. Nosferatualsoadded its own iconography that remains
23

Delegation en Perse, a French journal of antiquities.MontagueSummers in The Vampire: His Kith and Kin (London, 1928) adds that [the bowl is] amongst the illustrations of prehistoric utensils, p. 226. 24 Timothy Darvill, Prehistoric Britain (London, 1987).

32

associated withinvampire films: the dark and foreboding shadows, the prolongedmovements of the vampire, the reaction shots that occur whena moment of horror occurs.Although more like the folkloric vampire in appearance,Orlok does have some classic modern traits such as waking at night, sleeping in a coffin and biting his victims neck. Withregards the plot, it does follow that of Dracula in general withHutter (Harker) travelling to Transylvania, Land of thePhantoms, to finalize the sale of some property to Count Orlok(Dracula), but in Wisborg, Germany rather than London.Hutters employer, Knock (who takes the place of both Harkersemployer Hawkins and Draculas minion, Renfield) suggeststhat he knows Orlok is a Nosferatu when he tells Hutter that bytravelling to Transylvania he could make money, although itmay cost him a bit of pain and a little blood.And so Orlok buys the house, attacks Hutter and travels toWisborg onboard the Demeter, where he kills the crew. At this pointVan Helsing makes a brief appearance giving a lecture on thevampire plant, the Venus Fly Trap, but this is all we see of him.Missing too are the characters of Dr Seward, Lord Godalming,Quincey Morris and Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker becomesEllen Hutter. Another difference is the use of rats and the arrivalof the plague alongside the vampire, a clear link with folkloricexamples; rats themselves are known to have introduced thebubonic plague or Black Death in the fourteenth century. Theending of Nosferatuis also markedly different from Dracula inthat Ellen (Mina) discovers she must entice the vampire into sunlightto destroy him and so sacrifices her to do this. Orlok isdistracted whilst drinking Ellens blood and misses the cockcrow,thus exploding into dust with the break of dawn, ending theplague. This is similar to the popular myth that not only is sunlightlethal to vampires, but that the plague and death broughtabout by them can only be stopped by destroying the vampire.Two years later, in 1924, a theatre version of Dracula wasreleased in the form of Hamilton Deane and John BalderstonsDracula: The Vampire Play and, although an extremely spare versionof Dracula (set in only two locations: Dr Sewards parlourand Carfax Abbey), the play was a great success and was instrumentalin persuading Universal Studios to create Dracula on the big screen. It was this version, written by Tod Browning andreleased in 1931, and starring the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosias Count Dracula that transformed the image of the vampireforever. With the stage version, Deane realized that the operacloak would not only have a great dramatic effect but could beused to cover hidden trap-doors as Dracula disappeared underthe stage. Lugosi decided to carry the prop over into the screenversion and
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the cape has now become as iconic for the vampireas fanged teeth or the stake that pierces the heart. It is worth noting, however, that Lugosi was not Browningsfirst choice, with popular actor Lon Chaney the preferred candidate.Sadly Chaney succumbed to throat cancer in 1930 andLugosi, the star of the Deane / Balderston stage show, eventuallypersuaded his way into the role (perhaps due to him agreeinga considerably lower salary than might be expected). The production was also hit with a reduced budget due to studio financedifficulties, which in effect meant not only were a number ofscenes cut from the final film, but that there was less money forsalaries, a factor that may have determined Lugosis inclusion.One of the most memorable and widely recognized features ofthe film is Lugosis rolling East European speech pattern; I amDrrra-cul-aaa, which many attribute to the fact that he did notspeak English and therefore had learned his lines phonetically.Lugosis portrayal of Dracula is a chilling performance; his accent,facial expressions, threatening yet sophisticated demeanorand grandiose attire are still widely associated with vampirestoday. The horror he brought to the role was such that on theopening night many members of the audience fainted, a factorthat undoubtedly had the producers sweating. They need nothave worried, for Dracula proved an instant success and pavedthe way for further horror films by Universal includingFrankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and Draculas Daughter(1936), the sequel to Dracula. Perhaps it is fitting that whenLugosi died in 1956 he was buried in one of his Dracula capes. JorgWaltje suggests that [Lugosis] portrayal of Dracula as aforeign predator in the guise of aristocratic sophistication becamethe role model for many vampires to come [within the cinema],25but although this may appear the case, this role model hadalready been created in the Ruthven formula within literature,and only the vampire image created by Murnau disrupted thistrend, albeit rather briefly. This image was further enhanced by the number of Dracula-related films made by the BritishHammer Horror corporation from 195874 26 , starring ChristopherLee and Peter Cushing. The films were often praised for theirvisual style, although were rarely taken seriously: Altogether thisis a horrific film and sometimes a crude film, but by no means anunimpressive piece of melodramatic storytelling wrote one criticof Dracula in The Times27. However, many critics of Dracula found it disgusting and vulgar,which is strange given the
25 26

See Miles Russell, Monuments of the British Neolithic (Stroud, 2000). See Timothy Taylor, The Buried Soul (London, 2002). 27 Russell, Monuments.

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success and popularity of the noveland the stage adaptation, and the consequent cinematic versionsof Nosferatuand Universals Dracula. The media deemedit a singularly repulsive piece of nonsense that was made insuch sickening bad taste,6 and the Daily Telegraph sarcasticallycommented that a new certificate rating be created for it; s forsadistic or d for disgusting.The making of Dracula was not without its restrictions; thecensoring board demanded that there should be no scenesdepicting the vampires sinking their teeth into the victimsneck and that the act of staking the vampire should be depictedout of shot. Also, they demanded that women should beproperly clad and there be no scenes of a sexual nature. Sex was something they believed there was no room for in a horror film.After watching a preliminary black and white rough cut of thefilm, the Board made further requests to remove the scenesshowing the staking of Lucy, Draculas seduction of Mina andthe closing destruction scene of Dracula.Hammers response was to remind them that the x certificatesuggested for Dracula would automatically prevent anyone underthe age of sixteen from seeing the film and to argue that theaudience expected a certain amount of horror and gore from thefilm. They also suggested that the proposed cuts would removethe excitement and shocks that the audience was expecting.Hammers Dracula therefore relied heavily on the sexual sideof vampirism for the first time and was the first film to show avampire baring its teeth. Changes from the novel and previous efforts includedJonathan Harker being portrayed as Van Helsings assistantand posing as a librarian at Draculas ancestral home. Keyscenes, such as Draculas journey on the Demeter to Whitby, wereleft out. It is mentioned in Hammers Dracula that vampires cannotchange themselves into bats, wolves or other such creatures,a notion that is used heavily in other productions and is contraryto popular opinion. This is contradicted in Hammers nextvampire film, Brides of Dracula, however.Hammers Dracula is generally considered a worthy effort,given its budget, and, with the full use of the Technicolor process and star performances by Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing,it remains one of the classic vampire horror films in cinema.The success was not to last, though, and eventually Lee becamesomewhat disillusioned by the direction in which the filmswere going. He quit after The Satanic Rites of Dracula (1973), afterwhich only one more Dracula film was released by Hammer.Once again the vampire genre in general was becoming staleand audiences began to lose interest, but the vampire resurrecteditself and was thrown back into the spotlight in the form of Anne Rices novel Interview with the Vampire (1976), the first
35

