London solicitor, Jonathan Harker, takes a rambling tour of 1890s Hungary on his way to meet his new client in the Carpathian mountains, a Romanian Count named Dracula.
<Spoiler Alert!> He’s a vampire.
You didn’t know?
Bram Stroker’s Dracula is available via Project Gutenberg for free.
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/345
I was inspired to read this book by the following post:
As I continue to read #Dracula again I cannot help but think part of Stoker’s message was that although the modern world had turned its back on religion and the supernatural as mere superstition this would do nothing but leave them ill-prepared to deal with the very real evil…
— Jacob Allee (@jacob_allee) October 12, 2024
In case the tweet doesn’t show, the key bit was:
As I continue to read #Dracula again I cannot help but think part of Stoker’s message was that although the modern world had turned its back on religion and the supernatural as mere superstition this would do nothing but leave them ill-prepared to deal with the very real evil that exists (whether they believe in it or not). He seems to suggest that our best defense is to shake of modernity as the real superstition.
Jacob Allee
Full Disclosure: I don’t know Jacob. Aside from this one tweet and a bit of his study guide, I’ve not interacted with his work.
The idea that a famous horror novel was really a counter-enlightenment argument about the spiritual was fascinating to me, so I had to read the book and see for myself.
While, I expected a gothic horror, the opening pages reminded me more of a Jane Austin romance, as page after page was devoted to Lucy’s suitors and which marriage proposal she would accept. It’s quite clever, introducing you to all the key characters, while building the reader’s connection to Lucy — which is critical for the story to come.
When horror finally does come, it is muted, resting heavily on implication. I liked that. In this book, the fear is not the point. Stroker is not writing to get to the blood and viscera, he is writing about the peril of the human soul — something far scarier than who will bite whom.
Trying to be as spoiler free as I can, I was struck by Stoker’s language as one of the main characters was turned to a vampire. A group of men, looking on a beautiful woman, note this: “The sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness.” Purity is set as a virtue against voluptuous wantonness. Can you imagine a modern author making that comparison? We live in a world where voluptuous wantonness is held up as the feminine ideal. A few moments later the narrator says, “At that moment the remnant of my love passed into hate and loathing; had she then to be killed, I could have done it with savage delight.”
He is repulsed by the loss of her holy innocence. She has gone from a woman of purity and modesty to a creature of hedonistic indulgence, and it is repugnant. Put that into the context of our culture, where Greece has been a staple of a young woman’s education for decades, a story of an innocent young girl coming of age by sacrificing her purity and virginity to be cool.
…when she advanced to him with outstretched arms and a wanton smile he fell back and hid his face in his hands.
She still advanced, however, and with a languorous, voluptuous grace, said:—
“Come to me, Arthur. Leave these others and come to me. My arms are hungry for you. Come, and we can rest together. Come, my husband, come!”
There was something diabolically sweet in her tones—something of the tingling of glass when struck—which rang through the brains even of us who heard the words addressed to another. As for Arthur, he seemed under a spell; moving his hands from his face, he opened wide his arms. She was leaping for them, when Van Helsing sprang forward and held between them his little golden crucifix….
More than anything else in the book, I think, the above statement stuck out to me. Stroker is juxtaposing beauty and evil in a profound way. At the outset, the vampire is described in a dark parody of motherhood, and then this segment offers a corruption of marital union. In many ways, it feels as though Stroker is laying bare the devil’s playbook in 1897, and we are left to marvel at the warning unheeded in 2024.
The theme continues to develop as the book goes on and I loved this passage, where Van Helsing hopes for restored innocence:
…when that red scar, the sign of God’s knowledge of what has been, shall pass away, and leave your forehead as pure as the heart we know. For so surely as we live, that scar shall pass away when God sees right to lift the burden that is hard upon us. Till then we bear our Cross, as His Son did in obedience to His Will.
It goes on, but I don’t want to spoil it. There is real beauty — the truth about suffering in this life and our hope for something greater buried in a book which is ostensibly just a horror about a blood sucking monster who turns into a bat.
Since this is a book review and not a philosophy paper, I should probably note that the final act lost me a bit in an endless (to me) succession of Van Helsing monologues. The book is structured as a series of journal entries, letters and news articles written and gathered by the primary characters over the course of the novel. It’s a format you’ve almost certainly seen before and it works well to structure the tension as the story develops. However, particularly in the final act, I found the combination of Van Helsing’s intentionally broken English with a somewhat rambling philosophy hard to follow. In fairness, though, I was reading the book during a stressful period where I wasn’t getting enough sleep, so my attention was prone to wander in any case. You may not run into the same trouble.
This is definitely the prose of 1890s and not that to which we are accustomed. However, it’s an amazing story, told in a novel and interesting way with profound things to say. Well worth your time. If you, like me, enjoy reading classics, but have always thought Dracula wasn’t a serious book, I highly recommend you give it a go. There is so much here.
To help you along, Jacob Allee has written a study guide (I missed that when I was reading the book and only discovered it while working on this review, so I’ve not read it all, but it might help out, especially during those long rambles I mentioned.) Perhaps, Jacob’s argument is the best one of all:
So pick up this book and read a story of good men and women kicking evil right in its nasty fangs. Read a story about beheading the ancient serpent yet once again. Come read a story with all of your imagination, be afraid, and then conquer fear with the perfect and selfless love which drives out all fear.