Journal of Dracula Studies 4 (2002)
[Vrunda Stampwala Sahay
is a PhD candidate at the University of California, Riverside. This article is
based on a paper given at the Uses of Popular Culture Conference at the
University of Rhode Island, Kingston.]
We’re not just afraid of
predators, we’re transfixed by them, prone to weave stories and fables and
chatter endlessly about them, because fascination creates preparedness, and
preparedness, survival. In a deeply tribal sense, we love our monsters. (E O Wilson,
qtd in Benchley 7)
In his introduction to the collected essays, Monster
Theory: Reading Culture, Jeffrey J Cohen argues that “the monster is best
understood as an embodiment of difference, a breaker of category, and a
resistant Other known only through process and movement, never through
dissection-table analysis” (10). Perhaps the best example of this notion of
knowledge derived from observation of an animated entity fluctuating and
transforming itself over time is Stoker’s Dracula. Since its publication
over one hundred years ago, this tale of a notorious vampire has been through
countless re-interpretations which have created an otherness that embodies
society’s evolving fears about itself. As a result, Dracula is not just simply
a monster, but rather a “technology of monstrosity” (Halberstam 88). One of the
most important elements of this technology lies in society’s simultaneous
yearning for and fear of sexual desire. A consensus exists in modern
scholarship that vampirism in Dracula both expresses and distorts an
originally sexual energy. That distortion, the representation of desire within
the guise of monstrosity, reveals a fundamental psychological ambivalence
between fear and desire.
Then, if we
are to consider literature and film as mirrors for a culture’s belief systems
while we maintain that monstrosity can be understood in a state of process, we
can see a psychological and philosophical shift between the character of
Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel and that of Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992
film version. Certainly, what was Stoker’s monstrous sexual predator for the
late Victorian era becomes the fragmented, romanticized, and possibly
redeemable Other for late twentieth-century sensibilities. Recently, Dracula
has begun to receive serious critical attention from scholars who focus on late
Victorian sexual, intellectual, and political tensions in this classic
retelling of the vampire myth. If we take this notion into modernity and the
rise of cinema, we find that many mainstream movies have gained cultural
influence in that the identities and circumstances portrayed become part of
popular culture. I would argue that both Stoker’s and Coppola’s versions of Dracula
reflect the cultural fears or attitudes of their respective time periods where
sexuality plays a powerful role in problematizing the relationship between love
and carnal, violent desires that cannot be restrained.
I will first
explore the ways in which Stoker’s text plays upon Victorian anxieties
concerning physical representation, identity, and morphology to construct an
Otherness embodied in Dracula whose origins are unexplainable and whose evil is
irredeemable. Then, I move forward almost a hundred years and claim that
cultural attitudes towards Otherness have shifted in ways represented by
Coppola’s vision of Dracula. Twentieth-century culture embodies a sense
of isolation and fragmentation that creates an individualism in which people
see themselves as outsiders and often feel misunderstood by their society.
Coppola exploits this sentiment in a film that tantalizes the viewer into a
romance with Dracula, the ultimate outsider. Hence, the film version reveals the
postmodern sensibility of Dracula himself as a fragmented, multi-dimensional
man-beast who must sexually prey upon Lucy as an expression of his monstrosity
yet deeply loves Mina as an expression of his humanity. Moreover, popular
notions of true love coupled with the concept of reincarnation serve to
romanticize and humanize the Otherness of Dracula thereby dispelling much of
the effects of his monstrosity. Whereas Stoker’s Dracula is a thing to be
abhorred, Coppola’s Dracula is a man to be admired because he’s a survivor.
During the
1890s when Stoker was planning and drafting Dracula, the ruling paradigm
in the human sciences, in biology, psychology, and social theory, was concerned
with the pathologies of natural selection -- what we might call Darwinism and
its discontents -- particularly the fear of a slide back down the evolutionary
chain (Glover 251). In fact, certain contemporary portraits of the degenerative
condition were key referents for Stoker’s description of the vampire. This
degeneration threatens the security of respectable middle-class society,
precisely the world of doctors, lawyers and teachers that is under siege in the
novel (Glover 257). As Jonathan Harker begins his journey to Transylvania, he
immediately imbibes the eastern landscape with Otherness and this marker then
extends to his understanding of Dracula himself strictly based on his physical
appearance. In his first journal, Harker notes with dramatic emphasis his
passage from west to east into the “wildest and least known portions of Europe”
filled with “peasants” and “barbarians,” some of whom look like “some old Oriental band of brigands” who are
however “very harmless and rather wanting in natural self-assertion” (Stoker
1-3). The Otherness that Harker constructs of the inhabitants of the
Carpathians extends to Dracula himself as Harker provides a most unpleasant
physical appearance.
