Bram Stoker: A Literary Life

Bram Stoker A Literary Life

Lisa Hopkins

Literary Lives Founding Editor: Richard Dutton, Professor of English, Lancaster University This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most admired and influential English-language authors. Volumes follow the outline of the writers’ working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. Published titles include: Clinton Machann MATTHEW ARNOLD

Kerry McSweeney GEORGE ELIOT

Jan Fergus JANE AUSTEN

Tony Sharpe T. S. ELIOT

John Beer WILLIAM BLAKE

Harold Pagliaro HENRY FIELDING

Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË

Andrew Hook F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Sarah Wood ROBERT BROWNING

Mary Lago E. M. FORSTER

Janice Farrar Thaddeus FRANCES BURNEY

Shirley Foster ELIZABETH GASKELL

Caroline Franklin BYRON

Neil Sinyard GRAHAM GREENE

Sarah Gamble ANGELA CARTER

James Gibson THOMAS HARDY

Nancy A. Walker KATE CHOPIN

Cristina Malcolmson GEORGE HERBERT

Roger Sales JOHN CLARE

Gerald Robert GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

Cedric Watts JOSEPH CONRAD

Neil Roberts TED HUGHES

Grahame Smith CHARLES DICKENS

Kenneth Graham HENRY JAMES

George Parfitt JOHN DONNE

W. David Kaye BEN JONSON

Paul Hammond JOHN DRYDEN

Philip Mallett RUDYARD KIPLING

John Worthen D. H. LAWRENCE

Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER

William Gray ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

Tony Sharpe WALLACE STEVENS

Angela Smith KATHERINE MANSFIELD

Lisa Hopkins BRAM STOKER

Lisa Hopkins CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE

Joseph McMinn JONATHAN SWIFT

Cedric C. Brown JOHN MILTON

William Christie SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

Peter Davison GEORGE ORWELL

Leonée Ormond ALFRED TENNYSON

Linda Wagner-Martin SYLVIA PLATH

Peter Shilingsburg WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Felicity Rosslyn ALEXANDER POPE

David Wykes EVELYN WAUGH

Ira B. Nadel EZRA POUND

Caroline Franklin MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT

Richard Dutton WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

John Mepham VIRGINIA WOOLF

John Williams MARY SHELLEY

John Williams WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Michael O’Neill PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

Alasdair D. F. Macrae W. B. YEATS

Literary Lives Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71486–5 hardcover Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–80334–5 paperback (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

Bram Stoker A Literary Life Lisa Hopkins

© Lisa Hopkins 2007 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2007 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 13: 978–1–4039–4647–8 hardback ISBN 10: 1–4039–4647–7 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hopkins, Lisa, 1962– Bram Stoker : a literary life / Lisa Hopkins. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–4647–7 (cloth) 1. Stoker, Bram, 1847–1912. 2. Novelists, English–19th century– Biography. 3. Theatrical managers–Great Britain–Biography. 4. Dracula, Count (Fictitious character) 5. Horror tales–Authorship. I Title. PR6037.T617Z675 2007 823′.8–dc22 [B] 10 16

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

In memory of Mike Davis

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Abbreviations

ix

Editions Cited

x

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 1 Early Life in Stoker’s Fiction 2 At the Theatre 3 London with its Teeming Millions 4 On Holiday 5 The Cave Conclusion

1 23 47 69 91 121 149

Notes

151

Works Cited

165

Index

171

vii

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Scott McCracken, for his very helpful comments on the first draft of the last chapter; Michael Worboys, for help with the history of syphilis; Mary and Derek Grover; my father, for supplying Mozart books and taking me to Lourdes; the anonymous reader for Palgrave; Karin Brown, for kindly photocopying for me the phrenological report on Henry Irving; the interlibrary loan staff at the Mary Badland Library, Sheffield Hallam University, who have as always gone well beyond the call of duty; and my colleagues at Sheffield Hallam for being, also as always, models of collegiality. Andy Smith and Bill Hughes have been helpful in all things Stokerian for a long time now, and Chris and Sam make everything possible. This book is for Mike, who should have been here to read it. An earlier version of a small part of Chapter 1 appeared as ‘Vampires and Snakes: Monstrosity and Motherhood in Bram Stoker’, Irish Studies Review 19 (summer 1997), 5–8.

viii

Abbreviations D DG FI Jewel LA Man MB MT Mystery PP PR Shasta Shroud Snowbound SP WM WW

Dracula Dracula’s Guest Famous Impostors The Jewel of Seven Stars Lady Athlyne The Man Miss Betty Midnight Tales The Mystery of the Sea The Primrose Path Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving The Shoulder of Shasta The Lady of the Shroud Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party The Snake’s Pass The Watter’s Mou’ The Lair of the White Worm

ix

Editions Cited Dracula [1897], ed. A. N. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983) Dracula’s Guest [1914] (Dingle, Co. Kerry: 1990) Famous Impostors (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1910) Lady Athlyne (London: William Heinemann, 1908) The Lady of the Shroud [1909] (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994) The Lair of the White Worm [1911] (London: Brandon, 1991) The Man (London: William Heinemann, 1905) Midnight Tales, ed. Peter Haining (London: Peter Owen, 1990) Miss Betty [1898] (London: New English Library, 1974) The Mystery of The Sea [1902] (Stroud: Sutton, 1997) Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (London: William Heinemann, 1906), 2 vols The Primrose Path [1875], introduced by Richard Dalby (Westcliffon-Sea: Desert Island Books, 1999) The Shoulder of Shasta [1895], ed. Alan Johnson (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2000) The Snake’s Pass [1890] (London: Brandon, 1990) Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party [1908], ed. Bruce Wightman (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2000) The Watter’s Mou’ [1895] (Doylestown, PA: Wildside Press, n.d.)

x

Introduction: Stoker’s Book

Bram Stoker wrote 18 books.1 I am well aware that the primary if not the only interest of most readers of this book will be in Dracula, and I have therefore included some discussion of Dracula in four of the five chapters (the exception is the last, since the kind of readings which I offer there of lesser-known texts are already readily available elsewhere for Dracula). However, Dracula alone cannot give a full sense of either the range of Stoker’s interests or of the pressures and contexts that conditioned the creation of his most famous novel. Even the weakest and most disregarded of Stoker’s other fictions – The Shoulder of Shasta, Miss Betty, The Primrose Path – are interesting in this respect, and the more significant works – particularly The Jewel of Seven Stars and The Lady of the Shroud, but also The Mystery of the Sea – are well worth attending to in their own right as well as for what they can tell us about Dracula and its creator. I have, therefore, ranged widely over Stoker’s fiction and also his non-fiction, since his Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving and Famous Impostors in particular reveal much not only about Stoker’s life but also about the concerns which dominate his fiction. I began by observing that Stoker is popularly remembered only for one book when he also wrote 17 others. In one sense, however, Stoker did not write 17 other books: although it is true that his factual works are distinctively different, when it comes to his fiction, there is a sense in which he wrote Dracula many times over and called it a variety of different things. There are certainly numerous overlaps and recurrences between Dracula and his other novels. In Dracula, for instance, Mina writes while in Whitby that ‘I keep 1

2 Bram Stoker

the key of our door always fastened to my wrist at night’ (D: 95). This directly foreshadows The Jewel of Seven Stars, which David Glover calls ‘a kind of sequel to Dracula’,2 where Mr Trelawny too sleeps with a key fastened to his wrist. Also in Dracula, Seward thinks that Lucy’s ‘whole bed would have been drenched to a scarlet with the blood which the girl must have lost to leave such a pallor as she had before the transfusion’ (D: 123–4); Mr Trelawny’s bed too is so drenched. Later, Seward remarks on opening Lucy’s coffin, ‘It seemed to be as much an affront to the dead as it would have been to have stripped off her clothing in her sleep whilst living’ (D: 197); in The Jewel of Seven Stars Margaret Trelawny has precisely similar qualms about the unveiling of Queen Tera. Other works also share similarities. As Jeffrey Richards remarks, ‘Both Athlyne [in Lady Athlyne] on seeing Joy and Arthur Severn [in The Snake’s Pass] on seeing Norah exclaim “Here by God’s rood is the one maid for me”, echoing Sir Geraint in Tennyson’s Idylls of the King’, and Joy echoes the language used of Dracula when she ‘had seen Him pass into the garden opposite to the hotel and go secretively behind some lilac bushes opposite the doorway’ (LA: 141), while both The Man and The Snake’s Pass contain reference to the church at Hythe.3 David Glover compares The Snake’s Pass with Dracula,4 while Cannon Schmitt argues that ‘Orientalism, the West’s construction of a reified and stereotyped East, is arguably the dominant discourse in Dracula’ and claims that ‘Written at the zenith of European imperial expansion, between the Berlin Conference of 1884 and the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, Dracula takes shape at that moment when widespread armed conflict among European nations over territorial possessions, although temporarily suspended, must have appeared inevitable’.5 This makes Dracula sound like nothing so much as The Lady of the Shroud, and indeed that novel has in many ways as good a claim to be called a sequel to Dracula as The Jewel of Seven Stars has. Stoker’s great-nephew Daniel Farson, meanwhile, even though he declares of the other books that ‘Candidly, most of them might have been written by another author’,6 compares The Lair of the White Worm to Dracula, pointing out that ‘The two heroines are Lilla and Mimi, as against Lucy and Mina. Lilla is the virtuous victim; Mimi becomes Adam’s wife’ and that ‘Like Count Dracula, the Worm moves with the vital protection of darkness’.7

