Journal of Dracula Studies3 (2001)
[Dr Robert
James Frost studied at the Shakespeare Institute, Birmingham University,
England. Since 1986 he has worked as a Lecturer in a London College where he
has taught modules on Frankenstein and Dracula.]
Victor Frankenstein has
hidden himself away on one of the remote Orkney Islands, off the northeast
coast of Scotland, where he is on the verge of creating a second monster – a
She-creature. He has been working on the project for some time since he made
his promise to the Creature to make him a mate, but now he is having second
thoughts:
Even if they were to leave Europe, and
inhabit the new world, yet one of the first results of those sympathies for
which the daemon thirsted would be children, and a race of devils would be
propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of
man a condition precarious and full of terror. (160)
An interesting idea for a Science Fiction
sequel perhaps. But Mary Shelley’s novel takes a different direction when
Victor destroys the unfinished She-creature and prepares himself instead to
face the Creature’s wrath.
Many of the motifs in Frankenstein
(1818) resonate not only in Dracula, the most significant monster novel
of the late nineteenth century, but also in the fin-de-siècle classic SF tale,
H G Wells’s The War of The Worlds (1898). But first we need to examine
how Mary Shelley deals with scientific ideas in Frankenstein and
establishes the general outline that helps shape the later texts.
In terms of genre, Frankenstein
is generally considered a Gothic Horror novel. Indeed, it clearly owes much
to the Gothic literary tradition of the eighteenth century dating back to Walpole’s Castle of Otranto
(1764). But to pigeon-hole Shelley’s novel in this way is to understate how it
anticipates Science Fiction. In Trillion
Year Spree, Brian Aldiss argues the case for Mary Shelley as the first
writer of SF. Now whether we agree that Shelley was the first, and not Swift
for instance, is irrelevant here. Later SF writers such as Wells clearly
exploited the model of Frankenstein, including the horror elements, in
their own work.
In essence Frankenstein’s
claim to be SF rests on the way it represents the character of Victor
Frankenstein as “The Modern Prometheus.” The Greek myth of the fire-thief and
the terrible retribution of the gods certainly would have resonated with
Shelley’s classically educated readers. But significantly, Victor is not a god; he is a scientist, a new
type of protagonist in literature. Moreover the retribution Victor faces in the
novel is not directed by the gods; it is the Creature who takes revenge on his
creator. And what is the Creature but the symbol of scientific technology out
of control and wreaking havoc? Thus we have the essential formula for
subsequent writers of dystopian SF: a brilliant scientist invokes the powers of
science, but fails to control the forces he has unleashed with dire consequences
for himself and mankind, what Aldiss describes neatly as “Hubris clobbered by
nemesis” (30). Victor is “the Modern Prometheus,” not because he breaks the
laws of the gods and suffers divine retribution (a pious misreading of the
novel which does not stand up to close scrutiny) but because he is presumptuous
enough to think he can wield the god-like forces of science to conquer death
and produce a new utopia. Of course the results lead to a tragic denouement
with both the Creature and Victor facing destruction.
Let us turn now to a
closer examination of Victor’s character as a scientist. Victor approaches
science rather indirectly by way of alchemy and black magic. His intellectual
curiosity is aroused by reading the works of Paracelsus, Cornelius Agrippa and
Albertus Magnus. His father tells him these works are “sad trash” (38) but such
is the influence of Victor’s liberal education, he is free to choose his own
interests. He carries on reading these works in secret and, at the same time,
becomes intrigued by Nature and its hidden laws. His fascination with the
unknown is described in sexually charged language:
“The
most learned philosopher … had partially unveiled the face of Nature, but her
immortal lineaments were still a wonder and a mystery” (39).
Had Victor not been
living during the Eighteenth Century Enlightenment he would have run the risk
of serious charges for reading these banned books. The practice of witchcraft
was punishable by hanging and burning at the stake. Two points emerge out of
this. First of all, he is unable to share his interests with anyone; his
studies take a direction of esoteric and secret inquiry. Secondly, the pursuit
of knowledge is, in some ways, characterized by taboos and prohibitions.
