Journal of Dracula Studies3 (2001)
[Margaret L Carter, author of The
Vampire in Literature: A Critical Bibliography and editor of Dracula:
The Vampire and the Critics, has recently published Different Blood: The
Vampire as Alien (www.xlibris.com/DifferentBlood.html).]
Although Count Dracula is slain in the
final pages of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, throughout the subsequent century he
has enjoyed innumerable resurrections in film and literature. Many of these
incarnations might be unrecognizable to Stoker as the character he created.
Fictional treatments of Dracula, especially those that have appeared within the
past thirty years, reflect changes in attitudes toward vampires in general. In
contrast to the characterization of vampires in Stoker’s own fiction and that
of his contemporaries, in recent decades various authors have rendered these
“monsters” sympathetically.
Earlier
nineteenth-century works do contain a few hints of sympathy for their vampire
characters. They inspire sympathy or
attraction, however, despite their inhuman nature rather than because of it.
They still must be destroyed. The eponymous monster in Varney the Vampyre
(1847) displays remorse for his bloodthirsty past and finally commits suicide
by leaping into a volcano. Carmilla, in
J Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella (1872), presents herself initially as victim
rather than predator, and the narrator, Laura, finds her attractive, yet
Carmilla’s existence nevertheless ends in violent destruction. Nina Auerbach
characterizes pre-Stoker vampires as “not demon lovers or snarling aliens ...
but singular friends” in a literary period when “it was a privilege to walk
with a vampire” (13). This “sinister, superior sharer” enjoys an “intimate
intercourse with mortals,” even though a “dangerously close” one (13).
Auerbach
views Stoker’s novel as introducing a new quality of alienation into the
portrayal of the undead; his vampires “blend with mortals only at intervals”
and display a “soullessness” that “bars them from human space” (105). The text
of Dracula strongly implies that the soulless, bloodsucking revenant is
a different individual from the dead person who was put into the grave. Dr Seward emphatically refuses to identify
the night-prowling Lucy with the woman he loved. “Is this really Lucy’s body,”
he asks, “or only a demon in her shape?” and he labels the revenant “the foul
Thing which had taken Lucy’s shape without her soul” (260). Both Lucy and Dracula himself, after their
destruction, take on a peaceful expression that seems to indicate the return of
the “true” soul after the expulsion of an invading vampiric demon. Mina anticipates the “joy” Dracula will
experience “when he, too, is destroyed in his worser part that his better part
may have spiritual immortality” (367).
Some
of the very traits that made vampires monstrous to readers of the 1890s, oddly,
account for their appeal to the mindset of the late twentieth century. Many
critics have noted the revulsion with which Stoker’s male characters regard the
blatant sexuality of the vampirized Lucy. This “voluptuous” quality (to use one
of Stoker’s favorite words), shared by Dracula’s brides, does not extend to the
Count himself. Instead, he exemplifies blasphemous defiance of religion (having
studied, according to Van Helsing, at the Scholomance, the Devil’s school) and
ruthless exercise of power. Carol Senf points out, in the vampire fiction of
the post-1970 period, an “increasing emphasis on the positive aspects of the
vampire’s eroticism and on his or her right to rebel against the stultifying
constraints of society” (163). Combined
with the frequent appearance of literary vampires who “are less bloodthirsty
than ordinary human beings” (6), this stress on the “positive” dimension of
traits considered negative by nineteenth-century authors and readers produces
attractive, even admirable bloodsuckers. One of the earliest illustrations of
this trend appeared in the television series Dark Shadows (1966-71) with
Barnabas Collins, who began life (or undeath) as a Gothic villain and grew into
a popular and sympathetic character. Portrayal of Dracula as a character in
popular fiction has shifted focus along with these changes in writers’ and
audiences’ perception of vampirism.
Bloomian
“misreadings” of Stoker’s novel, of course, began in the 1920s with the stage
play by Hamilton Deane and John L Balderston, which transformed the Count into
a romantic melodrama villain. As David J Skal notes, this drama created an
“image of the master vampire in evening dress and opera cloak ... polite enough
to be invited into a proper Knightsbridge living room” and “able to interact
with the characters, rather than merely hang outside their bedroom windows”
(69-70). Yet this Dracula, though more
alluring than Stoker’s, cannot be mistaken for anything but the villain, just
as in the Bela Lugosi film (1931). True,
Lugosi’s Dracula quotes Swinburne’s line about “worse things waiting for man
than death,” a remark one would not expect to hear from Stoker’s Count. But despite this touch of pathos and the
erotic overtones of the film, he remains unmistakably diabolical, as do
vampires in general and Dracula in particular until the early 1970s. (I exclude humorous and parodic treatments,
of course.)