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 3

There certainly are similarities between The Lair of the White Worm and Stoker’s other texts. Adam thinks he has a second-sight vision (WW: 38), as Aunt Janet does in The Lady of the Shroud or as Miss Betty has an intuition so strong it is like second sight (MB: 91–2); the effect of the absence of birds in Lair is like that of the plague in Under the Sunset. Like Dracula, The Lair of the White Worm is interested in doubling – Richard Salton’s remark to Adam that ‘It is not every day that an heir to the old house comes back’ (WW: 10) proves the ironic preface to his announcement of the imminent return of precisely such another heir, Edgar Caswall. Caswall moves and opens the chest in his sleep (WW: 70), making this part of the novel a version of the same kind of locked-room-mystery logic that structures The Jewel of Seven Stars. Equally, Caswall’s remark to Mimi on the turret roof of Castra Regis, ‘When the Master of Evil took Christ up on a high place and showed Him all the kingdoms of the earth, he was doing what he thought no other could do. He was wrong – he forgot Me’ (WW: 148), recalls Miss Gimp’s acid observation about Dick in The Shoulder of Shasta: ‘Wants to show her all the kingdoms of the earth from a high place! We know what to make of him!’ (Shasta: 45). The Shoulder of Shasta also has parallels with other Stoker texts. Like Lucy, Esse has been suffering from disturbed nights. Esse’s colour comes and goes as Lucy’s will (Shasta: 109), and after carrying Dick home she arrives dressed in white and covered with blood, evoking in her mother’s mind ‘all sorts of unknown possibilities of horror’ (WW: 77). The evocation of Dracula is complete when Dick says of Esse, ‘ye may take the full of her purty little body of blood out of my veins for her, if that will do her any good!’ (Shasta: 105). Finally, an eerie collapse of Dracula and Stoker’s short story ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’ is effected when the Indian regards Mrs Elstree’s hair as likely to cover some actual gold and ‘in the agonizing suspense she could hear – or thought she could – the blood running through the veins of her neck’ (Shasta: 50). If Stoker effectively wrote only one work of fiction, what does it mean? Here we touch directly on the whole question of what a literary life is. This book is not in any sense a biography of Stoker, of which there are already several available, but an attempt to locate his fiction in its biographical and cultural contexts. This is made

4 Bram Stoker

both easier and harder by the fact that Stoker’s own life, like that of so many of his characters, was dual. On the one hand, his rôle as Acting Manager of Sir Henry Irving’s Lyceum made him one of the most publicly recognisable figures of Victorian London; no evening at the Lyceum was complete without Stoker, in evening dress, greeting the guests at the top of the stairs. On the other, he was intensely private. As Stoker himself wrote to Walt Whitman, whom he greatly admired, ‘I am equal in temper and cool in disposition and have a large amount of self control and am naturally secretive to the world.’8 By the same token, on the one hand it was a life of conspicuous achievement – one might indeed say over-achievement, since he held down a demanding job as factotum to Irving as well as writing one of the most famous and successful books ever published. Again, though, this is counterbalanced by the fact that Stoker’s life has some odd elements, beginning with the mysterious childhood illness that apparently kept him paralysed until the age of 7, moving through the extraordinary letter he wrote to Walt Whitman in 1872, when he was 24, which declared that ‘I am six feet two inches high and twelve stone weight naked and used to be forty-one or forty-two inches round the chest’,9 and culminating in his alleged death from syphilis. The letter to Whitman might seem like clear proof of homoeroticism, and, as discussed in Chapter 1, it has been argued that Dracula’s sharing of crucial dates with the Wilde trial makes it most easily readable as a text of concealment of such a dangerous proclivity. However, it is equally true that Stoker’s fiction characteristically seems to be deeply invested in the erotic power of women. These contradictions make Stoker a difficult subject to write about, and this has led to a wide range of critical manoeuvres by those who have tackled him and his works. Because of this wide range of approaches, Stoker’s biographer Barbara Belford accuses critics of assuming that ‘There has to be some unsavory explanation of why, out of an oeuvre of eighteen books, only Dracula succeeds as literature – in fact, is a masterpiece.’10 I have no particular desire either to muck-rake or to assume a one-to-one correspondence between an author’s books and his life of the kind offered by Belford herself when she declares that ‘Stoker and his mother, Charlotte, inform the brave and loyal Mina; while the frivolous and fragile Lucy, yearning to marry all her suitors, echoes Stoker’s socially

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 5

ambitious fiancée, Florence Balcombe’,11 and I find Paul Murray theoretically naïve when he writes that Stoker was rediscovered primarily on the campuses of America by academics who found in his writings a rich source for interpretations driven by Freudianism, Marxism and feminism. While great credit is due to those who first insisted that there was more than mere sensationalism in his writings, some of their conclusions, at least, were based on insufficient biographical research.12 As Michael Valdez Moses well observes, ‘it is finally impossible on the basis of scant biographical evidence to know what the circumspect and secretive author intended his greatest literary creation to signify’, 13 and I note too the force of Jennifer L. Fleissner’s identification of ‘the dangers of applying the repressive hypothesis too hastily to Dracula – of assuming that the novel is “really” pointing to a repressed sexuality at every turn, rather than mobilizing discourses of the sexual in order to explain potentially even more outré technological phenonema’.14 Nevertheless, it is hardly possible to ignore the abundant evidence of exactly the kind of internal conflict which is, one might well feel, most likely to energise fiction. Moreover, as David Glover points out, ‘Stoker himself constantly invites a biographical reading by playfully scattering topical references and allusions throughout his work’. 15 For instance, many of his mother’s ancestors were sheriffs of Galway, 16 and he refers to a heroic sheriff of Galway in The Man; and Jeffrey Richards points out that ‘Stoker regularly uses familiar locales for his tales. Betty Pole lives, like Stoker, in Cheyne Walk.’ 17 I have, therefore, sought to relate Stoker’s works to the most crucial and formative aspects of his life, namely his childhood and upbringing in Dublin, his long involvement with the theatre, his position as an Irishman in London, his fondness for travel, and, I suggest, his probable involvement in freemasonry. It is in the light of these factors that I have attempted to postulate meanings for ‘Stoker’s book’. One might add to this that at least a gesture towards the language and concerns of psychoanalysis is a reading strategy which insistently forces itself on any attentive reader of Stoker. Daniel Farson writes that ‘Frankly, I would hardly recognise a Freudian meaning if

6 Bram Stoker

I saw one, except in the case of Dracula and Bram Stoker, where it seems too obvious to ignore.’18 Stoker’s book insistently recurs to the motif of the return of something from a distant past, a pattern repeated in The Snake’s Pass, The Mystery of the Sea, The Jewel of Seven Stars, Dracula, and The Lair of the White Worm. In these novels, what returns can, uncannily, be either monster or treasure, as if they were interchangeable, something which irresistibly evokes the concept of the return of the repressed. The central question for many critics and biographers is whether Stoker knew what he was doing. The range of opinion on this point is striking. At one extreme, Stoker’s great-nephew Daniel Farson is completely dismissive of the possibility that Stoker might have been aware of the implications of his own texts: I doubt if Bram realised the homosexual implications of Whitman’s concept of idyllic boy-love; I doubt if he recognised the lesbianism in Carmilla, the novel that was to influence him so deeply; and I am sure he was unaware of the sexuality inherent in Dracula.19 At the other, Joseph Valente assumes total control and design on Stoker’s part: To my mind, the cleverness of Stoker’s narrative method consists in striking an unstably ironic attitude toward his characters’ moral and political assumptions, sentiments, and dispositions, even while maintaining a certain patina of the righteous and the heroic about them.20 Between these two polarised positions, other critics position themselves at varying points along the scale. Barbara Belford, for instance, argues that some critics claim he did not realize the import of what he was writing: it was all an unconscious dream. But they are in error. Stoker was an intelligent and thoughtful man, and his position at the Lyceum Theatre placed him at the social nexus of Victorian society. He was many things, but naïve was not one of them; he was fully aware of the subtexts in his horror tale.21