When Victor witnesses an
electrical storm and sees an oak blasted by lightning, his interests take a new
direction towards empirical observation. He starts to investigate the subjects
of electricity and galvanism. All this eclipses Agrippa and the others. At
this point Shelley seems to be emphasizing the importance of inspiration as
well as reading and mental discipline. Victor could become a crank sorcerer or
a serious scientist. But is the dichotomy really that clear-cut? In its way the
sudden flash of “dazzling light” (40) which reduces the oak to a blasted stump
is just as dangerous and ominous as the path of forbidden sorcery. The
disturbing aspect to the lightning is that, far from being wielded by the hand
of a vengeful Jupiter, it is a completely arbitrary manifestation of enormous
destructive potential.
Victor goes to the
University of Ingolstadt to study Natural Philosophy, a catch-all term for the
newly emerging branches of science including Physics, Biology and Chemistry.
But on meeting his charismatic tutor, Waldman, the alchemists and sorcerers
once again become the topic of conversation. Victor has at last discovered
somebody sympathetic towards his esoteric interests. Waldman has no faith in
the transmutation of base metals into gold nor the elixir of life per se; yet
he respects those who did this as the early fathers of the modern techniques.
He sounds what is a familiarly contemporary note of scientific caution when it
comes to making claims about what science is capable of; however, as he warms
to his theme he seems to get carried away with the “ardour” that fires Walton,
Victor and Clerval elsewhere in the
book. Waldman’s panegyric about “real”
scientists depicts them as deus ex machina: “They ascend into the heavens: they
have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe”
(47).
Victor now begins to
attend lectures and embark on an arduous and methodical course of private
research which leads, by slow degrees, to the discovery of the spark of life.
He acquires an attic laboratory segregated from the rest of the house by stairs
and a gallery, and locks himself away from human contact. He calls it “a cell”
and he is, in some ways, imprisoned in it (53). His gregarious human instincts
and love of Nature are stifled. The requirement for privacy is underlined by
the very practical and prudent criterion that much of this research involves
grave robbing and the desecration and mutilation of corpses. His need to work
outside the law and suppress natural instinctive fears shows that science, to
most people at that time, still was a black art. Working against the current of
popular prejudice and ignorance, Victor can still identify with science as a
heroic individual enterprise casting himself in the role of Prometheus pouring
“a torrent of light into our dark world” (52). But it is in fact Victor who is
forced to work in the dead of night by the light of a candle. This obsessive
work takes a physical toll on him and, as his conception of the Creature
magnifies in his mind to a giant of eight foot stature, his body shrinks and
dwindles as if he is suffering from a wasting illness (55).
While he embraces
science, Victor never completely escapes from the supernatural. On the surface
he shows the signs of belonging to a materialistic creed of science. So he
boasts that he has no fear of the dark and that the desecration of graves holds
no terrors for him because he regards churchyards merely as the “receptacles”
for dead bodies (50). On the other hand, he employs a rhetoric throughout the
novel which constantly infers a supernatural order within the scheme of things.
His antagonism towards the Creature is always expressed within a Miltonic frame
of reference. Thus the Creature who desires to be called Adam is dismissed by
Victor as devil, daemon and diabolical fiend. Victor also invokes guardian
angels and summons spirits to his aid (41). And yet the rhetoric is misleading
because different characters take it up and apply it in different ways to suit
their purposes. The epigraph to the novel, Adam’s complaint to God from Paradise
Lost, seems to support the Creature’s case that he deserves the same care
and attention from Victor, his god-like creator (97). Ironically, during
Victor’s pursuit of the Creature at the end of the novel through the frozen
wastes of the Arctic, it is the scientist who, like Milton’s Satan, carries
hell around inside him (197). Far from resolving the moral issues involved in
the conflicts of the characters, the rhetoric of damnation and redemption seems
designed to heighten our ambivalence towards them.