partof her now best-selling Vampire Chronicles. In this we hear thestory of the vampires Louis and Lestat and how they become avampire family when they turn Claudia, a young girl who losesher mother to the plague, into a child-vampire. The story ismarkedly different from any other vampire narrative that camebefore it and is a deeply dark, disturbing and soulsearchingmasterpiece that is second only to Dracula in dragging the vampireinto the modern world. What it created was a personality forthe vampire, a kind of desperate being that was continuallystruggling to understand its cursed existence; a theme that wasonly once hinted at before in Varney.The 1970s revival also saw a remake of Nosferatuby theGerman filmmaker Werner Herzog entitled Nosferatu: EinPhan -tom der Nacht(Nosferatu: The Vampyrein English) starring Klaus Kinski as Count Orlok. The film was a fitting tribute to the original and made its own mark on the Dracula theme. As thecopyright on Stokers novel had by then expired, Herzog wasable to use the original character names, but he stayed true toMurnaus film in most other respects. Notable additions sawmodern vampire imagery exploited, perhaps due to a morewidespread understanding of vampires (courtesy of theUniversal and Hammer offerings no doubt), such as the use ofthe bat and the cross, and rather than Orloks (Draculas) vampirestatus being surmised for much of the film, his vampireguise is apparent from the start. These common associations arefurther depicted when Orlok is staked by Van Helsing (he waskilled by sunlight in the original), and when it is suggested thatChristian symbolism is all-powerful against the vampire: thevampiricHarker is unable to leave the circle of Communionwafers and Orlok shuns the cross after leaving the Demeter. Thefilm is not quite sure of its logic on this point, though, as it alsoshows Orlok entering a church and Harker ripping off the crosshe wears around his neck. The main point that can be drawnfrom the re-make is that although it is in effect a re-release ofa world-famous classic and should therefore be guaran teed adegree of success, Herzog still deems it necessary to includecommon contemporary vampire themes and mythology in orderto satisfy his audience, and this suggests that by the 1970s societyhad a firm idea of what a vampire should be, something thatthe literary, theatrical and cinematic versions of Dracula mustbe credited with.Due to this preconceived ideology, future vampire workshad to find that extra twist in order to stimulate their audiences.It is likely that everyone who watches a modern vampire filmwill be familiar with the vampire and perhaps also the vampirefilm genre as a whole. Writers of modern vampire films use theiraudiences existing experience and knowledge, but
36

must alsostrive to provide something different and new, or else interest in the genre would quickly wane. Audiences of the earlier filmswould have been a lot less familiar not only with the vampire asan icon, but with the cinematic horror genre in general, and thisin itself creates an increased capability for inducing fear. And asmentioned, it was Anne Rices offering that was the catalyst forthe next stage in the vampires journey into the present.Interview with the Vampire without doubt changed the courseof the vampires evolution and, as Dracula did with the historicaland modern forms, bridged the gap between the early-modernvampire and the present form. After re-inventing itself in the literatureof pioneering authors such as Anne Rice and StephenKing, the vampire was born again in the world of the cinema,most notably in Joel Schumachers The Lost Boys, which wasreleased in 1987. It made over us$32 million and won the SaturnAward for Best Horror Film. The film tells the story of a teen ager,Michael, who, on moving to Santa Clara with his mother andyounger brother, falls in with a gang of vampire punks, oozing attitudeand clad in leather and riding motorcycles. From early onin the film there is the suggestion that Star, the only girl of thegroup, is a form of psychic vampire (discussed in detail shortly)and entrances Michael into falling in love with her. There areyet further examples of psychic vampirism in the mind gamesplayed on Michael by the vampire gang leader, who psychologicallyturns his rice into maggots and his noodles into worms.This is good evidence that the cinematic vampire genre wasattempting to develop the common vampire myth, and this isfurther supported in the creation of vampires through the consumptionof vampiric blood in The Lost Boys, as opposed to themore traditional view of biting the neck evident in earlier filmssuch as Nosferatuand Dracula. Once Michael drinks the vampireblood offered to him by the gang, he starts to turn vampire himself.Here we witness many of the common traits associated withvampires such as long fingernails, bad breath, aversion to sunlightand lack of reflection as well as the strange ability of being able to float in mid-air, something that is never really explainedto the viewer.With The Lost Boys we see the common theme of darkness,indeed, much of the film is set at night. However, up until thegangs attack on the beach, vampirism is assumed by the audiencerather than shown. There are many vampire associations,such as the garlic, the use of mirrors, the vampire comics andthe bat kite, but no actual vampires per se; rather than beingexplicit, it utilizes the audiences preconceptions. The attackand the gangs vampire forms leaves no doubt on the matter,and the scene is full of blood drinking and violence and isaccompanied by eerie church
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organ music to heighten thetheme of horror; so now you know what we are, youll nevergrow old and youll never die . . . but you must feed! David, theleader of the gang, informs Michael.The Lost Boys is in many ways a strange vampire film, in thatit continually downplays the vampire theme, almost as if it feelsit is exploiting its audiences fascination with the subject and isslightly embarrassed by the topic. To compensate for this itadds an element of humor and goofiness. A vampire sneers atthe Frog brothers (vampire hunters) that garlic dont work,boys!, to which the brothers reply, Yeah, well try holy water,death breath!. A scene involving the vampire child (whichcould have been deemed bad taste) is made light-hearted withthe line Its the attack of Eddie Munster!. These snippets ofhumor allow the film to be viewed as a satire and, while still ahorror film, The Lost Boys is a film in which the horror is diluted.This is no more apparent than when the head vampire is beingstaked and destroyed (a scene deemed too risqu for cinemajust thirty years earlier in Hammers Dracula); The Lost Boysreduces the repulsiveness of this by showing the Frog brothersdonning blacked out swimming goggles to protect them fromthe splattering blood, thus bringing an element of humor tothe scene.The horror of vampirism is present alongside the tongue in-cheek humor of it, as has become common in modern dealingswith the vampire, despite attempts by Interview with theVampire or Bram Stokers Dracula to maintain the fear element.The theme music to The Lost Boys is the Doors hit WhenYoure Strange and includes the line When youre strange, no one remembers your name, a phrase that quite poignantly sumsup the ailing vampire as the 1980s progressed into the 90s. Thesuccess of vampire literature, which introduced us to the thinkingmans vampire, and films such as The Lost Boys, which treatedthe vampire almost as a figure of ridicule or amusement,could not disguise the fact that the traditional vampire wasbeginning to lose its relevance in the technological modernworld. The answer was, rather unsurprisingly, to resurrectDracula once more.

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3.5 Science and faith in Dracula

"In obedience to the law as it then stood, he was buried in the centerof a quadrivium, or conflux of four roads (in this case four streets),with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives forever theuproar of unresting London!" 28 No, not Dracula (1897), but the closinglines ofa much earlier nineteenth-century work, Thomas De Quincey'sbleakly ironic essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts"(1854). De Quincey is describing how in 1812 the London populacedealt with the body of one of his prize exhibits, a particularly grisly serialkiller who had escaped the gallows by hanging himself in his cell atdead of night. Yet it is difficult for us to read this gleefully chilling passagetoday without thinking of Bram Stoker's classic vampire novel.The quirky Christian symbolism, the mandatory staking down of themonster to keep it from roaming abroad, the sense of a busily self-absorbedLondon unaware of its proximity to a murderous presencethat haunts its most densely populated byways: together these featuresseem virtually to define a basic iconography for the vampire Gothic asit achieved canonical status in Dracula.In the half-century that separated Stoker from De Quincey the punitiveassumptions behind the old suicide laws may have become littlemore than a barbaric memory, but the subsequent attempts to view suicidemedically as mental illness, redefining it as an instance of "moralinsanity," offered no easily civilizing consolation. Thus what unitesthese two otherwise historically distinct writers is their menacing useof the buried past to interrogate the present. In Stoker's work the twinpoles of past and present make their appearance through a strangelyparadoxical and crucially modem trope that of the spectator forced to confront a horror whose very existence seems to compromise any possibilityof securing the line between the modem and the pre-modern.This troubling of modernity's own historical self-consciousness is perhapsespecially marked in Dracula, which comes replete with the latestin late-Victorian consumer goods, many of which fiction as a meansof recording the structure of appearances and hence permit a precisememorializing ofthe past: cameras, phonographs, and portable typewriters. "It is nineteenth century up-todate with a vengeance," as oneof Stoker's characters so aptly puts it {Dracula, 49).At the same

28

Thomas De Quincey, "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts", in D. Masson, ed..The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, 14 vols. (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1890), 13:124.