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 7

For Belford, the difference between one great work and 17 indifferent or poor ones is easy to explain: it lies in the fact that ‘Stoker was a hasty writer’ except for Dracula, for which ‘Dates on the Dracula Notes at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia certify a six-year devotion to plotting and writing this vampire tale … This was the only novel he took within himself.’ 22 Belford is undoubtedly right that Stoker was generally hasty – David Glover points out that ‘the original draft of Seven Golden Buttons, the short historical novel that eventually appeared under the title Miss Betty in 1898, was completed in slightly less than three weeks’, 23 and the manuscript of the play version of Dracula cleary testifies to extreme hurry in its preparation, since ‘in some scenes such as the encounter with the Un-Dead Lucy, large gaps have been left in the text’. 24 Still, carelessness born of speed, however great, is not in itself sufficient to account for the gaping gulf in power and suggestiveness between Dracula and Stoker’s other books. It is true that part of Stoker’s suggestiveness is undoubtedly fortuitous. For instance, much critical ink has been spilled over the question of why Jonathan Harker thinks that one of the three female vampires whom he meets in Castle Dracula seems oddly familiar to him. Barbara Belford, however, has made it quite clear that in the original form of the novel it was obvious that the reason Harker recognises one of the women is that she is Countess Dolingen of Gratz, whom he has encountered earlier on his journey, in the deleted first chapter of the novel which was later separately published by Florence Stoker as the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’.25 That prosaic explanation is, however, far less effective than the sense of the uncanny generated by the failure to catch the continuity slip; as David Glover observes, ‘The presence of what Ken Gelder has shrewdly noted as the “undercoded moment[s]” in Stoker’s writings make them susceptible to a variety of sexual readings – queer, heteronormative, and bisexual alike – which cannot easily be reduced to plain matters of biography,’26 and there is a precisely similar effect in Snowbound, in which Mr Sparbrook says of Mr Macrae, ‘He simply idolised his little daughter, a bright, pretty child with golden hair and big grey eyes that I seemed, when I saw them, to have known all my life’ (Snowbound: 85). Regardless of the authorial intention here, the effect is magnificent.

8 Bram Stoker

Some of the interpretations which have assumed that Stoker did not know what he was doing have been weird and wonderful indeed. Daniel Farson’s description of Joseph Bierman’s is a gem in its own right: Anyone who wishes to play the Dracula game can bend the most surprising pieces of evidence to fit the puzzle. A number of distinguished American professors have done so with relish. One of the most astounding interpretations comes from Dr Joseph S. Bierman, of Baltimore, who argues that Bram’s subconscious wanted to eat my grandfather Tom.27 Although Farson’s contention that Stoker got on well with his brothers in later life neatly misses the point, one can forgive him on account of the delicious image of a subconscious eating someone’s grandfather. However, one should in justice note that Stoker himself invited readings which overrode his own agency: Farson reports him as writing to an American correspondent in 1906 that ‘you know a lot more about Dracula than I do’.28 A more subtle view sees Stoker’s novels as tapping in not only to the workings of their author’s mind but also to an entire cultural moment. Thus Jeffrey Richards writes that ‘Stoker is a fascinating case of a popular novelist who while working out his own concerns and preoccupations also plugged into the main currents of anxiety political, theoretical and ideological,’29 and David Glover prefaces his important critical study of Stoker by explaining that ‘I read Stoker’s fiction as public and primarily conscious fantasies, narratives that are formally structured and designed for popular consumption.’ Nevertheless, Glover still thinks that Paradoxically, for all their obsession with scientific knowledge and factual accuracy, Stoker’s narratives are best understood as fantasy, as their frequent evocation of states of reverie, unconsciousness, dream, and daydream ought perhaps to suggest.30 My own approach also seeks to register both the private roots and the public resonances of Stoker’s work. After the Lyceum company performed privately for her at Windor, Queen Victoria telegraphed that ‘Mr Bram Stoker may write whatever he likes about the event.’31

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 9

Although I am well aware that this had a limited, local application, there is nevertheless something magnificent in the idea of Queen Victoria thus licensing Stoker, for in a sense Stoker did indeed write whatever he pleased about the late Victorian period as a whole. Certainly Stoker himself felt that any writer was in some sense a public figure; he complained in his article ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, published in The Nineteenth Century in 1908, that for the modern writer ‘his duty to the public – to the State – appears to be nil.’32 I think, then, that Stoker’s book means more than just Stoker’s own concerns. In the first place, the interest of Stoker’s book does not, whatever Stoker himself may have thought about the matter, lie in its hero figure. It is certainly true that Stoker seems to have invested considerable emotional energy in the creation of his heroes and in encouraging his readers to receive them favourably. As Jeffrey Richards notes, ‘His heroes are frequently projections of himself, big, burly, athletic manly men who act according to chivalric ideas’, and ‘These heroes frequently save someone from drowning, Stoker’s regular measure of manhood. Stoker had earned headline praise from the newspapers for trying to save a would-be suicide in the Thames and had been awarded the Bronze Medal of the Royal Humane Society’, after his ultimately unsuccessful rescue attempt on 14 September 1882; thus in Miss Betty Rafe Otwell rescues Betty from the river (MB: 33), while in Lady Athlyne the captain of the Cryptic was ‘a valiant man who on state occasions wore on his right breast in accordance with the etiquette of the occasion the large gold medal of the Royal Humane Society’ (LA: 8). Stoker and his heroes share other traits too: ‘The experience of going blind and recovering partial sight, described in The Man, is something Stoker himself had undergone following Irving’s death in 1905.’33 However, despite their burly physiques and much-articulated code of chivalry, Stoker’s heroes are only rarely effective. Typically, they are late, unconscious or unsuspecting of the true nature of the danger whenever there is actually a woman to be saved. Even the manly Lord Athlyne, supremely effective when confronted by a Boer army, gets himself arrested by a Dumfriesshire policeman when it is a matter of protecting his fiancée’s reputation by driving her home to her father on time. The one exception is Rupert Sent Leger in The Lady of the Shroud, but here I think Stoker is writing under rather

10 Bram Stoker

different pressures from those which usually mobilise him, for he is, as Jeffrey Richards points out, clearly writing a riposte to Elinor Glyn’s bestselling novel Three Weeks.34 Glyn’s novel, which deserves immortality if only for the line ‘she must have been one of those exceptional women we read of in the sixth form’,35 tells the story of a fascinating Balkan queen who seduces an innocent young Englishman in a Swiss hotel. Stoker clearly both draws on it and counters it in The Lady of the Shroud. Like Rupert Sent Leger, Paul Verdayne ‘could not go and call like an ordinary visitor because he did not know her name!’ (Glyn, Three Weeks: 53), though he felt ‘the conviction that she must be some Queen or Princess of a country south in Europe – half barbaric, half advanced’ (151); like Miss McKelpie, the nameless queen correctly foretells that a son of theirs will sit on the throne (204–5); like the Voivodin Teuta, she does not want to be disturbed by ‘English conventionalities’ (61); and like Lady Arabella March she is repeatedly described as snakelike, most notably when reclining on the tiger-skin that made the book notorious: ‘Perfectly straight out her body was, the twisted purple drapery outlining her perfect shape, and flowing in graceful lines beyond – like a serpent’s tail’ (88). Like Stoker’s work in general, too, Glyn’s deploys Shakespearean allusion: in Venice the queen exclaims ‘Look, Paul! … Can you not see Desdemona peeping from the balcony of her house there!’ (Three Weeks:186), and later ‘the sweetness of the serpent of old Nile fell upon her’ (188), although she herself thinks that Shakespeare knew little of lovers (211). The nameless queen’s brother, Grand Duke Peter, even supplies the name of Stoker’s Voivode Peter Vissarion. Elinor Glyn shares Stoker’s wry scepticism about Englishmen – the queen teases Paul, ‘You dear, insular, arrogant Englishman!’ (Three Weeks: 64) – and even his obsession with mothering: the queen declares ‘You are beautiful, you know, Paul … So tall and straight like you English, with curly hair of gold. Your mother must have loved you as a baby’ (45), and she ‘drew Paul down to her until his head rested on her breast, and her arms held him like a mother with a child’ (130). However, Glyn’s gender politics are remarkably different from Stoker’s. Although Glyn is caustic about unduly masculine women, saying of Paul’s misguided first love for the parson’s daughter that ‘Paul was six foot two, and Isabella quite six foot, and broad in proportion. They were dressed almost alike, and at a little

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 11

distance, but for the lady’s scanty petticoat, it would have been difficult to distinguish her sex’ (Three Weeks: 10), Stoker could never have approved of her implicit endorsement of the truth of the queen’s observation that ‘in all ages it is unfortunately not the simple good women who have ruled the hearts of men’ (212). Nor could he have countenanced the amoral wit of the account of how ‘the scurrilous rag even gave a résumé of this ruler’s dissolute life, and a broad hint that the child could in no case be his; but, as they pithily remarked, this added to the little prince’s welcome in Ministerial circles, where the lady was greatly beloved and revered’ (Glyn, Three Weeks: 275). Stoker would not, either, have agreed with even the mild form of feminism underlying Glyn’s summation that ‘And so, as ever, the woman paid the price’ (302). It is under pressure of contesting these dangerous and heretical views that Stoker creates his own very different Balkan fantasy, in which women are almost comically abject and only too glad to sacrifice themselves for the good of men. In his other novels, though, one might well be tempted to note how often Stoker creates male projections of himself and then renders them helpless, outwitted or unmanned by disobedient or manipulative women. If Stoker’s heroes are not of much interest, however, the heroines indubitably are. It is the representation of women which energises Stoker’s fiction, and the story which he most loves to tell is of the woman who is put in her coffin. Tera in The Jewel of Seven Stars spends the entire narrative dead; Teuta in The Lady of the Shroud voluntarily inhabits a coffin for a third of the book, and wears a shroud for much of the rest; Lucy in Dracula is staked and forced back into the coffin from which she has struggled to escape; Marjory in The Mystery of the Sea is brought to the brink of death before being rescued by her husband; Stephen in The Man, in a moment of obvious psychoanalytic resonance, is traumatised by stumbling unexpectedly on the coffin of her mother. Most bizarrely, Lady Arabella in The Lair of the White Worm, seeing Oolanga carrying a box, asks him for no apparent reason, ‘Is that a coffin you have with you? If so, you are wasting your time. It would not hold me’ (WW: 94). As Alison Case tellingly expresses it, in Stoker’s novels ‘The only genuine Angel in the House is a wife who has joined the angels.’36 Stoker is also fascinated more generally by riddling the distinction between death and life. In the childhood stories which his mother