The inconsistency of
Victor’s rhetoric and its sense of awkwardness when it does not seem to quite
suit his unique circumstances, come out strongly in the churchyard scene where
he swears vengeance under the moonlight before Elizabeth’s tomb:
To execute this dear revenge will I again
behold the sun, and tread the green herbage of the earth, which otherwise
should vanish from my eyes forever. And I call on you, spirits of the dead; and
on you, wandering ministers of vengeance, to aid and conduct me in my work. Let
the cursed and hellish monster drink deep of agony; let him feel the despair
that now torments me. (196)
The language has the rhythm of
incantation. What does he know about furies and the spirits of the dead? “The
green herbage of the earth” (presumably grass) is a particularly clumsy
euphemism. In his grief-stricken and temporarily deranged state of mind Victor
seems to have forgotten about skepticism. Now the churchyard receptacle of
bones is full of listening ghosts.
Shelley glosses over the
actual moment of the Creature’s creation, never taking us into Victor’s
laboratory, to focus on the crucial moment of rejection instead. In keeping
with the taboos surrounding science, Walton, the auditor of Victor’s narrative,
must not be let into its secrets. At the heart of the novel’s presentation of
science is what might be described as a crisis of seeing, an error of
perception which highlights a crucial cultural and philosophical debate between
Enlightenment Science and Romanticism. We need to put this in its historical
context.
The Romantics approved
of science insofar as it supported their agenda for reform and radical social
change. The Romantic vision of man, partially derived from Rousseau, insisted
that man was a free being of unlimited potential who found himself enchained
within a repressive and corrupt social order. But if science had a role to play
in assisting man to throw off Blake’s mind-forged manacles, it also came to
challenge Romanticism in certain ways. Crucial to the Romantic view was the
beauty of the natural world and how we learn to perceive it. Wordsworth
expresses the crucial dialectic between feeling observer and observed object in
his poem “The Rainbow”:
My heart leaps up when I
behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life
began;
So it is now I am a man;
So be it when I shall
grow old,
Or let me die!
The poet is subject to the ravages of
time, but the rainbow cannot change, will always be beautiful. In his
experiments with prisms and the refractive properties of light, Isaac Newton
approaches the rainbow through his scientific intellect. The key question for
the Romantics was not whether Newton was suffering from chroma-stigmatism; it
was the issue of the primacy of perception: how to maintain the primacy of
feeling over the detached scientific gaze? Did beauty exist or not?
In Frankenstein,
we find a repeated dramatization of these crises of perception. The most
drastic of them is the shift from Victor’s telling of the story to the
Creature’s account. We suddenly find ourselves plunged into an alien universe
of Lockean phenomenology where nothing is called by its right name and all
objects are reduced to sensory data. Another example occurs when the Creature,
who has been hiding in the hovel next to the De Lacey’s cottage, reveals
himself to the old blind man. Everything goes well at first until the other
members of the family arrive and with their unimpaired vision, immediately jump
to the wrong conclusion that De Lacey is in danger from a monster. In a moral
sense a blind man sees better than they do.
Victor’s character is
that of a Romantic scientist. This is demonstrated by his love for Elizabeth to
whose beauty he is susceptible. It is also made apparent in the way he responds
to Nature. His heart leaps up with Wordsworth’s when, after Justine’s death, he
retreats to the lakes and mountains of the Alps. When he hears the cracking and
groaning of the ice his scientific instincts are reminded of “the silent
working of immutable laws” (93) which it was the practical job of science to
discover, but he is no detached Newtonian observer recording data because his
soul is moved. Again after the death of William, the first victim of the
Creature, he finds some relief in the electrical storm over Mont Blanc (73).
The
two words “artisan” and “artist” have their roots in the same Latin noun,
ars/artis, meaning “skill.” While today we think of these as two
distinctive appellations (the artisan is a workman skilled in any trade, while
the artist is specifically an individual gifted in the fine arts), during the
Romantic era the terms were more fluid. Scientists such as Erasmus Darwin
(Charles Darwin’s grandfather) wrote poetry and Isaac Newton wrote theological
tracts, while Victor Frankenstein, in the middle of his scientific
investigations, expects to feel like “an artist occupied by his favourite
employment” (56). The characterization of Victor as Romantic scientist would
have been much less incongruous to Shelley than to a modern reader.
At the heart of the
novel then is Victor’s rejection of the Creature founded on a fatal error of
perception which is highlighted by the polarization of Romanticism and science.