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time, in Dracula the past extends across space intothose zones of arrested development which modernity has not fullyreached, where the trains do not yet run on schedule or where the railwaylines have come to an abrupt halt. Though no farther from homethan a rural Hampstead churchyard, it can be profoundly "humanizing"to gaze upon the lights of London and to hear "the muffled roar thatmarks the life of a great city," despite the knowledge that the capital issimultaneously a site of depravity and danger. For theroutes of communication out ofthe metropolis may also bring terrifyinglyarchaic elements back into it, as in that eerie moment when CountDracula is seen hailing a hansom cab near Hyde Park or when, in TheJewel of Seven Stars (1903), the presence of an ancient Egyptianmummy in a house in Notting Hill begins to have strange effects uponeveryone who comes into contact with it. Such frightful encounters areimagined as tests of character in Stoker's supernatural romances, momentsof truth that will purge the self of its secret weaknesses, aspertaininga person's intrinsic worth in the face of a plethora of social andpsychic complications and providing a center of stability in a dangerousworld of flux. Hall Caine, the novelist and dedicatee of Dracula,once defended the genre of romance as a type of writing that shows"what brave things human nature is capable of at its best." But inStoker's work, the protagonists are forced to confront their worst, beforethey can really know what their best might be.If tests of character are endemic to modem adventure narratives, Stoker's Gothic novels mark a growing sense of difficulty with the fictionof "character" itself, a term that was intimately linked to late-Victorian views of modernity. At its most straightforward, "character"designated the selfreliant private individual whose ability to take controlofhis (quintessentially his) own destiny was the cynosure of socialand national progress. This was the brand of individualism espousedby moralists like Samuel Smiles, for whom the display of characterwas proof that one was living a truly dutiful life. At the same time, inthe language of politics, character indicated the rational citizen, the individualproperty owner of classical liberalism who, by Gladstone's era,was increasingly expected to rise above his own narrow self-interest.What united these different emphases was the belief that character wasessentially a function of human willpower, a disciplined effort calledinto play by the idiosyncrasies of the self and the vagaries of one's situation. Dracula is a novel that is very much concernedwith modernity's strengths and weaknesses, and, understandably,some of Stoker's contemporaries were uneasy with this aspect ofthe book. In the Spectator, for example, one anonymous critic
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dismissedDracula''29modem-day trappings, suggesting that the novelwould have been "all the more effective if Stoker had chosen an earlierperiod" as his setting, particularly given the essentially "medievalmethods" by which the vampire is laid to rest. And, of course, the reviewerhas a point, corroborated by no less an opinion than that of JonathanHarker, the first character to fall into Count Dracula's clutches.Harker innocently worries that "the old centuries had, and have, powersof their own which mere 'modernity' cannot kill" (Dracula, 49).The mixture of curiosity and fear recounted by Harker at the opening ofthe novel as he makes his journey to Count Dracula's castle in order tofinalize the mysterious aristocrat's purchase of property in London is avery modem young Englishman's sense of shock at slipping into apre-modern world. It is a world that is all too vivid. On his coach ridethrough Transylvania-his first trip abroadHarker is fascinated by the sight at "every station" of "groups of people, sometimes crowds...in all sorts of attire." "Strangest" of all are the Slovaks, "with their bigcowboy hats, great baggy dirty-white trousers, white linen shirts, andenormous heavy leather belts, nearly a foot wide, all studded over withbrass nails On the stage they would be set down at once as some oldOriental band of brigands". Harker's nervousness is intensifiedby the "hysterical" reactions that the news of his final destinationprovokes among the local people.This powerful historical pull back into the past becomes even strongerupon Harker's arrival at his final destination. Thomas De Quinceyonce observed that the gift of total recall "must be the next bad thing tobeing a vampire," but it is clear that in Dracula total recall is partlywhat makes the Count who or what he is.30 Once ensconced at the castle,the newly accredited solicitor hears the Count expatiate with immensepride on his family lineage, tracing it back to Attila the Hun andconceiving time as an endless series of battles and invasions. Harker,records that, the Count "spoke as if he had been present at them all," hislyrical nostalgia barely disguising the pure immediacy of the good olddays. In a sense, then, Harker must unclear what he alreadyknows, since Dracula is essentially a tale in which ProtestantEnglishmen and Englishwomen with a healthy respect for facts cometo see that, far from being "idolatrous," "such things" as holy wafers,missals, wild garlic, and the rosary are a vitally necessary means ofself-defensedespite their medieval provenance. At first glance, thebook could be described as a kind of conversion narrative, a return toancient beliefs
29 30

Spectator, July 31, 1897, pp. 150-51 Thomas De Quincey, quoted in J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 64.

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motivated by an occult, and truly ocular, dread. Fromthis perspective, Dracula can be read as a modem novel that is largelydominated by the stories and specters of the past.Nevertheless, Stoker's novel does insist upon a very different temporality,a continuous present that is constituted jointly through the procedures of law and science. Jonathan Harker's detailed notes fromhis Transylvanian journey reflect both his own recently completed legaltraining and the ethnographic travelogues of the period. If, inpurely literary terms, Dracula draws heavily upon the legal narrativesassociated with Wilkie Collins, whose book The Moonstone (1868)imagined the novel as a collection of depositions. Stoker's work alsoinvokes more practical nonfictional sources like his own exhaustivecompilation of The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland(1879). Written while the author was still employed as a civil servant inDublin, this handbook was designed to enhance bureaucratic effectivenessthroughout "the whole British Empire." In an ambitious attemptto rationalize the mass of "facts and theories resulting from the operationsof the last twenty-seven years," Stoker itemized the formal requirementsin preparing evidence for use in court proceedings in wordsthat echo those of Dracula's prologue. Thus, "each information shouldcontain a full and simple statement of all material facts to which thewitness can depose" and "should be taken as nearly as possible in thewitness's own words, and in the first person. 31 Empirically, therefore,Stoker's novel pretends to the status of "simple fact," assembling animpressive variety of sources, predominantly journal or diary entries,but also including newspaper articles, letters, fragments from a ship'slog book, and an alienist's case notes .But in Dracula "simple facts" are never simple. They are a constantproblem for the various professionals who make facts their business.The same opening chapters which depend upon a lawyer's observationsalso reveal to us the law's fallibilities. After encountering apack of wolves on his coach ride, Harker confesses that it "is onlywhen a man feels himself face to face with such horrors that he can understandtheir true import. Yet, in truth, it takes himsome time to recognize the gravity of his situation. Mesmerized by thevampire's business acumen and reassured by the presence of the LawList among the other English reference books in the castle's library,Harker is unprepared for the Count's nocturnal activities, which in elude spreading false evidence by putting on the solicitor's own clothesas a disguise."' Harker's visit to Transylvania has placed him beyondany legal redress, turning him into "a veritable prisoner, but withoutthat protection
31

Bram Stoker, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (Dublin: John Falconer, 1879), pp. v-vi and 27.