12 Bram Stoker

told him of the cholera epidemic, it was impossible to distinguish death from life; in his own short story ‘The Man From Shorrox’, a commercial traveller is duped into spending the night with a corpse, whom he believes to be a living man. Related to this is the fact that Stoker’s book is interested in resurrections of a different sort, that of the re-emergence of races or racial qualities from former times. This is a concern which recurs in many guises in Stoker’s fiction. As I explore in Chapter 3, Stoker was always aware of his own position as an Irishman in London, but he was also equally fascinated by what it meant to be a member of a number of other nationalities, from American to Spanish (as in The Mystery of the Sea) to his own imagined Men of the Blue Mountains. Sometimes Stoker’s representations of ethnic identities can be seen as configured by what we would now understand as racism, often fed by the phrenological and physiognomic prejudices of the time, but sometimes they are animated by a less judgemental and more simply ethnographic impulse (I shall be looking in Chapter 4 at the influence of travel on Stoker’s writing). At all events, it is impossible to think of virtually any Stoker character without remembering their nationality and/or ethnic identity. David Glover points out that ‘Stoker often gives his heroes some kind of Viking genealogy.’37 In The Shoulder of Shasta, for instance, ‘Dick looked a perfect giant as he stood in the doorway following out his guest, for all the manhood of him seemed to swell within him, and to glorify him till the blood and dirt on him seemed as if Viking adjuncts to his mighty personality’ (Shasta: 106). In Dracula, Arthur Holmwood is compared to Thor, and as Joseph Valente observes, ‘At the time of the novel, the figure of Thor was a popular, incipiently racist icon of Nordic-Aryan purity.’38 As Jeffrey Richards remarks, ‘Stoker subscribes to the racial ideas dominant in his period, in particular the superiority of the Nordic races to all others.’39 Particularly notable in this respect is the symbolism of Teuta’s name;40 in this context, the fact that Teuta had for some time lain as if dead before her triumphal re-emergence might well look like a revival of Teutonic values. One reason for Stoker’s interest in the Nordic might well have been the contemporary plight of Norway, which was, for most of his writing life, in much the same position in relation to Sweden as

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 13

Ireland was to England. The ongoing war amongst Stoker’s closest theatrical associates about whether or not to stage Ibsen is likely to have raised his consciousness of Norway, and the celebrated explorer Fridtjof Nansen, whose exploits received much coverage in the London press and who visited London in 1903, wrote a series of columns in the Times denouncing the Union of Sweden and Norway.41 Given the concern with launching a new kingdom in The Lady of the Shroud, Stoker might well have noted too that the Norwegian Parliament lobbied heavily for monarchism in the wake of the vote for independence in the hope that this would make it more acceptable to the Great Powers, and the Danish prince Carl was selected as the new king partly because he was married to Edward VII’s daughter Maud. (In the absence of a Norwegian diplomatic corps, it was Nansen who was sent to invite Carl to take the throne.) Given The Lady of the Shroud’s concern with armaments, Stoker might also have been interested in the fact that from 1902 onwards Kristian Birkeland was experimenting with revolutionary weaponry, on which The Daily Mail reported.42 Conversely, those who are of spectacularly non-Viking descent in Stoker’s book are open to constant attack. John Allen Stevenson’s remark of Dracula that ‘it may be fruitful to reconsider Stoker’s compelling and frequently retold story in terms of interracial sexual competition rather than as intrafamilial strife’43 can profitably be applied to all Stoker’s work. In The Lair of The White Worm, Adam’s man, asked to look around the ship, is ‘Naturally … struck with the aboriginal savage’ (WW: 43), while Caswall cheerfully declares that ‘the law doesn’t concern itself much about dead niggers. A few more or less do not matter. To my mind it’s rather a relief!’ (WW: 88). In Lady Athlyne, Lt Breckenridge says casually that ‘I’m from Kentucky myself; and I was there for a while – that time of the nigger disturbance you know’ (LA: 108), and Colonel Ogilvie observes, I find I have been wrong to quarrel so readily and without waiting to understand. If a nigger did it I think I’d understand, for I don’t look for much from him. But I do expect much from myself; and therefore I’ll go back a bit and go a bit farther. Hear me promise, so help me God, I’ll never quarrel again!’ (LA: 309)

14 Bram Stoker

In The Shoulder of Shasta: The Indians sat on one side of the fire and ate their meat half cooked – part of a little deer which Dick had shot, on purpose for the meal, just before sunset. Le Maistre and Dick sat together at the opposite side of the fire, and took their dinner with the larger deliberation of the Caucasian. (Shasta: 31) Esse ‘could not help thinking that the Indian want of humour was alone sufficient to put the race in a low place in the scale of human types’ (Shasta: 40), while Dick’s ‘proximity kept the Indians in order; for with the dominance of a Causcasian he made himself to some degree regulator of his neighbour’s affairs’ (Shasta: 49), and Mrs Elstree ‘had once seen, in a chest full of scalps, in the collection of a friend who was an amateur of Indian trophies, a scalp of a woman’s golden hair, and she herself, in common with all who had seen it, felt more pity for the late owner of those yellow tresses, than for all the original proprietors of the dark ones put together’ (Shasta: 50). Finally, one of the reasons Esse is attracted to Dick is that ‘Dick was the only male in the place, for of course Indians and servants did not count’ (Shasta: 54). Stoker’s views in this respect were abundantly supported by the scientific racism which had spread rapidly in the wake of Darwin, and above all by the pseudo-science of phrenology. (The Stoker collection at the Shakespeare Centre Library includes a phrenological report of Irving’s brain.) The Jewel of Seven Stars is a particularly good example of Stoker’s interest in this subject. Throughout the book, we are made insistently aware of the extent to which identity may be thought to be located in the actual physical configurations of the body. Malcolm Ross is a devoted student of physiognomy, whose evaluations of human characters are totally reliant on the kinds of supposedly quantifiable and measurable external signs so beloved of believers in criminal types and atavistic degenerates.44 At first sight of Doctor Winchester, he concludes that the latter has ‘aquiline features, keen grey eyes, and a forehead that stood out square and broad as that of a thinker’ (Jewel: 12), while Nurse Kennedy had a snub nose – there was no possible doubt about it; but like such noses in general it showed a nature generous, untiring, and

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 15

full of good nature. Her broad white forehead, which even the freckles had spared, was full of forceful thought and reason. (Jewel: 24) Of Mr Trelawny, Ross decides that ‘[t]hose beetling brows screened some massive purpose; that high, broad forehead held some finished train of reasoning, which the broad chin and massive jaw would help to carry into effect’ (Jewel: 40).45 Most suggestive of all is Ross’s analysis of Corbeck’s appearance: The Far East, the Tropic Seasons, and the Desert – each can have its colour mark. But all three are quite different; and an eye which has once known, can thenceforth easily distinguish them. The dusky pallor of one; the fierce red-brown of the other; and of the third, the dark, ingrained burning, as though it had become a permanent colour. Mr Corbeck had a big head, massive and full; with shaggy, dark red-brown hair, but bald on the temples. His forehead was a fine one, high and broad; with, to use the terms of physiognomy, the frontal sinus boldly marked. The squareness of it showed ‘ratiocination’; and the fullness under the eyes ‘language’. He had the short, broad nose that marks energy; the square chin – marked despite a thick, unkempt beard – and massive jaw that showed great resolution. (Jewel: 68) Here, Mr Corbeck’s history and character can both be read on his face. Stoker’s book is also about breaking and evading the law, particularly in the form of subverting the Victorian information-gathering project. Gary Day notes that ‘It was through the alliance of law and medicine that state intervention in civil society was most evident. Dracula bears witness to this in as much as two major discourses in the novel are those of law and medicine, represented by Harker and Seward respectively.’ He argues that The predominantly diary form … says something about the nature of the professions themselves. As already mentioned, professional expertise is based on selection through merit. However, it is precisely the specialized nature of the professions which inhibits an understanding of society as a whole.46