Often in the cinema the Creature has been depicted as malformed, brain damaged
or morally stigmatized in some other way. (One recalls the infamous “criminal
brain” in James Whale’s 1931 Hollywood version, for example.) But the truth is
that Victor’s rejection of the Creature is not founded on any perceived moral
defect; he rejects the Creature because he is a disillusioned Romantic who
cannot see beyond the ugliness of his creation. In some ways his reaction could
be compared with Pygmalion in the myth of the artistic sculptor who falls in
love with the statue he has carved, though in this case it is hate, not love,
at first sight.
The conclusion of the
novel forces the reader to confront a moral dilemma. Victor has pursued the
Creature to the Arctic, bent on undoing his work by destroying it. But the
chase has exhausted him and he is now dying in Walton’s cabin. He admonishes
Walton to shun ambition, advice which Walton heeds by eventually abandoning his
mission to reach the North Pole. Yet Victor appears to vacillate, as seen in
his dying words: “Yet why do I say this? I have myself been blasted in these
hopes, yet another may succeed” (210). This he directs at Walton, the
sympathetic listener, to whom he has not
divulged the secret of his scientific techniques to kindle the spark of life.
How do we respond to it? Is it a profession of faith in the ultimate progress
of scientific discovery? Or is it an ominous forecast for the future about the
fatal blindness of human aspiration? Victor may after all have thrown his life
away for nothing.
Let
us now turn to that other great horror novel of the nineteenth century, Dracula,
and note how some of these motifs, to be later more fully developed in SF,
resonate in Stoker’s classic tale of the vampire. Published in 1897, almost
eighty years after Frankenstein, it was inevitable that comparisons
between the two would be made. Stoker’s mother, Charlotte, was the first to
make the connection in a letter to her son, but ever since then the creaky
black hearse of the gothic band wagon has been lumbering down hill, picking up
speed.
Readers of Dracula
first encounter the Count through the eyes of Jonathan Harker. On a business
trip to Transylvania to settle Dracula’s purchase of property in England,
Harker keeps a journal of his strange, often surreal, experiences as the
Count’s guest. One of these
distinctively echoes an image from Frankenstein. Three days
after his arrival at the Castle, Harker is shaving in his room when Dracula
pays him an unexpected visit. Harker can see the whole of the room behind him
reflected in the mirror, but not Dracula. He is so startled he cuts himself
with his razor. Suddenly Dracula is transformed:
When the Count saw my face, his eyes
blazed with demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat. I drew
away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made
an instant change in him for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly
believe it was ever there. (38)
Harker is saved in the nick of time. But
instead of being terrified he becomes annoyed because the mirror has been
broken when Dracula hurls it out of the window. How is he going to shave now?
Harker’s concern about the trivialities of personal grooming after such a
figurative close shave is comical. So too is Dracula’s sardonic retort: “take
care how you cut yourself. It is more dangerous than you think in this country”
(38).
The magical detail of
Dracula’s invisible face in the mirror has no realistic explanation. The point
serves to illustrate the difference between Shelley’s Creature and the vampire.
As I have argued, Frankenstein tends to displace magic in favor of a
Romantic mythologized version of science whereas in Dracula magic tends
to exist side-by-side with science in an uneasy relationship.
Of
note here is the
short but moving scene when Shelley’s Creature goes out into the forest and
gazes at his own reflection in a pool of water. He sees himself as others see
him and the Creature shares in the world’s condemnation of his ugliness (110).
But it is not so much the Creature’s ugliness which reveals a hidden moral
deformity as in the case of Stoker’s vampire; Shelley locates the roots of evil
in the relationship between the scientist and his creation characterized by
hatred and loathing. In other words, the breakdown of Rousseau’s social
contract between Victor and the Creature is what produces the evil consequences
of alienation. The ugliness is only the catalyst.
