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Dracula
Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified solicitor from London, steps into the Carpathian Mountains in 1890 expecting a routine business transaction, only to find himself trapped in a castle where the sun never rises and the air smells of decay. He is there to help Count Dracula purchase a house near London, a task that quickly devolves into a fight for survival when the Count reveals his true nature as a vampire. Harker wanders the castle at night, ignoring the Count's warnings, and encounters three vampire women who attempt to feed on him. Dracula rescues him but leaves him to the women's mercy before departing for England, abandoning Harker to his fate. Harker escapes the castle, delirious and traumatized, and ends up in a hospital in Budapest, where he recounts a story that no one believes. The Count, meanwhile, has set sail on a ship called the Demeter, carrying boxes of earth from his homeland, and the crew's logbook tells a terrifying tale of disappearance until only the captain remains, bound to the helm to maintain course. An animal resembling a large dog leaps ashore when the ship runs aground at Whitby, marking the beginning of a plague that will sweep across England.
The Hunt For The Undead
Lucy Westenra, a beautiful young woman, becomes the first victim of the Count's predation after he arrives in Whitby. She begins to sleepwalk and falls into a deep, unnatural sleep, her health deteriorating rapidly despite the efforts of her suitors, including Dr John Seward, Quincey Morris, and Arthur Holmwood. Her mother removes the garlic flowers placed around her room by Professor Abraham Van Helsing, not knowing they repel vampires, and Lucy dies shortly after her mother dies of a heart attack. After her burial, newspapers report children being stalked in the night by a bloofer lady, and Van Helsing deduces that Lucy has become a vampire. The men, including Harker and his new bride Mina, go to her tomb and find her transformed. They stake her heart, behead her, and fill her mouth with garlic to ensure she cannot rise again. The hunt for Dracula intensifies as the group realizes the Count has distributed his boxes of earth around various properties in London. Van Helsing reveals that vampires can only rest on earth from their homeland, and the group must track him down before he can escape. They discover that Dracula has been communicating with Renfield, an insane man who eats vermin to absorb their life force, and they use this connection to track his movements. The hunters pursue Dracula to his castle in Transylvania, where they split up to cover all possible escape routes. Van Helsing and Mina go to the castle to destroy the vampire women, while Harker and Holmwood pursue Dracula's boat on the river, and Morris and Seward follow them on land. The final confrontation sees Harker decapitate Dracula as Morris stabs him in the heart, causing the Count to crumble to dust and freeing Mina from her vampiric curse. Morris is mortally wounded in the fight against the Romani and dies at peace, knowing that Mina is saved.
Common questions
When was the novel Dracula written and published?
The novel Dracula was mostly written in the 1890s and published in 1897. Bram Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes and drew extensively from folklore and history during this period.
Who is the author of the novel Dracula and when was he born?
Bram Stoker is the author of the novel Dracula and he was born in Clontarf, Dublin on the 8th of November 1842. He died in 1912 after publishing 18 books including Dracula as his seventh published work.
What are the specific weaknesses of Count Dracula in the novel?
Count Dracula must be invited into one's home, sleeps on earth from his homeland, and has no reflection in mirrors. Sunlight is not fatal to Dracula in the novel but it does weaken him.
How many times has the character Dracula been adapted into media?
Scholars note that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times. The Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character in 2015.
Why did the novel Dracula enter the public domain in the United States?
Bram Stoker failed to comply with United States copyright law which prematurely placed the novel into the public domain in the United States. This occurred in the 1930s when Universal Studios initiated development on a Dracula film.
Bram Stoker, born in Clontarf, Dublin on the 8th of November 1842, was a sickly child who was homeschooled before attending a private day school and later Trinity College Dublin. He began writing theatre reviews in the early 1870s and became friends with stage actor Henry Irving after writing a review of his performance. In 1878, Irving offered Stoker a job as the business manager of London's Lyceum Theatre, which he accepted, and he married Florence Balcombe later that year. This role required Stoker to be sociable and introduced him to the elites of Victorian London, yet he described himself as a private person who closely guarded his thoughts. Stoker supplemented his theatre income by writing romance and sensation novels, but was more closely identified during his lifetime with the theatre than he was with the literary world. By the time of his death in 1912, he had published 18 books, with Dracula being his seventh published book. Stoker's great-nephew, Daniel Farson, wrote that Stoker may have died from syphilis, but this is widely disputed by scholars. Novelist and playwright Hall Caine, a close friend of Stoker's, wrote in Stoker's obituary in The Daily Telegraph that, besides his biography on Irving, Stoker wrote only to sell and had no higher aims. The novel was mostly written in the 1890s, and Stoker produced over a hundred pages of notes, drawing extensively from folklore and history. He probably found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while on holiday, selecting it because he thought it meant devil in Romanian.