His face was a strong -- a very strong -- aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose
and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing
scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very
massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl
in its own profusion. The mouth so far
as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel
looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips,
whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years….
Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of his palm. The nails were long
and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands
touched me, I could not repress a shudder.... A horrible feeling of nausea came
over me, which do what I would, I could not conceal. (17)
Harker’s
description of the Count resembles a hybrid of human and beast and certainly
gives manifestation to the suspicions that humans can, indeed, degenerate lower
on the evolutionary ladder. It is interesting to note that only those human
beings who exist in the pre-modern world outside of western civilization appear
to manifest this shocking quality. Hence, Stoker depicts Dracula as more
creature than human being and certainly antithetical to the hairless, well
groomed, and proper middle-class British gentleman that Harker represents.
These physical differences immediately place Harker in a state of discomfort as
he suspects that he has come to serve a barbarian.
Stoker then
further problematizes the construction of Dracula by playing upon techniques of
Victorian morphology, the science concerned with the problems of form, function
and transformation in matter. In The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the
Fantasy of Empire, Thomas Richards states that “morphology put all beings
on the same imperial family tree. In the heyday of Victorian morphology, there
were no longer any singular beings in the universe other than those which human
beings created themselves; as in Mary Shelley’s novel, the Victorian monster is
made, not born” (45). Yet, Stoker disrupts this notion by creating Dracula as
an organic entity that has no human maker and who Harker begins to suspect is
timeless. The notion of immortality becomes a frightening possibility because
while Dracula’s physical description suggests his place on the evolutionary
ladder as beneath human, his longevity suggests a being superior to the English
gentleman. The Count nostalgically prides himself on his noble lineage of
ancestors who trace back to Attila the Hun, who “fought for lordship” and who
“were a conquering race” (25). Dracula defines his family through a series of
battles and invasions and Harker notes that the Count “spoke as if he had been
present at them all” (26). For Dracula, the imperial family tree proves
irrelevant because he alone can persevere long after generations of humans have
died. Unlike humans, Dracula has the power of creation through a different type
of reproduction. He does not reproduce from birth, nor from artificial means,
but transforms humans through death. In effect, Lucy’s body dies, but she is
reborn as an un-dead.
Yet,
the reader is informed only of the Count’s nobility, not of the origins of his
vampirism other than Van Helsing’s claim that his ancestors had “dealing with
the Evil One” (200). While Van Helsing validates scientific reason, he does not
underestimate the power of the supernatural. The English scientist’s use of crucifix and
holy wafer mediates ideological and cultural positions: “the occult does not
oppose reason and progress here, reason and progress are absorbed by the
occult” (Boone 81). Moreover, Stoker’s narrative insinuates that their very
reliance on scientific rationality makes the English vulnerable to Dracula’s
threat. The author’s primary mouthpiece on this point is Van Helsing who argues
that scientists lack an open mind since they believe that what “they can see
and prove constitutes the whole of reality” (Stoker 274). Hence, Van Helsing is
the only proponent of the modern world that understands the morphology at play:
He [Dracula] is brute, and more than brute;… he can, within
limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in any of the forms that are
to him; he can within his range; direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the
thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat and the owl and the bat
-- the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he
can at times vanish and come unknown. (197)
Essentially, mutants are
the height of monstrosity because they are capable of sudden and catastrophic
changes in form. They were threats to the global claim of Darwinism, disrupting
human order. As a result, institutional science is especially ineffectual in
dealing with the supernatural. Harker becomes frustrated that “the old
centuries had a power in Transylvania that even modernity cannot kill” (36).
Vampirism transforms people into more bestial versions of themselves by erasing
human identity and spreads like a disease, always threatening to undermine the
culture that believes too uncritically in its progress (Boone 80). Hence, Stoker succeeds in creating a form of
monstrosity that cannot be catalogued by science and is received by
nineteenth-century century audiences as an irredeemable Other whose motivations
are purely evil.
As
Harker spends more time with the Count, he begins to alter his negative views
as his host reveals western sensibilities in his tremendous admiration for
England and his hope to assimilate himself into British society: “Well I know
that, did I move and speak in your London, none there are who would not know me
for a stranger. That is not enough for me. Here I am noble; the common people
know me, and I am master. But a stranger in a strange land, he is no one” (19).