An
interesting use of reflective properties can be found in Wells’s The
War of The Worlds, published just one year after Dracula. Shortly
after the first Martian cylinder lands on Horsell Common, a thin rod rises from
the pit of the impact crater and on top of it is a spinning circular disc which
wobbles as it revolves. When a small group of people approach the cylinder
waving a white flag “the ghost of a beam of light” (23) is directed from the
disc and the delegation of peace is suddenly incinerated. The Martians have
unleashed their first weapon in their invasion of the earth – the heat ray. Wells
too is fascinated by the properties of mirrors in keeping with the literary
tradition of the fin de siècle. Here a polished parabolic mirror is used by the
Martians, to project not light but intense heat radiation in the manner of a
mirror in a lighthouse. The soul-less Martians have no use for mirrors as
symbols of individual human identity; nevertheless in the glittering,
reflective carapaces of their war machines armed with heat rays they ruthlessly
set about exterminating terrestrial life. The ugliness of the individual
Martians recorded by Wells’s anonymous narrator is as nothing compared to the
cool detachment with which they perpetrate genocide. Wells’s innovation is that
he takes the Romantic theme of the isolated individual alienated by scientific
technology (see Shelley’s Creature) and he generalizes it to apply to the human
species. The egotism of the individual and the vanity of human pride is exposed
by the team effort and overwhelming superiority of Martian technology.
Let us extend the
discussion to include Van Helsing’s science in relation to Dracula’s black
magic. Consider the scene in which
Harker looks out of a castle window and sees Dracula climbing down the
sheer face of a wall. He hangs “face down” over an abyss with his cloak
billowing (italics Stoker’s).[1]
This is certainly bizarre, but why is it so horrifying to Harker? Because
Dracula scrambles on all fours “just as a lizard moves along a wall” (49).
Harker’s unusual simile telegraphs the idea that Dracula is at once more than
human and less than human, related to the lower reptiles.
The reader is reminded
of this incident later when Harker again looks out of the window and sees
Dracula making the vertical descent this time wearing Jonathan’s traveling
clothes (62). In effect, the Vampire has forced Harker to change places with
him and stolen his soul-image.
Such
doubling
continues when the scene shifts to England and we meet the two heroines, Lucy
Westenra and Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancée. Lucy’s name reminds us that she is
a child both of light and of the occident. This pair of females soon become the
successive prey of the Vampire when he makes the crossing to England. The main
plot of Dracula is in fact one story repeated twice as the hunters
struggle to save Lucy from the predation of the Vampire and, failing, then
fight to protect Mina.
In the midst of all these
pairings the strangest of them is Stoker’s doubling of Dracula and Van Helsing,
his arch-enemy. Van Helsing plays the role of white magician to counter the
black magic of Dracula, but Stoker insists on presenting Van Helsing as a
scientist, a specialist in Neurology with so many impressive credentials they
won’t even fit on the letterhead: “M.D., D.PH, D.LIT etc etc.” Now being
qualified is one thing, but the reader learns with a feeling of discomfort that
the friendship between Seward and the Dutchman is based on a parody of vampiric
bonding. Apparently, when Van Helsing poisoned himself with a gangrenous knife
during a surgical operation, medical student Seward was the only one courageous
enough to suck the poison from the wound thus saving his teacher’s life (148).
Clive Leatherdale draws this comparison:
By his use of garlic
with Host and crucifix Van Helsing takes science across the frontiers of
witchcraft. Whereas Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, eighty years earlier,
had been a “magician-turned-scientist” Van Helsing becomes a
“scientist-turned-magician.” (123)
Mina Harker’s
description of Van Helsing is surely meant to echo Jonathan’s earlier account
of Dracula in its evocation of physiognomy:
[He is] a man of medium height, strongly
built, with his shoulders set back over a broad, deep chest and a neck well
balanced on the trunk as the head is on the neck. The poise of the head strikes
one at once as indicative of thought and power; the head is noble, well sized
broad and large behind the ears. The face, clean shaven, shows a hard square
chin, a large resolute, mobile mouth, a good-sized nose, rather straight, but
with quick sensitive nostrils, that seem to broaden as the big bushy brows come
down and the mouth tightens.” (235)
Though Harker describes Dracula as being
tall and thin, Dracula shares many features with Van Helsing. They both have
bushy eyebrows, exaggerated nostrils, hard clean shaven chins and high domed
foreheads from which the hair falls away. Van Helsing’s blue eyes can change
rapidly from tender to stern just as Dracula’s piercing red eyes can shift in
an instant from crafty courtesy to homicidal malevolence. The key word in each
characterization is “strong,” partly physical strength, but more importantly
the power of influence over others for good or for evil. In addition to this
Dracula has feral traits. His sharp white fangs are the most obvious; however,
he also has pointed nails and hair growing out of his palms. His ears are pale
and pointed too.