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of the law which is even a criminal's right." . The behavioral sciences have long been a fertile seed ground forliterary-critical approaches. In 1910 Ernest Jones wrote "Hamlet andOedipus," an article published in Journal of the American PsychologicalAssociation that applied Sigmund Freud's writings to literary analysis,reasoning that if characters in works of literature come alive asreal people, they can be psychoanalyzed. Generations of critics havecontinued exploring literature through Freudian concepts. Carl Jung'sideas have also attracted a great deal of attention among literary critics.Maude Bodkin's Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, published in 1934, isan early approach, to be followed by many others. Today, variations onboth approaches are legion.Sociobiology and the parallel field of psychobiology (for brevity'ssake, we use the term sociobiology here to describe both), newer developmentsin behavioral studies, also offer the potential to become apowerful hermeneutic methodology in the study of literature and film.Closely related to Jung's description of the collective unconscious,sociobiology suggests that a "whisper within" leads us to programmedresponses that transcend reason and the conscious mind. Sociobiologydiffers from Jung's findings in presupposing that the whisper emanatesnot from symbolic intuition but from millions of years of adaptive behaviorand inhabits the most basic levelthe human gene. Like Freudianand Jungian concepts, sociobiology offers a promising approach toliterary analysis. In the absence ofa better name, we will call it primaltraitscriticism.Sociobiology focuses on visceral-level responses rather than cerebral;thus, an application of concepts from this field to literature seemsmost fruitful for works with powerful primal and mythic appeals.Many works could be fruitfully analyzed with a primal-traits methodology,from ancient epics to the latest slasher movie. But the tale of terror, a type of literature long recognized to evoke strong response at theunconscious level, offers an excellent example for analysis throughprimal-traits criticism. Therefore, we will apply this approach to a signaturework ofthe horror genre: Abraham Stoker's novel Dracula. Thenovel obviously exerts a powerful pull on the popular imagination.Dracula has not been out of print since its publication and has inspireda plethora of vampire novels and films. This appeal, and indeed that ofmany others of the horror genre, rests on fictional conventions thathave long endured for a very good reason. They whisper messages toreaders at the most primordial level: instinctual responses. Stoker'snovel seems founded on four narratives: fear ofthe predator, territoriality,male bonding and cooperation, and protection of the female.These narratives in the novel, especially the last three, interact in
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creatingits power over succeeding generations of readers by evoking a response,sociobiologists might say, emanating from our genetic heritage.With his Origin of Species, published in 1859, Charles Darwin createda revolution in the way humanity thinks of itself. The great religionsofthe west, Judaism and Christianity as well as Islam, posit theassumption that God gave humanity a special place in the creation,"dominion over the fish ofthe sea, and over the fowl ofthe air, and overevery living thing that moved upon the earth" (Genesis 1:28). Darwin,on the other hand, describes humanity as one of millions of species engagedin what he called the great "Struggle for Life," the battle to adaptto an environment that is the true arbiter of survival. Individual membersof the species that have some trait privileged by the environmentare fittest to survive. They breed to pass on this adaptive trait and causethe species to change physically through natural selection (see Originof Species, iii, 55).Darwin's findings caused spiritual indigestion of various sorts, suggesting,as they do, not only that humankind evolved from "a hairyquadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal inits habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World, but that it evolved from this earlier form through the iron laws ofevolution: adaptation to changes in the environment through naturalselection and survival of the fittest. Christianity remained in denialthrough the nineteenth century, and conservative Christian sects clingdoggedly to the "Genesis" version of creation even today.Socio-biologists' interests lie in the study of animal behavior withapplication to human behavior, and ultimately, in fact, to the study ofhuman nature itself Chapter Nine of Carl Degler'sIn Search of HumanNature offers an excellent review of the literature of sociobiology.However, E. O. Wilson's Sociobiology: The New Synthesis createdmuch of the controversy surrounding this field in 1975 and hasremained the standard text.In this work, Wilson applies the successful studies of animal and insectpopulations to human behavior. He responded to criticism of hisfindings with On Human Nature, published three years later. In bothbooks, he begins with the Darwinian assumption that species evolvethrough adaptation to the environment by individuals, who, as the fittest,survive and pass on their genetic heritage. But Wilson expands the discussion fi-om the purely physical adaptation described by Darwin toadaptive social behavior. This key issue inspired the controversy overhis works. The environment, he posits, rewards not only species' physicalcharacteristics but also those group behaviors most beneficial tosurvival. Cultural practices and behavior, in other words, may becomesurvival traits if they are adaptive. Then,
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over milletmia, these behaviorsbecome part of the species' heritage at the instinctual level. Wilson'sinitial assumption about this approach stated in On Human Natureseems especially interesting for the study of the arts and for aprimal-traits critical methodology. Wilson posits that not only our beliefs and the actions based on thesebeliefs but our responses to real or fictional situations emanate fromwhat David Barash calls "the whispers within," subtle voices from tensof thousands of years of human evolution and located in genetic matter.Of human behavior, Wilson writes, "Before the curtain is drawn andthe play unfolds, the stage has already been partly set and much of thescript written. This sociobiological approach is fascinatingly similar to Jung's conceptsand parallels them in many respects. Calvin Hall and VemonNordby describe Jung's collective unconscious in terms similar to thefindings of Wilson and others on instinct: "What is learned through experienceby previous generations can be inherited by future generations,and does not need to be learned by them anew. Habits become instincts". Jung, however, followed Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's viewson evolution: that is, species may learn from experience and build thisexperience into their genetic heritage in a relatively short period oftime. Darwin denied Lamarck's view in favor of natural selection andsurvival of the fittest, a process that demanded far longer for the evolutionof a species. Sociobiology and psychobiology assume Darwin'sapproach. But Wilson and Jung agree on a basic principle: capacitiesfor response are built into our nature at the most primordial levelthe"germ plasma" to Jung and the human gene to Wilson.The two approaches immediately differ in terms of application, however.Jung developed his theory of archetypes, symbols that representthe collective experience of the species as related to myth. Socio-biologistsfocus on patterns of animal and human behavior: aggression,territoriality, kin relationships and sexual rituals, for instance-all qualities that gave some adaptive advantage for the species.One fundamentally Darwinian assumption underlies socio-biologists'thinking. They find that the drive to procreate the species subtly directsOne ofthe lessons to be drawn from Harker's misperceptions isthe need for a thorough scrutiny of the experience of our senses if the same facts are to be known. This gives scientific investigation a specialplace within the novel,nearly all other patterns of behavior. In Origin of Species, Darwin wrote,"In looking at Nature, it is most necessary to keep the foregoing considerations always in mind-never to forget that every single organic beingmay be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers".The "tangled bank" passage in Origin, in which the author describes amass of plants, with each
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individual trying to choke out others so that itand its progeny can survive, states the case for the procreation drive quite clearly. Wilson puts the matter only a little differently:"The brain exists because it promotes the survival and multiplication ofthe genes that direct its assembly. The human mind is a device for survivaland reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques". A primal-traits critical methodology would argue that "prepared learning"leads readers to respond to certain stories when we finally encounterthem, even though the response may not have pre-existed the encounter.The continuing popularity of Dracula bespeaks the potency of thenovel's hold on the popular imagination. Stage productions toured Englandand the United States soon after the book was published, attractinglarge audiences everywhere. Nosferatu, the first film adaptation,appeared in 1921, early in the history of cinema. Because F. W. Murnau,the German director, had failed to get permission to use Stoker'sstory, the film was soon withdrawn from circulation. But TodBrowning's Universal Studio's adaptation in 1930, starring Bela Lugosi, opened a floodgate of Dracula films that has extended to the new millennium.The primordial power of the story seems beyond question.Surely fear of the predator who would consume us is one of the mostprimal of responses. Texts that portray the predator-prey relationshipstir the sublime shiver of vicarious fear, and Dracula is precisely such apredator. Wilson mentions serpent aversion as a type of prepared learning.Not all people, he asserts, fear snakes, but they can learn such fearmore easily than affection or indifference for them. Assuming humanity'scommon ancestors were, as Darwin postulated, "arboreal in theirhabits," such a predisposition to a predator that hunted our "hairyquadruped" forebears in the trees seems a likely inheritance. Predatorstories abound in the literature of all nations, from the Big Bad Wolf tothe werewolf to the popular slasher films, in which a different type ofpredator (interestingly enough, often somehow dehumanized by maskor disguise) stalks teenagers. But the vampire tale has the greatest currencyin the twentieth century of any such story line. The vampire is,after all, as the Count says of the wolves outside his castle, one of the"children of the night," a being well suited to trigger visceral fear ofpredators that hunted our primordial ancestors in the dark.Stoker establishes the vampire's role as a hunter-predator early inthe film. In one of the most oft-quoted scenes in the novel (especially in Freudian analyses), Jonathan Harker strays outside his room in Dracula'scastle, against the Count's advice, and he awakes to find himselfthe prey ofthe Count's wives. Dracula enters the room "as lapped in astorm of fury" to save him, waving the wives away.
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When they complain,he tosses them a bag, from which there emanates "a gasp and alow wail, as from a half smothered child". Clearly, the Count hasbeen a-hunting and shares his prey with the wives. But they too arepredators. Freudian analyses ofthe novel stress the sexual suggestivenessof the wives, whose "wanton" and "voluptuous" beauty reeks ofsexuality, as they bend over a supine Harker and place their lips on hisneck, while he waits "in a languorous ecstasy . . . with beating heart". But the "kisses" that they anticipate are his blood. Harker hasstrayed into the dark, and predators have found him.The predator/prey plot thickens when Dracula stalks Lucy Westenrasuccessfully. He lures her outside her home to drink her blood, andmanages to gain entry later to prey on her again, ultimately causing herto become a vampire. Then she too is a hunter and preys upon childrenin London as "the bloomer lady." The hunt then shifts to Mina Harker,who falls victim to the predator when he gains access to her throughRenfield. The vampires' drinking of their victims' blood must resonateat the primal and instinctual level as the action of a hunting predatorbecause, as Renfield so correctly quotes from the Bible (Deuteronomy12:23), "the blood is the life!".A more sophisticated level of conflict arises when a band of sturdyheroes defends its territory against this predator, who is an "other," anoutsider and an invader. Wilson defines territory as "one ofthe variantsof aggressive behavior" and states that a "territory" is "an area occupiedmore or less exclusively either directly by overt defense or indirectlythrough advertisement". In The