16 Bram Stoker

Throughout Stoker’s work, the drive towards greater civic control is in tension with a sense of the need for the liberty of individuals to act, something which I shall be exploring in greater detail in Chapter 3. Most notably, Stoker’s book is invested in undoing what it itself has done, and reasserting gender norms. David Glover writes interestingly on Stoker’s admiration for Otto Weininger, whose first appearance in Britain, in 1906, came courtesy of Stoker’s own publisher, William Heinemann,47 and who is mentioned approvingly in Lady Athlyne, a novel in which we read that ‘Instinctively the woman recognised the tone and obeyed, as women have obeyed the commands of the men they loved, and were proud to do so, from Eden garden down the ages’ (LA: 303). In a sense, though, Weininger only confirmed what Stoker already subscribed to. In Snowbound, the connected collection of short stories centred on a theatrical troupe, we find an interesting exchange: ‘Did none of the men confess anything?’ asked the Singing Chambermaid. There was in the tone of her voice that underlying note of militant defiance which is always evident when the subject of woman in the abstract is mentioned in mixed company. The Second Low Comedian smiled as he replied: ‘Certainly, my dear! I thought you understood that I was speaking of the young ladies of both sexes. You remember that the first, in fact the one to set them off, was an alleged Man.’ (Snowbound: 73) The fear of possible gender blurring registered here is one which Stoker’s book works diligently to redress by jaunty statements such as that in Miss Betty of Betty and her grandfather: ‘unconsciously her womanhood admitted the dominance of the man’ (MB: 19). Stoker has no time for what he derisively identifies in The Man as Stephen’s ‘theory of sexual equality’ (Man: 221), which leads to nothing but trouble and misery for her. It is, however, repeatedly clear that Stoker is worried about gender rôles not only in relation to women but also, and even more urgently, in relation to men. Jeffrey Richards remarks on the prevalence of stories about crossdressing and gender uncertainty in Famous Impostors, and suggests of the discussion of the Chevalier d’Eon that ‘Stoker’s tone suggests

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 17

that he is anxious to stress that a certain feminine sensitivity in the male nature does not compromise basic masculinity,’48 just as in Miss Betty the rider with the money is disguised as a woman (MB: 127), but is nevertheless a daredevil. There are also passages in Famous Impostors where the behaviour of one sex leaches worryingly into that of the other: Stoker writes of the followers of one of the various fake Dauphins, for instance, that He got round him a gang of persons of evil life, as shown by their various records. One was a false priest, another a prisoner for embezzlement, another an ex-bailiff who was also a forger, another a deserter; with the usual criminal concomitant of women, dishonoured clergy and such like. (FI: 41) Stoker’s proposed solution to the contaminating influence of women was the promotion of strong male–male bonds, which typically work to exclude or marginalise women. In The Man, Harold asks Mr Stonehouse to keep his secret even from his wife (Man: 172), in an echo of how when Hall Caine lent Stoker money in his later years, he wrote to him that ‘I shall not even tell my wife, and you need not tell your wife.’49 It is worth noting that this bond of shared secrecy between men which excludes women was also what lay at the heart of freemasonry, which, I shall be suggesting in Chapter 5, was a force in Stoker’s life: Mrs Caudle’s Curtain Lectures, which first appeared in Punch, objected to her husband’s freemasonry on the grounds that it entailed keeping secrets from his wife.50 I should make it plain that I do not regard Stoker’s drive to enforce gender codes as born of simple misogyny. Rather I see it as a form of self-policing, and as the result of writing under considerable pressure on this front. On several grounds, Stoker found his own masculinity embattled. In the first place, he started his working life as a clerk, and as Jennifer Fleissner notes, ‘a popular phrase such as “Born a man, died a clerk” … suggested a job inherently at odds with masculinity.’51 Moreover, his escape from this ‘unmanly’ occupation came courtesy of the fit of hysteria with which he greeted Irving’s recital of ‘The Ballad of Eugene Aram’, and William Hughes points to the pervasive association of hysteria with femininity.52 Most notably, the theatre was notorious as a place of sexual nonconformity, and there

18 Bram Stoker

were many insinuations of sexual impropriety against theatre people.53 Irving’s Hamlet was called unmanly and his Othello effeminate; Ellen Terry’s daughter Edith Craig, who probably played Mina Harker in the Lyceum’s read-through of Dracula,54 was a lesbian, and even though she did not move in with her long-term partner Christopher St John (Christabel Marshall) until 1899, her sexual orientation may well have been apparent much earlier, since she had already previously shared a house with a woman.55 Certainly Irving’s circle seem to have accepted Christopher St John’s preferred selfdesignation, though they must have been well aware of his true name and gender: Brereton’s life of Irving, for instance, lists in its bibliography ‘Henry Irving. By Christopher St. John’.56 Edith Craig further subverted gender roles by appearing as Donalbain in Irving’s Macbeth, and Stoker himself could be seen as metaphorically emasculated in his role at the Lyceum, where he was not only subservient to Irving but where Ellen Terry called him ‘Mama’.57 At the same time, he would have been all the more sharply aware of the growing push to police sexual behaviour and criminalise homosexuality because of his personal friendship with Henry Labouchere, author of the amendment under which Oscar Wilde was convicted.58 The hysteria which so often surrounds Stoker’s writing about gender could well be seen as the product of a radical insecurity on this front. In Stoker’s work, moreover, gender bears on wider issues than itself. David Glover writes of how, in The Man and Lady Athlyne, ‘science takes the form of sexology or sexual psychology and in Stoker’s hands it underwrites a normative heterosexuality that holds the key to national regeneration’, and he identifies ‘the strategic marriages between different national subjects that are a common form of closure in Stoker’s novels’.59 This returns us to the central question of any literary life, the relationship of the author’s works to his or her life. There is one central aspect of Stoker the person to which the reading process entirely blinds us: he was Irish. When we silently read his works in our own voices inside our heads, we forget what his contemporaries remembered every time he opened his mouth, since he never troubled to modify his Irish brogue. As Joseph Valente points out: Moonshine, a magazine of ‘wit, humour, and satire’, which was given to libelous caricatures of the Celtic race, lampooned Stoker

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 19

as a man of laughably boundless ambitions … the Tatler mocked Stoker’s attempt to fit into English club society by pointing to his clumsy Irish inflected wit, his ‘horrible dooble ongtong’.60 In all Stoker’s fiction, Ireland plays a part, and the relationships which Stoker fantasises between his idealised men and women can indeed be seen as uneasily mirroring the harmony which this ‘philosophical’ but sentimental Home Ruler hoped to see between his adopted country and the country of his birth. Marriage thus becomes, in Stoker’s book, a metaphor with a very wide range. Above all, though, Stoker’s book is concerned not only with its own content, but with the process of presenting it in writing. Writing and its mechanics are at the very heart of Stoker’s interests. As Gary Day observes, ‘That Dracula is a novel ultimately preoccupied with form is clear from the fact that it destroys its own content’ and comments on the novel’s ‘identification of writing with a machine’.61 Alison Case argues that In Dracula, knowledge is power, and not only power over Dracula himself. The opening note, with its tantalizing promise that ‘how these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them’ (xxi), asks that we read with a consciousness, not only of the emerging story, but of the process by which it has been recognized and organized as such.62 Similarly, Jennifer Fleissner poses the provocative question ‘Is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as much about secretarial work as it is about sex?’,63 while Rebecca A. Pope argues that ‘One glance at the novel’s extravagant narrative structure … suggests that it is as concerned with textuality as with sexuality.’64 Stoker’s representation of texts is certainly eroticised: when Lord Athlyne is a prisoner at Pretoria, we are told that ‘At this time they were occasionally getting letters. These had of course gone through the hands of the censor and their virginity thus destroyed’ (LA: 47). Similarly in The Jewel of Seven Stars, the all-important writing on the jewel itself, the hekau, has been produced by means unknown. There is also a constant interplay between Stoker’s own texts and those of Milton,65 the Bible, and above all Shakespeare, something which I will explore more

20 Bram Stoker

closely in Chapter 2. Stoker’s concerns thus extended to the form as well as the content of his book. This book has five chapters. The first, ‘Early Life in Stoker’s Fiction’, considers the impact on Stoker’s work of his early life in Dublin, including the mysterious childhood illness which kept him bedridden until the age of 7 and therefore led him to be much in the company of his mother Charlotte. It proposes that the peculiarly literary and narrativised nature of the relationship between Stoker and his mother was an important influence on his later fiction, particularly with regard to its typically conflicted depictions of motherhood. Other traces of Stoker’s Dublin years are also readily detectable in his works: the Stokers lived close to St Michan’s Church, where the unusually dry air had caused the spontaneous mummification of the bodies in the crypt, a sight which has often been seen as the genesis of the undead bodies in Dracula; and it was also in Dublin that Stoker met both his wife, Florence Balcombe, and the Wilde family. Both Oscar and his father, the Egyptologist Sir William Wilde, seem to have influenced Stoker’s works: Egyptology provides the story of Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars, and many of the dates so carefully cited in Dracula correspond directly with those of the Wilde trial, allowing the novel to be read as a covert examination of the plight of the homosexual in society. The second chapter, ‘At the Theatre’, centres on the connection with Henry Irving which was to prove so central to Stoker’s life. When Stoker realised that there were no regular theatre reviews appearing in the Dublin press, he offered his own services for free, and was thereafter associated with the theatre for the rest of his life. This chapter traces the history of that connection and explore its meanings for Stoker’s work, paying particular attention to the construction of his plots and to the extent and functions of his allusions to plays and dramatic characters. It also goes on to look briefly at the chequered history of dramatisation of Dracula after the failure of Stoker’s repeated attempts to interest Irving in it, and to glance at the history of this and his other novels on screen. The third chapter, ‘London with its Teeming Millions’, considers the effect of England and Englishness on Stoker’s work. ‘London with its teeming millions’ is what Count Dracula hopes he will be able to prey on when he leaves his Transylvanian crypt. When Stoker left Dublin in 1878, never to live there again, he entered a world which offered