Physiognomy is not
something we accept today so the modern reader, conditioned by Star Trek
repeats and Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, may be skeptical. But from the
perspective of the Harkers, Dracula and Van Helsing are uncomfortably matched.
When in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker describes
contemporary Victorian celebrities such as Lord
Tennyson and Sir Richard Burton, he refers to their prominent canine
teeth indicating that they were fighters, not in the pugilistic sense, but in the
sense of their proud indomitable spirits. Tennyson comes across to Stoker as “a
great Newfoundland dog” (198), meant as a compliment. So Van Helsing and
Dracula too are covered with the same mantle of nobility and iron resolution.
But is the moral
integrity of Van Helsing’s shamanic-science compromised by the close links with
Dracula’s black magic? In posing
this question we now approach the heart of the novel. Underlying Stoker’s
belief in physiognomy is the novel’s fundamental idea that we can generalize
about individual physical traits and use them to classify human beings into
psychological types. Dracula himself belongs to the same class as Van Helsing.
For Stoker, Dracula is not simply threatening because he is an individual
predator, a loner like Shelley’s Creature. The real curse of the undead is the
way they can infiltrate Victorian society and subvert its ordered hierarchy.
Vampires can interbreed with humans and contaminate the species like a
syphilitic infection. This is why Van Helsing’s struggle with Dracula is an
indirect struggle for control over the bodies of Lucy and Mina. Vampires
reproduce asexually of course and yet Dracula’s attentions inevitably gravitate
towards women. Why? Because if he can control the women then he can seed chaos
and degeneracy by controlling the biological destiny of the race. Cornered by
Van Helsing and his band, the Count turns to taunt them: “Your girls that you
all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine -
my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed” (395).
The image of the jackal
recalls Stoker’s earlier reference to Dracula’s cold stare of lion-like disdain
(393), his lizard like scrambling along a vertical wall and many other images
from “tiger” (412) to “fox” (376). These images, no doubt, all help to
reinforce the idea of Dracula’s savagery, but they also seem to be used by
Stoker to characterize the female vampires as well: they lick their chops (54)
and snarl like cats (271).
One way of making sense
of these images is to interpret them as the Freudian symbols of repressed
desires. The psychoanalytic perspective on Dracula insists that our
fascination with vampires rests on the way they embody our unconscious impulses
to feed, to suck, to possess utterly. But I want to take a different line of
inquiry. The extended canines of vampires are the most obvious way in which
they come to represent animals. Nevertheless, seen from the unsound scientific
perspective of physiognomy, the threat of vampires is that they blur the basic
categories that separate rational human beings from the irrational instincts of
beasts. To a physiognomist like Stoker this was an especially appalling
prospect because if human beings could revert to animals then the categories
themselves could become confused and the most cherished beliefs of Victorian
society in progress and the sanctity of marriage were vulnerable.
It
is here that we find a major intersection between the Gothic modernism of Dracula
and fin-de-siècle Science Fiction. Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species
(1859) had a profound impact on the Victorians because it challenged the
Biblical account of Creation and placed the emphasis instead on the common
origins and development of all life on earth. In this respect, it tended to
erode the perceived differences between humans and animals and emphasized their
similarities. Thus the small bone extending from the base of the human
vertebrae, the coccyx, was an illustration that humans and apes shared a common
ape-like ancestor. The social consequences of this were enormous and
unpredictable, but basically what happened was that Religion lost its hegemony
and faith went into decline.
Science Fiction as a
literary form also gained momentum from the advent of Darwin, since the
influence of science was greatly extended into every sphere of life and it
became feasible to speculate in new and imaginative ways about the future
destiny of man, themes which before tended to be inhibited by censorship and
orthodoxy. But freedom breeds anxiety and uneasy soul-searching and so much of
fin-de-siècle SF projects a world of doubt, monsters, grim dystopias, identity
crises and moral anxieties.