Through these words, Dracula both asserts his nobility and reveals his
vulnerability as a “stranger” from a pre-modern world who wishes to partake in
the greatness of the west. Certainly, these words appease Harker for they
pamper his sense of western superiority while veiling the vampire’s inherent
evil and baseness under the guise of nobility and family lineage. This leads us
to the late Victorian anxieties about identity and the fear of the Other.
According to H L Malchow, the typical
gothic story of the late nineteenth century “revolves around the problem of
confused, vulnerable, or secret identities, fear of exposure, evil masquerading
as respectability, or respectability built upon a hidden corruption” (126).
Deeply impressed by the vampire’s business acumen, Harker proves quite taken
with the Count and imagines that Dracula “would have made a wonderful
solicitor.” Little does Harker know that the Count’s only purpose for coming to
Great Britain is to instigate an act of “revenge” through reverse colonization.
The “crowded streets of mighty England” (18) are filled with human blood donors
that Dracula seeks to make into “my creatures, to do my bidding and to be my
jackals when I want to feed” (255). Thus, under the guise of assimilation into
the British Empire, the Count’s true vision is a nation of blood donors and
possible legions of vampires.
Moreover, if
the earlier gothic was often occupied with the liberation of the physical self
from the unjust imprisonment and degradation, stories in the late nineteenth
century frequently revolve around the preservation of one’s individual
identity, the conscious self, from disintegrating internal conflict (Malchow
126). As Van Helsing points out, Dracula represents a new form of monstrosity
that arises to outwit science, rationality, and Darwinism. When Dracula forces
Harker to remain with him for a month, the young solicitor realizes his
imprisonment with the “dread of this horrible place overpowering [me] and there
is no escape” (Stoker 30). While the
claustrophobia of the castle begins to diminish Harker’s mental state, what
pushes him to the brink of insanity are the manifestations of monstrosity which
prove inexplicable by his rational intellect. Initially, by recording his
experiences in the journal in a scientific manner even while experiencing the
supernatural, Harker desperately seizes the fragments of his rationality: “Let
me begin with facts- bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of
which there can be no doubt. I must not
confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation or
my memory of them” (27).
Harker tries
to understand, order, and control his experiences by relying on reason. When he
sees Dracula crawling down the castle’s steep walls “as a lizard,” the internal
conflict between the rational and the supernatural begins to disintegrate
Harker’s mind into tremendous turmoil and conflict. Furthermore, his encounter
with the vampire sisters proves particularly disturbing because it surfaces the
deep sexual desires that Harker must keep restrained as a well-mannered English
gentleman. Jonathan feels in his “heart a wicked, burning desire that they
would kiss me with those red lips” (33). So,
immobilized by the competing imperatives of “wicked desire” and deadly
fear,” Harker awaits an erotic fulfillment that entails the dissolution of the
boundaries of the self. Thus, his failure to accept these experiences on their
own supernatural terms means that he cannot actively comprehend them, and
instead they eventually transform Harker as his conscious self slips away in a
surreal state whereby an illusive reality envelopes and ravages his identity.
Less than one
hundred years after Dracula was published, in 1992, Francis Ford Coppola
released his own film version of it entitled Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Although much of the details of the original text was reproduced in visually
stunning ways, Coppola transformed Dracula himself into a modern definition of
Otherness by rendering a far more complex portrait of monstrosity than Stoker’s
initial vision. In the late twentieth century, monstrosity becomes acceptable
in popular culture when there are reasons behind it that surpass the purely
one-dimensional evil of Victorian texts. In effect, Coppola’s postmodern vision
delineates Dracula as a complex, multi-dimensional entity; a deeply emotional
persona perched on the delicate boundary between man and beast, struggling
between the incessantly carnal needs of the predator and the longing of an
unrealized and possibly redeeming love. Hence, utilizing the popular myths of
true love and reinforcing it with “new age” beliefs in reincarnation, Coppola’s
film represents Count Dracula as a redeemable soul whose humanized Otherness
dispels much of his monstrosity.