Introduction: Stoker’s Book 21

him many more opportunities, but in which he was also permanently marked as an outsider by the persistence of his Irish accent – something which has been suggested as a genesis for the heavily accented speech which persistently marks both Count Dracula and Van Helsing as different from those around them. This chapter outlines the main events of Stoker’s life in London, not least the publication of Dracula by Constable in 1897 (although the initial critical reception was somewhat muted, giving little indication of the success the book would eventually achieve), and explores both what London means in Stoker’s fiction and also what Ireland came to mean in these years of exile. It considers particularly the extent to which his novels can be seen as dealing with questions of Irishness and, above all, of Irish Home Rule, and the ways in which both the possibilities and the restrictions of London life are figured in his work. The fourth chapter, ‘On Holiday’, looks at Stoker’s travels. Almost as important to Stoker’s fiction as London are the places to which he (and even to some extent his friends) travelled during the years that he lived there. From 1883, the Lyceum company, and Stoker with it, toured America almost annually, and this is reflected in novels like The Shoulder of Shasta and Lady Athlyne, as well as in the important rôle played by the Texan Quincy Morris in Dracula. In 1890 Stoker visited Whitby, a trip which he famously revisits in Dracula in ways which, I argue, do not only contribute a picturesque setting to the novel but also inform its examinations of domesticity versus foreign threats and of evolutionary theory. Finally, 1893 saw the first of his subsequently regular trips to Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire, which became the setting for The Watter’s Mou’ and The Mystery of the Sea, and here too the connotations of the location condition the meanings of the fictions. The fifth and final chapter is called simply ‘The Cave’. Many of Stoker’s novels feature a cave, crypt or other dark subterranean place, ranging from Dracula’s tomb to the cave of The Mystery of the Sea and the cellar of The Jewel of Seven Stars, and it is not hard (indeed hard not) to read these in psychoanalytic terms. Stoker himself was so secretive that several key questions about his life remain unanswered, but all too often his novels seem to tell the stories that he himself will not. This chapter explores the darker side of Stoker’s fiction, especially its obsessions with sex, gender, disease, and various forms of secret knowledge, and argues that, in his fiction, Stoker was in fact writing his own literary life.

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1 Early Life in Stoker’s Fiction

Bram Stoker was born in Dublin on 8 November 1847. By his own account, his early childhood was one of entire invalidism: ‘till I was about seven years old I never knew what it was to stand upright’ (PR I: 31). This produced a particularly intense exposure to the company of his mother, Charlotte, and the horrific stories she told of her childhood in Sligo at the time of the cholera epidemic, some of which were highly dramatic: Stoker’s great-nephew Daniel Farson claims that his grandmother, Charlotte’s daughter-in-law, told him that towards the end of the cholera epidemic, ‘on one of the last, desperate days, Charlotte saw a hand reaching through the skylight. Seizing an axe, she cut it off with one tremendous blow’.1 The fact that the relationship between Stoker and his mother centred so much on stories was an important influence on his later fiction, particularly with regard to its typically conflicted depictions of motherhood. Charlotte appears to have been a powerful figure; Farson recalls that ‘My grandmother Enid married [Bram’s brother] Tom when she was little more than a girl, in 1891. She was not a fanciful woman and she told me that the family were in awe of Charlotte if not actually afraid of her’.2 Indeed Carol A. Senf suggests that ‘When [Charlotte] died, her son lost one of the most powerful influences in his life. The result may be that women characters in his later novels are less powerful’.3 Certainly Barbara Belford remarks that ‘Stoker’s women characters frequently have names beginning with M (Maggie, Mina, Mimi, Marjory, Margaret), a tribute, perhaps, to “Mother” and sisters, Matilda and Margaret, his early caretakers’.4 23

24 Bram Stoker

Two features of Stoker’s early life in Dublin appear to have been particularly influential on his later writing. It was there that he met, at an unknown date, his wife Florence Balcombe, whom he married on 4 December 1878 when she was 19 and he 31, and the Wilde family, whom he knew from childhood and whom Florence too knew, since her first romantic involvement was with Oscar Wilde. Both Oscar and his father, the Egyptologist Sir William Wilde, seem to have influenced Stoker’s works. The Snake’s Pass, in which Arthur can contemplate the possibility of Norah having to rescind a promise formerly given to marry Dick Sutherland and Dick is expected to react favourably, looks very like a wish-fulfilment revisiting of the love-triangle of Stoker, Wilde and Florence (SP: 129) (the short story ‘Greater Love’, published by Florence after Stoker’s death, also centres on two friends in love with the same girl),5 while Egyptology provides the story of Stoker’s 1903 novel The Jewel of Seven Stars. The DNB article on Stoker claims unequivocally that The Jewel of Seven Stars was ‘inspired by the Egyptian adventures of Oscar Wilde’s father’, although Sir William was not the only influence on Stoker’s ideas about Egypt. Stoker noted that once when he was visiting Tennyson, ‘In the garden [he] pointed out to us some blue flowering pea which had been reared from seed found in the hand of a mummy’ (PR I: 215), and Peter Haining notes that ‘in 1902 … Stoker discussed with [his friend Hall] Caine his plot about the Egyptian mummy, and from the novelist he received a considerable amount of esoteric and occult knowledge which he included in the story. Caine also helped him with the stark and gruesome ending’ (MT: 152), while in The Jewel of Seven Stars, Stoker himself gives the various parts of the being as listed by ‘Doctor Budge’ (Jewel 150), that is Wallis Budge, author of Egyptian Magic (1901). Moreover, mummies were an increasingly fashionable topic for fiction in the wake of British military occupation of Egypt in 1882, with several notable examples of the genre preceding and clearly influencing Stoker.6 Most intriguingly, mummies could be seen as bringing together two of Stoker’s most deep-rooted concerns, female power and the position of Ireland, since, as Sandra M. Gilbert points out: The figure of the New Woman, with its evocation of such unruly females as the Egyptian Cleopatra and the pseudo-Egyptologist Madame Blavatsky, vividly suggested an ultimate triumph of

Early Life in Stoker’s Fiction 25

otherness. Feminist thinkers had long understood this point, quite consciously identifying their work for women’s rights with such related challenges to patriarchal authority as spiritualism, abolitionism, and the Home Rule movement in Ireland.7 Still, early exposure to Egyptology can only have fed the fascination with the borderline of death already begun by his mother’s stories about how in the confusion of the cholera epidemic people had been buried alive. Moreover, Stoker’s most recent biographer, Paul Murray, plausibly suggests that the ‘Docther Wilde’ reference in The Snake’s Pass (SP: 129) is to Sir William, and further suggests that Stoker’s ‘notion of the Irish regenerating the United States may well have come from Stoker’s friends, Sir William and Lady Wilde’.8 There is also the fact that, as Talia Schaffer has shown,9 many of the dates so carefully cited in Dracula correspond directly with those of the trial of Oscar Wilde. The other major element of Stoker’s work which seems to be traceable back to his childhood, which I have already touched on above, is his insistent troubling of the borderline between life and death. This is no doubt partly attributable to the bizarre phenomenon of the spontaneous mummification that had occurred to the bodies in the crypt of St Michan’s Church, near to where the Stokers lived, and in which Charlotte Stoker was buried when she died in 1902. Early exposure to this resulted in a riddling throughout Stoker’s work of the distinction between life and death. In his short story ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’, for instance, when Margaret Delandre appears to her brother it is initially unclear if she is alive or dead (DG: 63), and the same is true of Teuta in The Lady of the Shroud, and of Tera/Margaret in The Jewel of Seven Stars, while several characters in Dracula so bestride the boundary that they can be classified only as Un-Dead. This surely contributed to Stoker’s deeply conflicted and ambivalent attitude towards ‘mummification’ of a different sort – actual motherhood.10 I make the bad pun because there is a close connection in Stoker’s mind between the two concepts: as Andrew Smith points out, in The Jewel of Seven Stars ‘The novel … works towards the idea of the pursuit of the absent mother (here presented as an Egyptian Mummy) that forms one of the underlying tensions of the Female Gothic’,11 a trope that is especially effective because, as David Glover observes, ‘one of the most