Darwin had a fortuitous
encounter with a real vampire bat while he was on expedition in South America.
It happened when he was camping with a servant in Coquimbo, Chile, and one of
their horses became restless. They went to investigate and Darwin’s servant put
his hand on the horse’s withers to remove the small vampire – Desmodus Rufus.
It is interesting to observe that the person who first refers in any detail to
vampires in Dracula is not the expert Van Helsing, but Stoker’s answer
to Indiana Jones, the Texan adventurer and explorer, Quincey Morris. Quincey’s
anecdote is similar to Darwin’s (196).[2]
As a scientist Darwin
was interested in seeing the vampire’s feeding habits as an example of
specialized adaptation. As a writer Stoker was interested in adapting Darwinist
science to bolster his myth of Dracula. Count Dracula is able to cross the
species barriers by transforming himself into a wolf or a bat; we also see him
using his magic powers to influence the lower animals such as rats. When the
hunters enter his Carfax lair, he uses a whole pack of rats to menace them. But
as well as being a type of evolutionary throwback, a creature of animal
appetites and dangerous spontaneous impulses, Dracula is sophisticated,
calculating, cunning and has an evolving brain to rival the rational faculties
of human beings.
It is possible to read
the struggle between vampires and human beings in evolutionary terms as a
competition between rival species on the food chain.
“You
think to baffle me, you – with your pale faces all in a row, like sheep in a
butcher’s” (394), says Dracula in what is essentially an inversion of the order
we all tend to take for granted. From the dispassionate viewpoint of Darwinism
there are no special guarantees that human beings cannot be relegated to mutton
by a superior predator.
Stoker’s use of Renfield
fits into this larger pattern. Renfield is diagnosed by Dr Seward as a
zoophagous madman, but actually his condition represents natural selection gone
mad. His madness ultimately implies cannibalism.[3]
Darkly comic as the Renfield subplot is, it serves to illustrate the
competitive Darwinism underlying Stoker’s theory of vampires. The degeneration
of Victorian society, the most advanced form of industrial capitalism, appears
to mark the ascendancy of vampires as the potential dominant species of the
planet. The theory of evolution attempts to do justice to the infinite
multiplicity and complex variations of life and yet it also emphasizes the
harshness of the implacable laws which pit species against one another. The swiftest
runners, the fiercest killers, the most prolific breeders are the ones which
get to pass on their genes whereas the losers become extinct. Therefore
Dracula’s red teeth and claws reprise the famous image of Tennyson’s Nature. He
embraces Darwinism; Van Helsing’s science and parapsychology seeks to promote
human values in the face of Darwinian theory.
Cannibalism, blood
drinking and social degeneration then are interrelated themes in Dracula.
But the feeding habits of vampires on sheep-like humans also points
towards The War of The Worlds. Wells’s Martians have more than a passing
resemblance to Darwin’s vampire bats. Desmodus Rufus has a very narrow
oesophagus opening at right angles into its stomach and thus it dispenses with
the extended intestinal system familiar in other mammals. The anonymous
narrator of Wells’s novel tells us the
Martians “were heads – merely heads” (119). Without entrails or a digestive
tract the Martians have evolved into vampires and they therefore derive their
nourishment from injecting the blood of other creatures directly into their
bodies. They do this by means of a straw or a “little pipette” like the
hypodermic fang of the vampire.
This information, cut
out of some early editions of The War of The Worlds as too horrible for
many readers, actually helps to promote a dual interpretation of the aliens. On
the one hand, Wells offers a painstakingly realistic account of an invasion of
Earth from another planet, focusing on South East England but essentially
implying the collapse of human civilization; on the other hand, the parasitic
Martians are distorted images of ourselves, pointing to one possible path for
human evolution. The super-intelligent Martians, totally reliant on their
technology in an Earth environment, with atrophied bodies and emotions,
illustrate what we may become in the distant future.
One final comment on
this may be offered and that is the way Wells, drawing on Darwin, invokes
animal images to promote this dualistic aspect of The War of The Worlds.