According
to Coppola, Dracula’s origins were not monstrous; he becomes evil after he is
robbed of his wife and true love Elizabeta. Unlike Stoker, Coppola shows
Dracula as a human being from the beginning. His Count is actually Vlad the
Impaler, who leaves Elizabeta to fight in the crusades. Elizabeta commits
suicide after reading a false note that Dracula has been killed in battle. When
Dracula returns to find his beloved wife dead, he renounces Christianity and becomes
the immortal, un-dead vampire. So, from the onset, Coppola constructs Dracula
as a tragic anti-hero whose passionate nature and thirst for true love lead him
to evil. Hence, Coppola’s Dracula dramatizes a romantic version of sexuality in
his obsession for romantic love.
Although he retains all aspects of Otherness that Stoker initially gave
him, the audience senses Dracula’s humanity precisely because he is capable of
feeling love. This results in a paradigmatic shift of the notions of
monstrosity. While Dracula must still be destroyed for all the same reasons as
before, the sentiment regarding his annihilation shifts from relief over the
destruction of evil to sadness for a lost soul redeemed by his release from
monstrosity. Hence, popular culture’s faith in the fantasy of true love and
romantic passion results to a certain extent in the audience’s acceptance for
and forgiveness of Dracula’s monstrosity.
Another
popular cultural belief that Coppola relies upon to construct Dracula as a
sympathetic character is that of reincarnation. This notion, the belief that
souls are immortal and thus reborn into new bodies after they die, derives from
eastern religious tradition and has always been considered anti-Christian.
Certainly, such a notion was unacceptable amidst the morphology and Darwinism
of the Victorian era. Yet, in the latter part of the twentieth century, the
concept of reincarnation, usually labeled as a “new age” belief, has developed
into a non-religious, popular cultural phenomenon. According to a sociological
study of England published in 1999, survey data indicate a substantial minority
of westerners with no attachment to Eastern or New Age religion who
nevertheless believe in reincarnation:
Many of them hold reincarnation alongside Christian belief; Most are
less than dogmatic about their belief and some entertain the possibility of
reincarnation because of experience (first or second hand). For others
reincarnation solves intellectual problems, e.g., concerning theodicy; in that
they see bodily incarnations in the context of long term spiritual progress,
and they value spirit over body. Their belief in reincarnation has rather
little effect on the rest of their lives. It is concluded that rising belief in
reincarnation heralds neither a spiritual nor a moral revolution, but fits
easily into the privatized religion that characterizes contemporary western
societies, and England in particular. (Walter 187)
Thus Coppola
capitalizes on this aspect of popular culture to inform and change the original
canonical text of Dracula. Mina is the reincarnation of Elizabeta in
this film and Dracula travels to London not so much to colonize it for
vampirism as to regain his lost love.
Coppola
remains true to his postmodern take by countering Dracula’s relationship with
Mina with that of his violence towards Lucy. Dracula must dispel his
monstrosity and evil upon Lucy so that he might sustain and nourish his love
for Mina. In Stoker’s original text, the representation of women and sexuality
can be traced back to Victorian anxieties regarding disease, infection, and
cultural invasion:
The women represent potential for transformation; they are the place
through which threats to cultural stability can enter. The metaphor of entry is
a sexual one so that “Woman” must remain soul not body, a transcendent value
not open to transformation- women must not become sexual. For the characters in
the novel, sexual desire leads to and is mingled with horror. (Boone 83)
Coppola
himself has stated that “vampires seduce us and take us to dark places and
awaken us sexually in ways that are taboo” (Coppola and Hart 136). Moreover,
vampirism is constructed in opposition to purity and righteousness, and thus as
a threat to society. In the beginning of the film, Sadie Frost portrays Lucy as
an overtly promiscuous woman who revels in the sexual conquest of her three
suitors and to a certain extent influences Mina to become sexually adventurous.
While Winona Ryder’s Mina represents the purity, chastity, and propriety of the
good Englishwoman, it is a state that she cannot fully sustain. In a sense, the
women are inviting Dracula’s seduction when they fantasize about sexual
pleasures and eventually become his mistress and wife, the vessels in which he
deposits both his violent and loving tendencies (Corbin 42).