26 Bram Stoker

provocative of contemporary archaeological findings was that ancient Egypt was a matrilineal society’.12 The Jewel of Seven Stars is typical of Stoker’s works in that attitudes to the mother are wildly unstable in it. On the one hand, there is a careful observation of the conventional pieties fed by the ideal of the Angel in the House: the late Mrs Trelawny is never spoken of in any terms but those of the most profound respect and affection, and Margaret is sure that the scar on her wrist testifies to her mother’s suitably wifely anxiety about her father (Jewel: 141). To the reader, however, it is only too obvious that the scar could all too easily have another meaning, and be the sign of a deeply disturbing bond between Margaret and the mummy, Tera, which calls into radical question not only her particular relationship with her own mother but the whole nature of mothers/mummies in general. Although all the characters shy away from facing up to this possibility directly, it haunts them in the shape of a half-terrified fascination with ‘the mummy pit’, which Corbeck and Trelawny repeatedly enter. What they find there is hideously emblematic: in the tomb, which is decorated with ‘disjointed limbs and features, such as arms and legs, fingers, eyes, noses, ears, and lips’ (Jewel: 97), lies a mummy with a missing hand, which neatly encapsulates the whole gamut of fears about the fragmentation and self-splitting produced by either too close identification with or too radical separation from the mother. It is a sign of this tension between fear of severance and fear of absorption that Stoker’s depictions of both mothering and being mothered are equally fraught. In The Shoulder of Shasta, for instance, Dick tells Esse that ‘Mother couldn’t abide mountings, and kept dad down in the bottoms’ (Shasta: 39), but after she died ‘Me an’ Dad scooped a hole for the old lady ’way down by One Tree Creek’ (Shasta: 40), and were then free to live as they liked. During the crucial scene in which Esse rescues Dick from the bear, it is slyly insinuated that the two humans offer an eerie parallel to the bear and his mate: Esse throws her handkerchief in the male bear’s face just as she used to hold it to her own, while he rips her dress and nearly undresses her in this highly sexualised scene (Shasta: 70–1), and the doctor says of Dick that ‘we must not judge of his health and recovery by the standard of the towns, but rather by the animals, who simply lie quiet and lick their wounds’ (Shasta 80). It is, therefore, suggestive that it is the mother bear which is the more

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threatening both to Dick and to Esse – ‘Each instant the monster seemed to be coming closer, closer, till its great paw was stretched to tear her heart out’ (Shasta: 68) – and that this is a prelude to the first hint of distance between Esse and her own mother: we are told that Esse ‘knew her own secret now, and it took all her time and effort to so bear herself as to deceive her mother’ (Shasta: 82), with the wildly suggestive use of the verb ‘bear’ confirming the link. Similarly in the very early novella The Primrose Path, the first chapter is entitled ‘A Happy Home’, and yet on the very first page of this there is a remark which is by no means unequivocally suggestive of happiness, when Katey gives Jerry the baby to kiss: ‘Children are quite as jealous as dogs and cats in their own way, and instinctively the urchin sprawling on the hearth-rug came over and pulled at his mother’s dress, saying plaintively “Me too, mammy – me too”’ (PP: 16). Here both the mother and the child are placed under strain, the child by feeling that he is being excluded and the mother by being badgered, and it is notable that though it is the father who, by kissing the baby, is seeming to exclude the older child, it is at the mother that the child’s anger and desire are directed. Although the principal emotional investment may be in mothers, however, fathers are not forgotten, for all Stoker’s depictions of parenthood are conflicted, something which one might well be tempted to see as doubly grounded in his own experience, since Florence Stoker does not seem to have been a very affectionate mother to their only child Noel: it seems suggestive, for instance, that Noel spoke French before he spoke English because that was the language of his governess,13 and Daniel Farson claims of Noel that ‘When he was a boy he spent much of his time with my grandmother, who told me that Florence was not particularly fond of him.’14 Certainly a less than warm relationship seems to be implied by George duMaurier’s Punch cartoon of the Stoker family, ‘A Filial Reproof’, in which Noel, told by Florence that he should be seen and not heard, replies ‘But you don’t look at me, Mamma.’15 Coolnesses between parents and children are omnipresent in Stoker’s fiction. It is a sorrow to Margaret Trelawny in The Jewel of Seven Stars that she knows so little of her father’s life; in Dracula, the truth about Lucy’s illness must be kept from her mother at all costs. In the short story ‘The Dualitists’, which Paul Murray sees as reflecting ‘the influence on Stoker of the work of the contemporary criminologists,

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Cesare Lombroso...and Guglielmo Ferrero, who propagated the notion of the inherent criminality of women and children’,16 we are offered a detailed description of the trials undergone by the parents of twins: The twins were the idols of their parents, and at the same time their pleasure and their pain. Did Zerubabbel cough, Ephraim would start from his balmy slumbers with an agonized cry of consternation, for visions of innumerable twins black in the face from croup haunted his nightly pillow. Did Zachariah rail at ethereal expansion, Sophonisba with pallid hue and dishevelled locks would fly to the cradle of her offspring. Did pins torture or strings afflict, or flannel or flies tickle, or light dazzle, or darkness affright, or hunger or thirst assail the synchronous productions, the household of Bubb would be roused from quiet slumbers or the current of its manifold workings changed. (MT: 47) Nor are the babies the only troublesome offspring in the tale, for their eventual killers are also children, Harry Merford and Thomas Santon, whose names clearly glance ironically at the idealising view of childhood peddled in Thomas Day’s Sanford and Merton (1783–89). Each of the two boys is given a knife by his parents, a gesture which Joseph Valente interprets as initiation into compulsory heterosexuality: One Christmas, they give each boy a knife, distinguished by his initials, a master signifier of his individual subjectivity. Now since the parents likely feared some manner of homoeroticism in the lads’ intimacy (a never distant possibility in Stoker’s works), the gift of such an obvious phallic symbol, monogrammed, seems intended to impart to each boy a positive sense of his masculine gender identity.17 I think this reading is a little strained, but there is no doubt that, whether or not they are the products of it, the knives are certainly the causes of tension between parents and children: after Harry and Tommy are thwarted in their first attempts to destroy the pianos and family portraits (MT: 49) with these knives, ‘articles of crockery began to be missed … Mrs Merford and Mrs Santon mourned their losses, but Harry and Tommy gloated day after day over their spoils’

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(MT: 52). Finally the two boys kill the babies in the ‘hacking’ game they have developed: The pasty face of Zerubbabel had fallen fair on that of Zachariah, for Tommy and Harry were by this time artists of too great experience to miss so simple a mark. The putty-like noses collapsed, the putty-like cheeks became for a moment flattened, and when in an instant more they parted, the faces of both were dabbled in gore. Immediately the firmament was rent with a series of such yells as might have awakened the dead. (MT: 56) Moreover, not only do they take a callous pleasure in their actions – the two boys ‘continued their awful pastime with a zest tenfold as they knew that the agonised eyes of parents wept at the cause of their joy’ (MT: 57) – but they also cause the deaths of both the twins’ parents, killed trying to catch the decapitated bodies of the twins, ‘who were thus posthumously guilty of the crime of parricide’ (MT: 57). In the ultimate – and typically Stokerian – insult, because Harry and Tommy testify that they have committed suicide, the parents are buried with ‘stakes driven through their middles’ (MT: 58). In ‘The Dualitists’, it is hard to say which is the greater, the animus against parents or the animus against children. Elsewhere in Stoker’s fiction parenthood is similarly consistently disastrous. In ‘The Secret of the Growing Gold’ it is the pregnancy of Geoffrey Brent’s wife which precipitates the disaster, and when she refers to ‘us three’ (MT: 69), of whom one is clearly an intruder, and Geoffrey protests that there are only two, she could mean the baby as much as the ghost of Margaret. Stoker’s women are often weak or flawed – in the short story ‘The Gipsy Prophecy’ Gerald wisely counsels Joshua not to tell his wife about the prophecy on the grounds that women are superstitious (DG: 75) – but his mothers are most notably so, not least because, as Carol A. Senf notes, ‘he tends to connect sensuality in women with cruelty to children’,18 and despite Victorian doctors’ protestations that good women felt no sexual desire, the fear at the heart of Stoker’s novels is that motherhood is inevitably a sign of sensuality. This half-fascinated, half-terrified obsession with the mother is perhaps most memorably illustrated in Dracula. The teleology of