TerritorialImperative, Robert Ardrey establishes territoriality as one of the most common instinctual responses across species boundaries.

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CONCLUSIONS

We have seen that the vampire has taken on many formsthroughout history before finally adopting that which we knowso well in the present. The modern vampire sleeps in his coffinthroughout the daylight hours, waking come sunset to stalk hisprey and drink its blood. And yet was his path from ancientdemon to modern-day fanged fiend inevitable, given all theexamples discussed? Was his evolutionary transformation aconstant progression through history and culture?One must here determine whether there is a definite linkbetween each form; for example, was it inevitable that thespirit form of the vampires early history would one day metamorphoseinto a more solid being (in this case, the revenant)?If it is decided that no single common attribute of vampires,such as blood-drinking, shape-shifting or rising from the grave,is necessary, then it is reasonable to suggest that either a) thereis another conclusive ever-present factor or b) there is in factno link and therefore no evolutionary pattern. It is the authorsopinion that there can be seen to be no defining link in allexamples of vampirism except for the aspect of fear, and it isthis point that the fundamental elements of any doctrine mustbe based upon. The progression that we witness in arriving at the modernmyth, then, is the spirit or demon form evident in the ancientworld followed by a cross-over in the prehistoric period whereshifting funerary beliefs depict clear associations between thephysical dead and the spiritual dead. This leads in turn to theidea of the revenant, or undead being, that could be trapped onearth after death (caused by many factors, often area-specific)with a progressive route apparent from this point up to the moderncreation: through the Medieval period, the epidemics of theeighteenth century, the Gothic literature of the nineteenth centuryand finally the fixed, modern form we are familiar with.Many people regard literary examples as the basis of themodern vampire myth, and although this is a fair assumption inmany respects, these themselves were influenced and basedupon much earlier foundations, as we have seen. The earlyreports of the eighteenth-century epidemics were seen as thefirst documentary evidence of vampires, and yet medieval writerssuch as Walter Map or William of Newburgh (see Appendix)provided documentary examples some 500600 years previously.In essence, it all depends on how exactly one defines theterm vampire. Many works on vampires tend to concentrate their analysison the latter phase of vampirism, the
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period from the early eighteen century to the end of the nineteenth, culminating inDracula and responses and critiques of this. They do, however,acknowledge the earlier history of vampirism but do not usually dwell on this for too long. Although the word vampire did notenter the English language until 1736 (and so in effect prior tothis point there were no vampires per se), it is impossible todeny that early demons and revenants are precursors of thevampire. Thus it is equally important to consider these indetail in any vampire history.Aside from the popular imagery and the elements that areassociated through the varying cultures or periods we must alsoconsider what the vampire represents. If the modern vampireimage is the culmination of a historical evolution based on fear(and fascination with death), then once this fear began to subsidewhat we are left with is fascination with the being andwith death, and this is evident in many cases of vampire crime.It is this factor that Ernest Jones pointed out above; that therelationship between the living and the dead, or life and death,can be maintained so long as desire or fear, or both, are present. Ifone replaces the other, such is apparent in the modern examples,would it then be expected that the representation of a vampiremay also change? This goes back to the suggestion earlier thatthe vampire is for some the ultimate villain (or Stuart Jeffrieship, sexy, immortal teen). However, there is something remark -ably more fundamental in societys interest with vampires, andthis is our desire for ever-lasting life. The lure of the vampire isoften that he cannot die (so long as he feeds on the life-force ofblood, energy, etc.) and societys attempt to emulate this is oftenapparent. We have noted the many examples of using blood asa rejuvenator throughout history, and in the present this act isstill evident in the extreme cases of vampires torture or murder,where the killer consumes the victims blood in order to obtaintheir life. It would be difficult to surmise that interest in thevampires immortality could only begin to form after societyovercame its fear of the being, as in order to seek to emulate thevampire a person must first hold the belief that not only is thevampire powerful and dominant but that in being these things he must instill fear in others. It is, perhaps, a kind of catch-22:the vampire needs the fear in order to remain dominant butwhile the fear remains we cannot expect to empathize with himand thus become like him.The quest for immortality is by no means a phenomenonexclusive to vampirism and examples are far-reaching withinsociety. Examples include the miraculous healings of Jesus and,ultimately, his resurrection from death, the quest for the HolyGrail, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, tales of revitalizing springs,and examples from
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mythology such as Achilles or the Gorgonsfrom Greek Mythology and the mythical Phoenix who wouldrise from the flames of its own death to live again. Interestingly,there are often ways in which an immortal being can die. In theHighlander films this could be done by cutting off an immortalshead, and with vampires there are numerous ways such as thestake through the heart, or sunlight, and this tends to suggestthat although we are deeply interested in the dream of immortalityit is tantalizingly beyond our grasp. There is no typical vampire. Perhaps a true vampire wouldbe an amalgamation of all the forms we have seen worldwide as well as reflecting attributes of all the historical examples. Inessence, the vampire reflects an everchanging being that bearsrelevance to the culture it exists in. The modern vampire is abeing born of demons, burned as a heretic and reviled as a fiend;the Devils own creation. What the future may hold for him isuncertain, yet it is undeniable that the image immortalized byDracula, encapsulating over six thousand years of history, cannever be undone. Stoker's personal library, but it is possible to form a generalidea of its scope and subject matter, as distinct from the bookswhich he studied in reference libraries for background informationfor his own books. The discovery of his research notes for Dracula(now in the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia) threw a flood oflight on the meticulous detail of his research, and Clive Leatherdale'sstudy The Origins of Dracula (1987) lists over thirty such titles and examinesin detail seventeen of them. These do not appear, however, to bebooks from Stoker's personal library.However, Harry Ludlam's book A Biography of Dracula: the LifeStory of Bram Stoker (1962), mentions that in 1910, two years beforeStoker's death, Bram and his wife Florence moved from their house inDurham Place, Chelsea, to a smaller house in nearby St. George's Square,and discarded hundreds of books collected over many years. These includedauthors like Kipling, Mark Twain, and Stevenson, volumes ofEgyptology, a history of the Ku Klux Klan, and sets of ordnance maps forthe British Isles.In the year following Stoker's death, the rest of his library wassold up, probably by his widow Florence, and the printed catalogue ofSotheby, Wilkinson, and Hodge in 1913 listed the remainder of the library.This was disposed of on Monday, 7th July, and ran to 317 items.The cataloguemakes fascinating reading, and indicates the wide range of Stoker'sinterests and associations.Travel and history were represented by books on Egypt, Asia,Canada, and America, which had survived the sale in 1910. Predictably, a number of other books were concerned with the theatre and theatrical history,including biographical studies of Stoker's idol Henry Irving. In