Raymond
Rudorff’s The Dracula Archives (1971), for example, chronologically
stands on the cusp dividing the traditional, diabolical undead from the “new”
vampire, allowed to be morally neutral or even good. Dracula himself does not
appear “onstage” until the very end of the novel. Rudorff's story, a prelude to Stoker’s,
unfolds a long, complex process of preparation for the advent of the vampire
lord. Dracula returns to unnatural life by possessing the body of a young man
whose mother had succumbed to a vampire embrace and been destroyed, like Lucy,
by staking. Like Lucy, Adelaide in The Dracula Archives is framed as a
victim whose true innocence is restored when her vampiric nature is exorcised
by the stake. Rudorff’s novel makes an interesting contrast with a much later
prequel to Dracula, Jeanne Kalogridis’ “Diaries of the Family Dracul”
trilogy, beginning with Covenant with the Vampire (1994). Here Dracula
himself, unmistakably evil, demands blood sacrifices from his subjects and
relatives, yet individual vampires can choose to resist the descent into
darkness inherent in the loss of their humanity. The vampire remains the person he or she was
before transformation. In Rudorff’s 1971
novel, as in Stoker, rebirth in vampire form simply obliterates the humanity of
the transformed victim.
The year before Anne Rice brought the
sympathetic vampire to the attention of readers outside the genre, another
novel narrated a vampire’s apologia on tape in his own words. The 1970s, according to Auerbach, constitute
“a halcyon decade for vampires, one in which they not only flourished, but
reinvented themselves” (131). Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975),
one instance of such reinvention, portrays Count Dracula as a misunderstood
nobleman persecuted by a gang of superstition-addled men under the direction of
a bigoted, hardheaded Professor Van Helsing. This favorable treatment of
Dracula recurs in several other works of fiction during the 1970s and 1980s, in
accordance with that period’s general tendency to characterize fictional
monsters as simply different kinds of people. Echoes from the civil rights
movement resonate in fantastic fiction, with vampires and other inhuman beings
shown as another misjudged minority group. Saberhagen’s book, which became the
first in a still-continuing series, foreshadowed and helped to create this
trend. The Count Dracula portrayed on
screen by Frank Langella in 1979, for instance, resembles Saberhagen’s hero
more than he does the Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee Dracula. Auerbach
describes Langella’s Dracula as “sad and wise and far-seeing, erotically easy
in his animal self,” clearly superior to the “scurrying little mortals” who
harass him (145).
The
predominance of the sympathetic vampire, however, has been countered in recent
years by a “backlash” toward viewing the vampire as evil monster, a trend
Auerbach links to the emergence of AIDS (among other cultural phenomena), as
illustrated by the dominance of the disease metaphor in many recent novels. Yet
these works do not merely revert to the nineteenth-century view of the vampire
as demonic and worthy only of destruction. Following upon decades of highly
successful novels and stories foregrounding “good” vampires, these recent
backlash works tend to take a more nuanced approach. An outstanding example is Anno-Dracula
(1992), by Kim Newman.
The
typical fictional vampire of the 1970s and beyond is humanized rather than
demonic. The product of a secular world-view, he or she no longer necessarily
constitutes a threat to the victim’s immortal soul – and may even possess a
soul him- or herself. Even if still conceived as a supernatural being returned
from the dead, this kind of vampire has free will and may choose to behave
ethically. Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape not only endows Dracula with
free will but merges Stoker’s character with the historical Vlad Tepes and
recreates both in positive rather than negative terms. This Dracula is the hero
of the tale instead of the villain, not only a nobleman but a gentleman,
telling his side of the story in an urbane, sardonic tone. The first-person
narrative incorporates all the “facts” established in Stoker’s epistolary novel
but reinterprets them from Dracula’s point of view. His goal is not to invade
and conquer England but “to be fully and unquestioningly accepted in the normal
world as human” (22). Lucy and Mina
freely give him their blood in highly erotic encounters. He backs away from a
brandished eucharistic wafer, not because he fears holy objects, but because he
prefers not to desecrate them with his enemies’ gore. Van Helsing, not the
vampire, commits sacrilege by misusing sacred symbols. Lucy dies from
transfusions of incompatible blood, not from Dracula’s feeding, and he doses
her with his transforming blood in an attempt to save her life. She preys upon children, Dracula theorizes,
because her traumatic death has damaged her mind. The scar on Mina’s forehead
results from the hypnotic force of Van Helsing’s personality acting upon her
own guilt, not from God’s curse. The
staking of an undead revenant does not liberate a soul from Satan but
constitutes simple murder. Vampirism, in short, becomes a morally neutral
transformation, leaving the subject’s free will intact. Dracula maintains, “It is the forcing
of death, or of a change in life, that’s criminal, whether the force be applied
by vampire fang, or wooden stake, or means more subtle used against a vulnerable
mind or heart” (103) – an obvious allusion to human beings’ frequently inhumane
treatment of their fellow men and women.