So we have references to the Dodo (7, 31), native of the Mauritius islands and
proverbial example of an extinct species, frogs (61), caterpillars (29) and
even microscopic organisms as the Martians observe Earth through their
telescopes in the great opening sequence of the novel, which foretells its
surprising and yet inevitable outcome (5). The sterile Martians are defeated by
micro-organisms finally. But these images serve not only to diminish the scale
of human pretensions – to the Martians we are of no more significance than
insect larvae – they are a constant reminder to the reader of how we ourselves
have a history of disregarding the life of other organisms on this planet:
“Like sheep in a butcher’s.”
The
basic SF paradigm traceable to Shelley’s Frankenstein draws on various
forms of pre-Darwininan Romantic myth and archetype to raise moral questions
about future technology and human progress. Victor’s dying words in the novel
are, “ I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed” (210).
By the time Dracula appears in 1897 the shaping forces of science and
the philosophy of Darwin questioning the fundamentals of faith and salvation
have permeated Victorian society. We are in the age of the fin-de-siècle.
Van Helsing is a new
kind of scientific hero, not seeking to create a monster but to destroy one.
Moreover, Van Helsing’s mission is not simply to eradicate the representative
of evil. In order to achieve his goal he has to act as a type of shaman to
counteract the skepticism and the modern forces of materialism which are
corrupting England. As well as combating Dracula’s influence through hypnosis
and blood transfusions, Van Helsing has to fight for the hearts and minds of
Seward, Mina and the others to consolidate their league against the vampire in
whom they do not believe at first. Victor Frankenstein is a study in
alienation; however, Van Helsing’s job is to create a new type of human society
in miniature, a community of the faithful, which will be capable of
collectively resisting evil. He is not a loner like Victor.
The discussion of The
War of The Worlds helps to suggest a parallel with Stoker in the way two
different contemporary writers respond to Darwin. The Martians have no
individualized identity as Count Dracula and the Creature do, but they have the
feeding habits of vampires. Blood drinking, along with cannibalism, is at once a symbol of atavistic
savagery, a regression to the primitive animal inside all of us and also a
Science Fiction metaphor for the ruthless detachment and unfeeling
sophistication of “superior” alien minds. The Byronic individualism of Dracula
invests him with all the allure of Romantic myth whereas the irredeemable
Martians assume collective action and act as an amoral force of nature. There
actions may have “evil” consequences for mankind and yet they hardly seem to
have a moral dimension. Is Dracula redeemed at the end of the novel as the
final “look of peace” on his face as he lies in his coffin may suggest (484)?
It is hard to be confident. The Creature passes judgment on himself saying he
is going to commit his body to the Promethean flames, but he is still very much
alive at the end of Frankenstein, leaving open questions about
the justice of the gods. Arguably, alongside the blood of the Huns and the
Szekelys which the Count boasts to Harker is running through his aristocratic
veins, there may well have been the odd trace of Martian.
Works Cited:
Aldiss,
Brian, with David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science
Fiction. Grafton Books, 1986.
Leatherdale,
Clive. Dracula: The Novel and the Legend. Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert
Island Books, 1993.
Shelley,
Mary. Frankenstein. 1818. Penguin Classics, 1992.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. 1897.
Penguin Classics, 1993.
Stoker,
Bram. Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving. London: Macmillan, 1906.
Wells,
H G. The War of the Worlds. 1898. Everyman, 1993
[1] In the
Francis Ford Coppola film, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), we have a
vertiginous shot of Dracula (Gary Oldman) crawling on all fours in an enormous
trailing scarlet cape lit up by the stark flashes of an electrical storm. He
hangs over an abyss.
[2] Stoker
certainly knew of such traveler’s tales of real vampires and adapted them to
his novel. Darwin’s account was readily accessible in the 1888 edition of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. Furthermore there was a reference to vampire bats in “Vampires
in New England,” an article Stoker read while in New York in 1896. Real
vampires are not large, however; the
head and body of the vampire is only about three inches long.
[3] Van Helsing in
the Coppola film was played by Anthony Hopkins, who had already gained fame for
playing the cannibal Hannibal Lecter, in The Silence of the Lambs.
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