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additionto the works of Shakespeare and other items of Shakespeare interest, there were books on the Bacon cipher controversy. Books of poetry includedsuch authors as Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Eugene Field, JamesWhitcombe Riley, and Walt Whitman. Field and Riley were personalfriends of Stoker, and Riley ("the Hoosier Poet") was also a favorite of Irving. Stoker had been captivated by Whitman's poems from the time thathe first read Leaves of Grass when a student at Trinity College, Dublin.Stoker later became a great friend of that poet.The Sotheby sale included seventeen Whitman items; mostly associationcopies inscribed "Bram Stoker, from his friend, the Author." Item136 was a unique collection of fragments of Whitman's writings in hisown hand on scraps of paper, mounted in an album. There was also an interesting autographed letter from Stoker describing how, with EdwarDowden, he had defended the poet from violent criticism in a discussion atthe Fortnightly Club, Dublin. Whitman wrote: "My physique is entirelyshattered, doubtless permanently from paralysis and other ailments. But Iam up &dresss& get out every day a little live here quite lonesomebut hearty & good spirits. Write to me again."There were few works of fiction in the catalogue, but presumablythese would have been sold off in 1910 when Stoker moved house. Remaining fiction books included the works of Stevenson, tales by H.Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein,E.T.W. Hoffman's Weird Tales, and a volume of stories by J. Sheridan LeFanu. Other books of folklore and occult interest included W. Silkes,British Goblins, Elliott O'Donnell, Byways of Ghost-Land, D.MacRitchie, Fians, Fairies and Picts, J.G. Campbell, Superstitions andWitchcraft and Second Sight in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland,and a volume of Anancy Stories of the West Indies by Pamela ColmanSmith, with an autographed letter from her. There were also copies of themagazine The Green Sheafedited by Smith, with her hand-colored illustrations. A large part of the collection was taken up by over sixty presentationcopies of books to Stoker and his wife. Notable individuals whoinscribed their books to Stoker included S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain), BretHarte, Winston Churchill, W.B. Yeats, and Hall Caine. Caine was a specialfriend of Stoker, and the presentation copy of Caine's My Story (1908)reads "To my dear Bram, to whom this book owes much." It will berecalled that in turn, Stoker had dedicated Dracula to "my dear friend,Hommy-Beg" (a nickname for Caine).One unique item in the catalogue was No. 143, a Death Mask andHands, closed, of President Abraham Lincoln. These were cast by thesculptor Augustus St. Audens in 1886 from original molds made byLeonard Wells Volk before Lincoln went to Washington
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for his first presidency.The molds were found by Volk's son twenty-five years later, andtwenty men subscribed to purchase the molds and present them to theAmerican nation. Each of the twenty received bronze casts of the face andhands with his name in each case, cast in bronze, and two of the men wereHenry Irving and Bram Stoker. Item 144 was the original manuscript ofStoker's lecture on Lincoln.Browsing through the Sotheby catalogue one discovers a great varietyof subjects which must have had special interest for Stoker, such as: H.Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals (1891), Robert Benson,Sketches of Corsica (1825), J. Baker, Imperial Guide, with PicturesquePlans of the Great Post Roads (1802), W. Morton (translator), Collection ofProverbs, Bengali and Sanscrit(1832), J.C. Lavater, Essays onPhysiognomy (5 vols., 1789), A. Balfour, Second, Third and Fourth Reportsof the Wellcome Research Laboratories at the Gordon Memorial College,Khartoum (3 vols., 190611), J.W. Powell, First and Second Annual Reportsof the Bureau of Ethnology, 1880-1, Nic. de Febure, Compleat Body ofChymistry(1670), The Lightning Sea-Column or Sea-Mirrour, discoveringall the Coasts and Islands of Europe, Africa, America and Asia (1689), SirW. Hamilton, Collection of Vases, mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship, discoveredin Sepulchres in the Kingdoms of the two Sicilies(3 vols.,1791-95), Statutes made and established from the time of Kyng Henry thethird, unto the firstyear of the reign of Henry the VIII (1543), Wm.Rastall, Collection of Statutes now in force from Magna Charta, until thereign of Queen Elizabeth (1588), Geoffrey Chaucer, Works (1721), M.Sadeler, VestigidellaAntichita di Roma (n.d.), Wm. Stirling, SomeApostles of Physiology, Account of their Lives and Labors(privately printed,1902), F. Harvey, List of Portraits, Views, Autograph Letters, andDocuments contained in an Illustrated Copy of the Princess MarieLiechtenstein's History of Holland House (only 25 copies printed, n.d.).Of special interest was an album of Original Pencil Sketches byWilliam Fitzgerald, who was one of the illustrators for Stoker's bookUnder the Sunset (1882). Fitzgerald was responsible for the picture of thegloomy castle of the King of Death, which seems like a precursor ofStoker's Castle Dracula. In the last few years, a reckless mythology alleges that BramStoker died of syphilis. There are two sources for this story. The mainsource is Daniel Parson, great-nephew of Stoker, in his book The ManWho Wrote Dracula (London, 1975; New York, 1976). A secondarysource is a family tradition of Senator David Norris, a connection of theDublin city branch of the Stoker family.Parson's claim rests on the interpretation of the Death Certificateof Stoker, which reads:
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"LocomotorsAtaxy 6 months, Granular ContractedKidney, Exhaustion." Parson asserts that 'LocomotorsAtaxy' is aeuphemism for TabesDorsalisor General Paralysis of the Insane, the finalstages of syphilis.Senator Norris was under the impression that Stoker "died of thepox," but this belief may derive from the Death Certificate as well as gossipamongst ancestors scandalized by the sensationalism of Stoker's novel Dracula. Dublin gossip is often hurtful and scandalous, as well as witty.Since Bram Stoker died in London, the Death Certificate could well havebeen the source of this gossip.Parson's surprisingly emphatic interpretation of the DeathCertificate of his relative rests on the common medical identification