In both
Stoker and Coppola’s visions, although more overtly in the latter, Mina and
Lucy represent the complex forces at war in Dracula’s soul. In the film,
Dracula tortures Harker after he discovers Mina’s photograph and recognizes her
as Elizabeta. He comes to England and immediately victimizes the lustful Lucy
whose aroused sexuality makes her an easy target. He ravages her in the form of
a beast but is painfully ashamed when discovered in the act by Mina. In order
to “protect” her, Dracula wills Mina to forget the violent sexuality she
witnessed. Instead, he appears to her as an eastern prince and woos her with
gentle, loving gestures. Yet, in order to satisfy the monster within, Dracula
continually preys upon Lucy to unleash the raw carnality that defines much of
his being. The violence toward Lucy increases as Dracula realizes that Mina
will indeed marry Harker and he will lose her again. In fact, as they wed,
Dracula fatally attacks Lucy in the form of a wolf thereby causing her “death”
and subsequent rebirth as a vampire. Thus, in the twentieth century, even
though Dracula may acquire emotions and the capacity to love, his monstrosity
and propensity towards violent, evil acts cannot be obliterated. Instead of the
one-dimensional evil of Stoker’s novel, Coppola’s Dracula is multi-faceted,
tortured, and completely at odds with the jagged dichotomies that characterize
his existence.
Furthermore,
the Otherness constructed by Stoker in his original motive of re-colonization
for the vampire’s migration to England are overshadowed in Coppola’s version by
Mina’s realization of her life as Elizabeta. Even though she initially
pronounces herself as “unclean, unclean” (Stoker 247), Mina realizes her love
for Dracula and seeks to embrace his otherness and become like him. Waking to
find Dracula in her bed, Mina says, “I’ve wanted this to happen. I know that
now. I want to be with you always.” Even though she knows that he killed Lucy,
Mina cannot stop loving Dracula. “I want to be what you are; see what you see;
love what you love,” she says. And
Dracula discloses the requirements of his love: “To walk with me you must die
to your present life and be reborn into mine.” Mina accepts the conditions
stating, “you are my love and my life always” to which Dracula responds, “then
I give you life eternal, everlasting love, the power of the storm and the
beasts of the earth. Walk with me to be
my loving wife forever.” Yet, when Mina attempts to drink his blood, Dracula
stops her saying, “I love you too much to condemn you.” He must accept that a
union with Mina cannot occur because of his existence as a being outside of
human definition or understanding. So, even in Coppola’s rather sympathetic
version, monstrosity of Dracula’s magnitude must be destroyed because of its
overwhelming threat to humanity. Unlike Stoker’s version where the vampire is
mercilessly annihilated, Coppola offers the monster salvation through love.
With Dracula’s acceptance of failure comes a desire for release from his
tortured immortality. After a loving goodbye, he asks Mina to behead him. Upon doing so, she beholds his former visage:
a young, handsome, man with an innocent face and a peaceful expression in
death. Thus, almost a century later, the monstrous Other who disgusts and
repels becomes something to be accepted and loved regardless of its faults.
In Dracula,
Stoker diligently and systematically combined all notions of otherness as
defined in physical appearance and identity in order to present a horrific picture
of monstrosity. Stoker probably never imagined that some day the otherness and
monstrosity that was so rejected and feared by both the greatest intellects and
popular masses of his era would come to be accepted; that less than a century later, popular
culture may not only look past monstrosity, but relate to and glorify it in
deeply psychological ways. Certainly, there is an identification with and
respect for those who rebel against the status quo. Post-modernism reveals the
fragmented realities of our existence and makes us acknowledge that there are
multiple layers of complexities within each human being. We all have goodness
and we also retain shades of darkness within us. The Dracula of the nineteenth
century was a one-dimensional being who motivations for evil were never quite
clear. Yet, he became a cultural icon precisely because of the continuing love
affair with predators and his longevity attests to the notion that, as Wilson
contends, we truly do love our monsters. Stoker’s creation has allowed us as a
society to problematize and re-interpret the notion of monstrosity. In many
ways, Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula enhances the vampire’s exoticism and
transcendence over time through the construction of internal complexity
supported by popular notions of true love and reincarnation. As a result, a
feared monster of the nineteenth century becomes a humanized, redeemable, and
romantic man in the twentieth-century popular imagination.
Works Cited:
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Peter. “Reality Bites.” Reader’s Digent (January 2001): 7.
Boone,
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Jeffrey J. ed. Monster Theory: Reading Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
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Francis Ford, and James V Hart. Bram
Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend.
New York: Newmarket Press, 1992.
Corbin,
Carol & Campbell, Robert. “Postmodern Iconography and Perspective in
Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.”
Journal of Popular Film and Television 27.2 (1999): 40-48.
Glover, David. “‘Our
Enemy is Not Merely Spiritual’: Degeneration and Modernity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Victorian Literature and Culture 22
(1994): 249-63.
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Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters.
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