The Folklore And The Fiction
Folkloric vampires predate Stoker's Dracula by hundreds of years, and Stoker adopted some characteristics of folkloric vampires for his own, such as their aversion to garlic and staking as a means of killing them. He invented other attributes, for example, Stoker's vampires must be invited into one's home, sleep on earth from their homeland and have no reflection in mirrors. Sunlight is not fatal to Dracula in the novel, a fact that was an invention of the unauthorized Dracula film Nosferatu in 1922, but it does weaken him. Some of Stoker's inventions applied unrelated lore to vampires for the first time, for example, Dracula has no reflection because of a folkloric concept that mirrors show the human soul. Some Irish scholars have suggested Irish folklore as an inspiration for the novel, for example the revenant Abhartach, and the 11th-century High King of Ireland Brian Boru. Dracula scholar Elizabeth Miller notes that in his childhood Stoker was exposed to supernatural tales and Irish oral history involving premature burials and staked bodies. Count Dracula has literary progenitors, including John William Polidori's The Vampyre from 1819, which includes an aristocratic vampire with powers of seduction, and the lesbian vampire of Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla from 1872, who can transform into a cat, as Dracula can transform into a dog. There is almost unanimous consensus that Dracula was inspired, in part, by Henry Irving, with scholars noting the Count's tall and lean physique and aquiline nose, with Dracula scholar William Hughes specifically citing the influence of Irving's performance as Shylock in a Lyceum Theatre production of The Merchant of Venice. Historical figures have been suggested as inspirations for Count Dracula, including the Wallachian prince Vlad the Impaler and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory, but recent scholarship suggests otherwise, with no evidence that Stoker drew directly from their crimes.
The Epistolary Structure
Dracula is an epistolary novel, structured through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles, a format that has been neglected in analyses compared to other elements of the novel. Critics note Stoker's decision to structure the novel this way may relate to a 19th-century trend of publishing diaries and travelogue accounts, especially with Harker's account of the journey to Transylvania. The structure only provides a narrative voice to Dracula's opponents, while the collaborative narration reinforces the idea that Dracula must be defeated by a combined effort. The narrative's style distances the reader from its plot, with Dracula's journey on the Demeter captured by the captain on the logbook, then translated by the Russian consul, transcribed by a local journalist, and finally pasted by Mina into her journal. This structure highlights the power struggle between the vampire and his hunters, as well as the power struggle between Mina and the male protagonists for narrative mastery. The novel is characteristically Gothic in its depiction of the supernatural, preoccupation with the past, and embodying of the racial, gendered and sexual anxieties of fin de siècle England. Count Dracula generally represents these tensions, being both masculinised and feminised, and his appearance as racially western and eastern. Dracula deviates from other Gothic tales before it by firmly establishing its time as the modern era, a point raised by one contemporary reviewer. Writers of the mode were drawn to the Eastern Europe setting because travelogues presented it as a land of primitive superstitions.
The Victorian Anxieties
Sexuality and seduction are two of the novel's most frequently discussed themes, and modern critical writings about vampirism widely acknowledge its link to sex and sexuality. Across the novel's critical history, theorists have collectively argued that the Count breaks virtually every Victorian taboo, including non-procreative sexuality, abnormal sexuality, fellatio, bisexuality, incest and the abuse of children. Transgressive or abnormal sexuality within Dracula is a broad topic, with some psychosexual critics exploring the novel's disruption of Victorian gender roles. The novel contains no overt homosexual acts, but homosexuality and homoeroticism are elements discussed by critics, with Christopher Craft arguing that the primary threat Dracula poses is that he will seduce, penetrate, and drain another male. The novel reveals a reactionary response to the New Woman phenomenon, a late-Victorian term used to describe an emerging class of women with increased social and economic control over their lives. Several critics describe the battle against Dracula as a fight for control over women's bodies, with Mina, who plays an important role in Dracula's defeat, repeatedly expressing contempt for the concept. Dracula, and specifically the Count's migration to Victorian England, is frequently read as emblematic of invasion literature, and a projection of fears about racial pollution. In an influential postcolonialist analysis, Stephen Arata describes the novel's cultural context of mounting anxiety in Britain over the decline of the British Empire, the rise of other world powers, and a growing domestic unease over the morality of imperial colonisation. Critics frequently identify antisemitic themes and imagery in the novel, with Dracula's appearance resembling some other cultural depictions of Jews, such as Fagin in Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist and Svengali of George du Maurier's Trilby.
The Public Domain Legacy
Dracula has been adapted many times across virtually all forms of media, with scholars noting that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times, with nearly 1000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage. In 2015, the Guinness Book of World Records named Dracula the most portrayed literary character, noting he had appeared almost twice as much as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Adaptations were produced during Stoker's lifetime, with Stoker's first theatrical adaptation, Dracula, or The Undead, read once at the Lyceum Theatre. The first film to feature Count Dracula was a Hungarian silent film, Károly Lajthay's Drakula halála, which allegedly premiered in 1921 but this release date has been questioned by some scholars. Very little of the film survives, and the cover artist for the 1926 Hungarian edition of the novel was more influenced by the second adaptation of Dracula, F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu from 1922. Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, initiated legal action against Prana, the studio behind Nosferatu, and the legal case lasted two or three years, with Prana agreeing to destroy all copies in May 1924. In the 1930s, Universal Studios initiated development on a Dracula film and learned Stoker failed to comply with United States copyright law. This prematurely placed the novel into the public domain in the United States, and it was not until the 1960s that publishers recognized the novel's copyright status. Stoker's mistake prevented his descendants from collecting royalties but provided ideal conditions for the novel to endure because writers and producers did not need to pay a licence fee to use the character of Count Dracula.