of"LocomotorAtaxy" with the final stage of syphilis, but this is by no meansinvariable. I consulted a medical lecturer at the Wellcome Institute for theHistory of Medicine, who stated as follows: "As for 'locomotorataxy', itusually, (one can never put it more strongly than that) refers to the consequencesof cerebellum disease due to tertiary syphilis. There is therefore adefinite indication that syphilis was related to cause of death, but one cannotbe certain."This cautious statement confirms that there is no definite justificationfor assuming that syphilis killed Stoker, and the circumstances surroundinghis later years would seem to militate against the possibility.TabesDorsalisis usually the culmination of several years of physical deteriorationand brain damage, expressed in disturbances of vision, palsy, and disorientationin walking, accompanied by mental degeneration.In the case of Stoker, he did not exhibit the mental deteriorationthat might be characteristic of General Paralysis of the Insane, since hewas mentally alert and active with literary work almost up to his death in1912. The fact that he had some muscular disorientation described as"locomotorataxy" is hardly surprising, since nine years earlier he had suffereda severe stroke after the death of his friend and idol Henry Irving. AsStoker's biographer Harry Ludlam wrote: "He suffered a stroke which laidhim unconscious for twenty-four hours, and which began a painful illnessthat dragged on for weeks, robbing his robust frame of much of its boundlessvitality and leaving his eyesight impaired." In the following years,however, Stoker revised his novel The Man, corrected proofs of his biographyof Irving, and published five other books: Lady

Athlyne(1908),Snowbound (1908), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), Famous Impostors(1910), The Lair of the White Worm (1911), as well as a number of articlesin periodicals. None of this is characteristic of a man in the finalstages of syphilis! Some physical difficulties were inevitable. He hadstruggled for years with overwork. The aftermath of the stroke in late
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life,coupled with earlier suffering from Bright's Disease and gout, could beexpected to result in a condition of paralysis agitansor palsy, affecting hisgait.The really significant cause of death is surely the single word"Exhaustion." Dracula advances a vision of infection not through contact, notthrough the bite alone, but by way of a process analogous to osmosis.Count Dracula is not merely taking sustenance from Mina; he isimplanting his own spiritual poison within her by the same physicalchannel. His actions with respect to Mina are an amplification andexaggeration of those which he inflicts upon Lucy. In a sense he ismore obviously inseminating Mina, passing to her through contagiouspathology the seed of her own vampirism and that of a future generationof vampires. The oral and the vaginal are as closely identifiedhere as their respective fluid economies were in the case of Lucy. Withthis incident in mind, a series of remarks regarding contamination of the blood, from Harker, as reported by Sister Agatha of the Buda-Pesthhospital:'He has had some fearful shock - so says our doctor and in hisdelirium his ravings have been dreadful; of wolves and poison andblood; of ghosts and demons; and I fear to say of what.' (D 99)from Seward, in his private journal:I suppose it is some of that horrid poison which has got into herveins beginning to work. The Count had his own purposes when hegave her [Mina] what Van Helsing called 'the Vampire's baptism ofblood.' Well, there may be a poison that distils itself out of goodthings; in an age when the existence of ptomaine is a mystery weshould not wonder at anything! (D 322)and latterly, from Mina herself:'There is a poison in my blood, in my soul, which may destroy me;which must destroy me, unless some relief comes to us. Oh, myfriends, you know as well as I do, that my soul is at stake....' (D 330)become totally meaningful and obviously systematic. InDracula,spiritual disorder is a consequence of fluid contamination, as bothSeward and Mina acknowledge. Ptomaines are amine compounds,often toxic, in putrefying animal matter. The Count is, in physiologicalterms, dead animal matter, his 'rank' breath (D 18) hinting ofinterior putrefaction.80 Mina has effectively consumed the vampire'smorbid pathology, and his corruption is multiplying, bacteria-like,within her own circulation.Though the novel draws heavily here on the eugenic implications ofmingling bloods, and the suggestion that such relationships invariablyresult in the decline and dilution of the healthier stock, the wholeissue has a moral and spiritual resonance also. Minas Christian spiritfaces a progressive undermining by that of the vampire, who has, likeChrist, purchased her through his blood. Van Helsing's depiction ofthe incident as a 'baptism of blood' is, similarly, a point of
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intersectionwith the religious script. It will take the shedding of Quincey Morris'sinnocent and freely given blood to repurchase Mina adequately. Theblood clearly is not only that of earthly life, but of the Life Everlastingalso. Subjects could engage in the exoneral activities which form thedistinctive feature of their trance existence. Blood is as close to themesmeric Fluid in Dracula as it ever could be.The relationship between the novel, the reader and the culturalarchive upon which both draw is a complex one in Dracula. The textis an extended play upon the multiple connotations of blood, literaland symbolic; it charts their economic relations to the body, and theirpotential for exchange and coexistence with each other.Demonstrably, the medical script is not included merely to function asa convenient authority for occasional statements that draw onconventional therapeutics or surgery. Nor, again, is the novel apolemic against one or more traditions in medical or

psychologicalthought: the failure, as we have seen, is that of the practitioner, notthat of the discipline. The discipline - and under this heading wemight include physiology, diagnosis, toxicology and surgery hasbeen itself represented as a discursive economy in the text, subject toexchange, and with boundaries that shift in response to the ebb andflow of symptom and hypothesis.Hence the medical script is a persistent and integral component ofthe fabric of the novel, saturated with mythic as well as literal value, aprime motive force in the construction and interaction of both humanand supernatural character. The medical language does not yield at alleasily to the occult script. Rather, through its ability to reflex, to twistits own meaning to another purpose, the medical script demonstratesan unforeseen potential with which it may subvert the occult, forcingfurther the adherence of the supernatural to the more mundane lawsof economics, the physiological concepts of secretion and depletion.The occult cannot be said therefore to be the only source of instabilityin the novel: the medical content enjoys a markedly similar functionthroughout. The rhetorical strategy of Dracula therefore is one ofrealignment, an assertion of coexistence rather than of an Absolute.Boundaries become blurred as the Christian and the scientific move toaccommodate the occult, and as the demarcations between pathologicalconditions, pharmacopoeias and techniques break down.Causes and consequences are no longer assignable with ease to eitherthe material or the spiritual. subjects could engage in the exoneural activities which form thedistinctive feature of their trance existence. Blood is as close to themesmeric Fluid in Dracula as it ever could be.The relationship between the novel, the reader and the culturalarchive upon which both
55