Since, like many recent literary vampires, Saberhagen’s Vlad Dracula is
less violent and cruel than his mortal adversaries, he has, as Joe Sanders puts
it, “something to teach breathing humans about choosing honor and compassion as
they live their uncertain lives in a chaotic world” (118).
The
Dracula Tape anticipates not only Rice’s subjective, internalized
presentation of the vampire as protagonist but also the heroic, attractive
Count Saint-Germain of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. This character, who first appears
in Hotel Transylvania (1978), may be described as a mirror image of
Dracula. Saint-Germain, like Stoker’s villain, is a Transylvanian Count who
sleeps on his native earth, casts no reflection, and transforms his donors by
sharing his own blood with them. But Yarbro’s vampire, unlike Stoker’s, is
generous, self-sacrificing, and highly ethical. Religious symbols have no
negative effect on him; in fact, a scene in Hotel Transylvania, in a
deliberately ironic reversal of roles, shows him warding off a gang of
Satanists with a holy object. Yarbro, by the way, has also created her own
version of Dracula, in her recent trilogy dealing with the vampire’s three
“brides.” Her Dracula, based directly on Stoker’s, belongs to the more recent
phase of fictional vampirism. Though ruthless and evil, he appears so from free
choice rather than diabolical compulsion, and the women he transforms make
their own ethical choices after initiation into the new existence of undeath.
In
the 1990s readers have seen a reversion to the unequivocally “evil” vampire
(though the more benign type has not, of course, vanished). This “backlash”
predator, however, freely chooses to defy the laws of God and society rather
than acting under compulsion from the indwelling of a diabolical force. Dracula
Unbound (1991), by Brian Aldiss, most nearly approaches framing the vampire
as inherently evil. Aldiss’ monsters, reptilian parasites operating on instinct
rather than intelligence, cannot make moral choices. They feed on human victims
from the same innate drive that any other subhuman predator does. Dracula
himself appears “horned and gigantic, more devil than man” (159), but the
“devilish” quality is metaphorical, not literal. Bram Stoker, as a character in
this metafictional novel, scorning the suggestion that vampires might be “one
more oppressed minority” (as many post-1970 works characterize them),
classifies them as “simply ... a bad lot – a disease, in short” (181). This
book contains no “good” vampires. In
keeping with the preoccupations of the late twentieth century, however, the
“evil” of vampirism arises from biological rather than supernatural roots.
Another
reinterpretation of vampirism as disease instead of demonic possession appears
in Dan Simmons’ Children of the Night (1992). Set partly in Romania after the fall of
Communism, Simmons’ novel propounds its theory of vampirism against the
background of AIDS-infected children left to the overstressed mercy of the
state. In this case, the genetic disorder that causes vampirism carries
positive as well as negative qualities. If properly harnessed, this mutation
has the potential to confer benefits on humanity, including a treatment for
AIDS. The “vampire” most visible to the reader is not only innocent but
helpless – a baby boy, seen through the viewpoint of his foster mother. As for
Dracula, he works behind the scenes, a ruthless tyrant, killer, and capitalist,
motivated not by the Devil but by pragmatic self-interest.