draw is a complex one in Dracula. The textis an extended play upon the multiple connotations of blood, literaland symbolic; it charts their economic relations to the body, and theirpotential for exchange and coexistence with each other.Demonstrably, the medical script is not included merely to function asa convenient authority for occasional statements that draw on conventional therapeutics or surgery. Nor, again, is the novel apolemic against one or more traditions in medical or psychologicalthought: the failure, as we have seen, is that of the practitioner, notthat of the discipline. The discipline - and under this heading wemight include physiology, diagnosis, toxicology and surgery hasbeen itself represented as a discursive economy in the text, subject toexchange, and with boundaries that shift in response to the ebb andflow of symptom and hypothesis.Hence the medical script is a persistent and integral component ofthe fabric of the novel, saturated with mythic as well as literal value, aprime motive force in the construction and interaction of both humanand supernatural character. The medical language does not yield at alleasily to the occult script. Rather, through its ability to reflex, to twistits own meaning to another purpose, the medical script demonstratesan unforeseen potential with which it may subvert the occult, forcingfurther the adherence of the supernatural to the more mundane lawsof economics, the physiological concepts of secretion and depletion.The occult cannot be said therefore to be the only source of instabilityin the novel: the medical content enjoys a markedly similar functionthroughout. The rhetorical strategy of Dracula therefore is one ofrealignment, an assertion of coexistence rather than of an Absolute.Boundaries become blurred as the Christian and the scientific move toaccommodate the occult, and as the demarcations between pathologicalconditions, pharmacopoeias and techniques break down.Causes and consequences are no longer assignable with ease to eitherthe material or the spiritual. Beyond Dracula has argued that the crude evaluative criteria whichallow Stoker's writings other than Dracula to be dismissed merely asthe ephemera of a 'hack writer' are clearly no longer adequate.1 It isapparent that the concerns of Dracula - be they religious, racial, socialor epistemological - are equally the concerns of the author's otherwritings. Moreover, the manners in which these concerns are presentedin Stoker's fiction, whether through plot, character or scenic backdrop,are again in no respect unique to Dracula. It might be argued, inresponse to such an assertion, that the frequent recurrence of suchdevices as the knightly vigil, the aquiline countenance or the blushingface confirms Stoker's writings to be characterized by an unimaginativeor obsessive
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repetitiousness. It should be evident, however, thatsuch recurrences are, in essence, reworkingrather than simply replications.Each fresh occurrence, as it were, is modified by its contiguity toother issues, other signifiers and other texts. Though certain featuresof Stoker's fiction at times appear markedly reminiscent of each other,they are seldom truly congruent in terms of their contextual effect onthe reader. Nor are Stokers books remembered in the ways he would probablyhave wished. If people have heard of him at all, they havealmost certainly done so as a horror writer. Stokers interests are,however, far more diverse than this. Throughout his oeuvre, hereturns regularly to the idea of settlements and union, both personal in the form of the marriages which so often conclude hisnarratives and political. Alan Johnson notes thatThe concept of internationalism, a harmony between nations, issuggested at the end of The Shoulder of Shasta by the harmonyachieved by Reginald, Esse, and Dick. Like the idea of a scheme ofnature, the concept of internationalism has a root in Stokers own past experience and, as it is dramatized in The Shoulder ofShasta, it sheds interesting light on the ending of Dracula, withits final tableau of the Dutch Dr Van Helsing, the English Seward,Holmwood, and Jonathan and Mina Harker, and their sonQuincey, who has been named after the deceased American,Quincey Morris.Stoker was also interested in transcending the politicized dividebetween Protestantism and Catholicism which was proving so destructive to Ireland, and he would have found in Freemasonry anorganization that rose above religious schism. For all this stress onunion, however, what really energizes the best of his fiction is thatthis drive to union is held so strongly in tension with a darklyGothic obsession with the double which, a century after his death,has lost none of its power to disturb.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Adderley, Rev James. Stephen Remarx: The Story of a Venture in Ethics. 2. London: Edward Arnold, 1893. 3. Allen, Grant. The Woman Who Did.London: John Lane, 1895. 4. Allen, Grant. 'Plain Words on the Woman Question'.Fortnightly Review, 46(1889): 455456. 5. American in London. 'The English Barbarian: His Haunts, His Homes, HisHabits, His Heroes'. New Budget (August 1895): 28-29. 6. Aveling, Edward, and Marx, Eleanor. Shelley's Socialism: Two Lectures. 7. Manchester: Lesley Preger, 1947. 8. Blatchford, Robert. Merrie England.1895; reprint London: Clarion Press,1908. 9. Booth, Charles. Labour and Life of the People: Poverty Series. Volumes 1 and 2. 10. London: Williams and Norgate, 1889. 11. Booth, William. In Darkest England and the Way Out.London: InternationalHeadquarters, Salvation Army, 1890. 12. Bradfield, Thomas.' A Dominant Note of Some Recent Fiction'.WestminsterReview, 142 (1894): 543-54913. Buchanan, Robert. The Reverend Annabel Lee.London: C. Arthur Pearson,1898. 14. Burton, Richard. The Jew, the Gypsy and El Islam.London: Hutchinson andCo., 1898. 15. Buxton-Forman, H. The Books of William Morris Described. London: FrankHollings, 1897. 16. Caine, Hall. The Christian: A Story. London: William Heinemann, 1897. 17. Caird, Mona. The Daughters of Danaus.London: Bliss, Sands and Foster,1894. 18. Cantlie, James. Degeneration Amongst Londoners. London: Field and Tuer, theLeadenhall Press, 1885. 19. Carpenter, Edward. Love's Coming of Age. 1896; reprint New York andLondon: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911. 20. Clapperton, Jane Hume. Margaret Dunmore\ or, A Socialist Home. London:Swan, Sonnenschein and Lowrey, 1888.
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21. Conrad, Joseph. Chance.1913; reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press,1988. Edited with an introduction by Martin Ray. 22. Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 2: 1898-1902. 23. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1986. 24. Conrad, Joseph. Collected Letters, vol. 3: 1903-1907. Frederick R. Karl andLaurence Davies (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988. 25. Conrad, Joseph. Collected Letters, vol. 4: 1908-1911. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,I99OCorelli, Marie. The Sorrows of Satan.London: Methuen, 1895. 26. Davidson, John. The Testament of an Empire Builder.London: Grant Richards,1901. 27. Dawson, W.J. The Redemption of Edward Strahan.London: Hodder andStoughton, 1891. 28. Dawson, W.J. The Makers of English Fiction.London: Hodder andStoughton, 1905. 29. 'Death of a Decadent'. Woman's Signal, 3 (May 1895): 2^9-Dowie, Menie Muriel. Gallia.London: Methuen, 1895. 30. Edgeworth, Charles. Mathematical Psychics.London: C. Kegan Paul, 1881. Egerton, George. Keynotes (1893) anc^ Discords (1894). Introduced by 31. Martha Vicinus. London: Virago, 1983. 32. Ellis, Havelock. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual 33. Characteristics. 1894; reprint London: Walter Scott, 1904. 34. Ellis, Havelock and Symonds, John Addington. Sexual Inversion.London:Wilson and Macmillan, 1897. 35. Garrett Fawcett, Millicent. Review of The Woman Who Did. ContemporaryReview, 47 (1895): 630. 36. Garrett Fawcett, Millicent. Woman's Suffrage.London: T. C. and E. C.Jack,1912. 37. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty.London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co.,1882. 38. Gilbert, W. S. The Bab Ballads.James Ellis (ed.). Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard, The Belknap Press, 1970. 39. Gilbert, W. S. The Complete Plays of Gilbert and Sullivan.New York: W. W.Norton and Company, 1976.

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40. Gladstone, W. E. 'Robert Elsmere and the Battle of Belief. Nineteenth Century,23 (May 1888): 766-788. 41. Grand, Sarah. The Heavenly Twins.3 vols. London: William Heinemann,1893-Grand, Sarah. 'The New Aspect of the Woman Question'.North AmericanReview, 158 (1894): 271273. 42. Grand, Sarah. 'The Woman's Question'.Humanitarian, 8 (1896): 160-169. 43. Greenwood, Frederick. 'A Shoreditch Club'.Daily Telegraph (22 October1887): 2.

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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION..3 CHAPTER I GOTHIC LITERATURE.. .5 1.1 HIDDEN IDENTITIES: GHOSTS...6 1.2 GOTHIC DOUBLES...12

CHAPTER II TWENTIETH CENTURY.15

2.1 THE GHOST STORY AS THE END OF GOTHIC...15 2.2 GOTHIC POSTMODERNISM.18

CHAPTER IIIDRACULA: BETWEEN TRADITION AND MODERNISM.21 3.1 DRACULA, MYTH and HISTORY...21 3.2 THE SACRED and the PROFANE in BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA...26

3.3 VAMPIRISM RUSSIA, and the SLAVS30

3.4 PHANTASMGORIA: THE MODERN VAMPIRE...33 3.5 SCIENCE and FAITH in DRACULA.41

CONCLUSIONS...50
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BIBLIOGRAPHY.60

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