Kim
Newman’s alternate history, begun in Anno-Dracula, depicts Europe and
England in the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth as
dominated by vampires. Newman rewrites the conclusion of Stoker’s narrative to
reveal that Dracula survived his conflict with Van Helsing’s band and married
the widowed Queen Victoria. Now that Dracula (identified with Vlad Tepes) has
become Prince Consort of Great Britain, the vampire minority holds sway over
the “warm” majority. Ordinary human citizens retain their civil rights, but
vampires have a near-monopoly on political power and social chic. As Elizabeth
Hardaway notes, Stoker’s Dracula, “a grotesquely romantic outsider,” becomes in
Newman’s novel “a power-mad politician and despot who has made England safe for
vampires” (179). Dracula himself, not seen in person until the end of the
novel, is a loathsome monster, an undead bloodsucker of the most gruesome type,
enthroned naked except for an “ermine-collared black velvet cloak, ragged at
the edges” and “his body thickly coated with matted hair, blood clotting on his
chest and limbs” (342). Sadistically cruel to Queen Victoria, whom he keeps
chained at his side, he retains negative traits that originated in his human
lifetime; “barely a generation away from his mountain bully-boy ancestors,” he
displays “the philistine avarice of a true barbarian” (346). Although
supernatural as well as depraved, he is not, however, literally diabolical.
Hardaway remarks upon Newman’s “secularization of Dracula and, even more
importantly, of vampires in general,” observing that, “The Dracula that haunts Anno
Dracula ... is grotesque, violent, and corrupt, but ultimately secular,”
and that vampiric violence “differs only in degree, not kind, from the violence
and cruelty found in the human heart” (185).
In
Newman’s fiction vampirism as such is not inherently evil. While some of the
undead spring from “debased bloodlines,” such as the “polluted” bloodline of
Vlad Tepes, others escape this curse (166). One of the principal villains, Jack
the Ripper, turns out to be the completely human Dr John Seward, driven mad by
the death of Lucy. And we find upright,
ethical characters among the vampire population. Genevieve Dieudonne, for
example, devotes her time to charitable works.
She even aids a human secret agent, Charles Beauregard, in his attempt
to assassinate the Prince Consort. Genevieve, as Auerbach puts it, “is a
harmonizing alternative to Dracula’s sick spawn” (178). Hardaway points out
that the novel emphasizes the parallels between vampires and ordinary people
more than their differences, conveying as its subtext “a philosophy that values
‘humanity’ (warm and undead alike) over such external constructs as government
or other power-based entities” (181).
Fictional
reinterpretations of Dracula as a character have thus evolved over the past
century from Stoker’s original characterization of the Count as satanic through
various stages corresponding to the overall evolution of the literary vampire.
When the typical vampire of the popular imagination became humanized in the
1970s, Fred Saberhagen created a Dracula who epitomized this trend and helped
to catalyze its growth. Later, when the vampire as ruthless predator ascended
to renewed popularity (though the sympathetic vampire has not, of course,
vanished), Draculas of this type proliferated, as illustrated by the works of
Jeanne Kalogridis, Dan Simmons, and Kim Newman. Since these novelists wrote
after the significant shift in the fictional vampire from undead corpse
animated by the Devil to a humanized being with free will and moral
responsibility, however, they did not create vampires who were simply evil. In
the fiction of these more recent writers, a more nuanced approach allows the
possibility of “good” vampires, even though the archetypal vampire, Dracula, is
depicted as evil.
Works Cited:
Aldiss, Brian. Dracula Unbound. New
York: HarperCollins, 1991.
Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Hardaway, Elizabeth. “‘Ourselves Expanded’: The Vampire’s
Evolution from Bram Stoker to Kim Newman,” in The Blood Is the Life:
Vampires in Literature, ed. Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling
Green, OH: Popular Press, 1999.
Kalogridis, Jeanne. Covenant with the Vampire. New York: Delacorte, 1994.
Newman, Kim. Anno-Dracula. New
York: Carroll and Graf, 1992.
Rudorff, Raymond. The Dracula Archives. New York: Arbor
House, 1971.
Saberhagen, Fred. The Dracula Tape. New York: Warner, 1975.
Sanders, Joe. “The Pretense That the World
Is Sane: Saberhagen’s Dracula,” in The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in
Literature, ed. Leonard G Heldreth and Mary Pharr. Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press, 1999.
Senf, Carol. The Vampire in
Nineteenth-Century English Literature.Bowling Green, OH: Popular Press,
1988.
Simmons, Dan. Children of the Night.
New York: Putnam, 1992.
Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic. New York:: Norton,
1990.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.
Reprinted as The Essential Dracula, ed. Leonard Wolf. New York: Penguin,
1993.
Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn. Hotel Transylvania.
New York: St. Martin’s, 1978.
No comments:
Post a Comment