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Dracula is an interesting one: rather than progressing, like so many other Victorian novels, towards a closing marriage, which, in Gail Cunningham’s formulation, is normally ‘the mainstay of Victorian fiction’, 19 it ends instead on an image of motherhood. The final paragraph of the novel, spoken by Van Helsing and relayed by Jonathan Harker, is ostensibly offered as a celebration of domesticity, continuity, and affective ties: We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us! This boy will some day know what a brave and gallant woman his mother is. Already he knows her sweetness and loving care; later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake. (D: 449) Alongside the discourse of affect, with its reinforcement by the physical location of the boy on Van Helsing’s knee while these words are spoken, another language is surprisingly dominant: Van Helsing focuses not only on what the boy’s future experiences will be, but, above all, on the epistemological structures which will produce them.20 These are, apparently, unproblematic; indeed the text has already instantiated a model of knowledge as essentially a benevolent communion of souls, untainted by the mechanics of actual communication, when, earlier in the closing ‘Note’, Jonathan Harker posits a replacement of the terrifying psychic link between Dracula and Mina by one between Mina and himself: ‘His mother holds, I know, the secret belief that some of our brave friend’s spirit has passed into him’ (D: 449). What Mina secretly ‘holds’ is wordlessly ‘known’ to her husband. Van Helsing’s summing-up is structured by verbs of perception. After the dismissal of the initial notion of ‘proof’ there come instead ‘believe’, ‘know’, ‘knows’ and ‘understand’. ‘Belief’ is in fact negated by its association with the impossibility of ‘proofs’, and ‘understanding’ and part of the ‘knowing’ are displaced to the future; but one thing is figured as already ‘known’ to the young Quincey Harker, and that is his mother’s ‘sweetness and loving care’. The basis for his apprehension of these must, presumably, be sensory and experiential, and the fact that his future knowledge of her bravery and gallantry will be available to him despite the absence of

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any proofs such as could induce belief in others suggests that there will be a similarly felt and intuitive quality to his future knowledge. This idea is reinforced by the fact that the basis for this future knowledge will in fact be grounded in love: ‘later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake’. In fact, love underpins all the paragraph’s epistemological assumptions, since it is through the operation of Mina’s maternal affection that the boy already ‘knows her sweetness and loving care’. However, there is surely a difference in the kind of love which will inform his later awareness: ‘later on he will understand how some men so loved her, that they did dare much for her sake’. Before he can imaginatively apprehend the nature of the love entertained by other men for his mother he will have to have negotiated a very different awareness of both himself and her, and of the affective structures which govern mature human relationships. ‘Later on’ signals not only the passage of time, but the developing awareness of sexuality, loss, and of the social structures which dictate that men must ‘dare’ for the sublimated love of the woman they can never possess – a process of understanding which will have its roots in the development of the Oedipus complex which forestalls the boy’s own possession of his mother. Motherhood, then, is encoded at the close of the novel not as any idyllic image of Madonna and child – indeed the child sits not on its mother’s knee, but on Van Helsing’s, and Mina herself is silent throughout the closing ‘Note’ – but as a merely temporary refuge from precisely the kinds of sexual knowledge that initially unleashed the horrors of vampirism amongst the Crew of Light. In fact, despite its structural status as narrative telos, this closing representation of motherhood is fissured by the same kinds of ambiguity that have made many of the novel’s images of maternity only slightly less obviously monstrous than the figure of the Count himself. The figuration of motherhood as implictly monstrous begins both early in the text and early in the processes of the novel’s gestation. The historical Vlad Dracul was alleged to be guilty of appalling cruelty to mothers and their children, and Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne point to the possibility that Stoker may have been influenced by the story of Henry Holm, who, as a medical student,

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obtained access to the tomb of his mother and cut off her head.21 Moreover, J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, an undoubted source for Dracula, centres on a girl apparently abandoned by her mother, and her victim, like Coleridge’s Christabel, is warned by the voice of her own dead mother.22 In the novel itself, Jonathan Harker, once in Transylvania, notes that ‘the women looked pretty, except when you got near them, but they were all very clumsy about the waist’ (D: 3). He thus registers a horror of the thickened waist – prime symbol of motherhood – found throughout Stoker’s work: in The Lady of the Shroud, the Voivode Vissarion, being rescued from mortal danger, still takes time to notice that the woman who is about to save him ‘was figured something like my Teuta, but broader, less shapely’ (Shroud: 175); it is in fact his daughter Teuta, with ropes coiled round her waist. The woman who supplies Harker with a rosary to ward off Dracula tells him that it is for his mother’s sake (D: 5); later Dracula himself hideously mimics motherhood when he puts Harker to bed and folds up his clothes (D: 40),23 and the ship which brings him to England is named after the earth-mother Demeter (a name which, surely significantly, Stoker had changed from the Dmitry which he found in his source).24 Most suggestively, the mother of the child whom Dracula kills is destroyed by a pack of wolves who flood in ‘like a pent-up dam when liberated’ (D: 45), just as she herself, the ‘dam’ of the child (a term used most often in ‘the devil and his dam’) has in a sense fallen victim to the extravagance of her own behaviour in trying to storm the castle door.25 The pattern persists in the central part of the novel. The inadequacy of Mrs Westenra, for instance, has often been commented on. Alan P. Johnson argues that it is her selfishness and instinct for selfpreservation which both drive Lucy into rebellion and strip her of her defences against Dracula.26 Suggestively, he also posits a link between Lucy’s unarticulated feelings for her mother and another of the novel’s representations of monstrous motherhood, the story of the suicide George Cannon, whose grave lies immediately beneath Lucy’s favourite seat in Whitby churchyard: The epitaph says that the slab and the seat were ‘erected by his sorrowing mother to her dearly beloved son’ and that ‘he died, in the hope of a glorious resurrection’. Swales states that ‘the sorrowin’ mother was a hell-cat that hated him … an’ he hated her

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so that he committed suicide in order that she mightn’t get an insurance she put on his life.’ Although George Canon was outspoken in his filial rebellion, the antagonism between him and his hypocritical mother parallels closely the implicit antagonism between Lucy and Mrs. Westenra. Lucy’s response to Swales is revealing: ‘Oh, why did you tell us of this? It is my favourite seat, and now I cannot leave it …’27 And although Johnson does not develop the suggestion, he also attaches to his discussion of Mrs Westenra a brief consideration of the history of the wolf by which she is frightened to her death, a normally passive creature who may nevertheless, his keeper fears, ‘devour an untended baby in the park’28 – surely a potent image of such an annihilating rage against children from an unexpected source as characterises the novel’s other representations of monstrous motherhood. There is, too, the zoo-keeper’s instructive comment that ‘you can’t trust wolves no more nor women’ (D: 167), coupled with his explicit linking of a failure to nurture with unbridled female sexuality: If he can’t get food he’s bound to look for it, and mayhap he may chance to light on a butcher’s shop in time. If he doesn’t, and some nursemaid goes a-walkin ’orf with a soldier, leavin’ of the hinfant in the perambulator – well then I shouldn’t be surprised if the census is one babby the less. That’s all. (D: 169–70) There is no mention at all here of the child’s mother; her maternal role has been relegated to a careless nursemaid, more intent on securing her own sexuality and fertitlity than on attending to the product of another woman’s, and the grief that would be produced in her by the loss of her child is deflected by the brutal figuring of the dead infant as merely a statistic in the population count. Instead of the nurturing mother, we are left with the devouring mouth of the wolf (so reminiscent of the monstrous metamorphosis of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother) and the wandering sexuality of the nursemaid, deterministically drawn to the stereotype of aggression embodied by the soldier. Elsewhere in the novel, even the performance of nurturing cannot save the maternal woman from demonisation. As Christopher Craft

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points out, the milk with which a mother feeds her child is radically confused in the image patterns of the text: ‘What are the relations between blood and semen, milk and blood?.’29 When Mina sucks from Dracula’s breast images of motherhood and images of monstrosity startlingly coalesce.30 This is even more the case when a somnambulistic Lucy actualises the fantasies of preying on small children which are expressed by that archetype of the devouring mother, Lady Macbeth; the parallel between the two is accentuated by her earlier tearing of a paper while asleep (D: 152), and again at the end when the three weird sisters appear to Van Helsing and Mina and lead to the death of the horses (D: 336–7), something which in Macbeth had functioned as a sign of the evil to come. Such mergings of nurturings and preyings recall one of the nineteenth century’s most startling images of monstrous motherhood, which occurs in the seemingly innocuous pages of Mrs Beeton’s The Book of Household Management (1861). Her adjuration to women not to go to sleep breastfeeding encodes some very interesting assumptions: the mother wakes in a state of clammy exhaustion, with giddiness, dimness of sight, nausea, loss of appetite, and a dull waking pain through the back and between the shoulders. In fact, she wakes languid and unrefreshed from her sleep, with febrile symptoms and hectic flushes, caused by her baby vampire, who, while dragging from her her health and strength, has excited in itself a set of symptoms directly opposite, but fraught with the most injurious consequences – ‘functional derangement’.31 For Mrs Beeton, a sucking infant is ‘a baby vampire’, and similar language is used in an American news report which Stoker may well have seen, subtitled ‘The Old Belief Was that Ghostly Monsters Suckled the Blood of Their Living Relatives’.32 Sally Shuttleworth, quoting the Beeton passage, goes on to focus on the deep tension felt in Victorian ideologies of femininity between the duties of the wife and those of the mother: ‘whenever a mother thus doats upon her children, she is guilty of an act of unfaithfulness to her husband’.33 On similar lines, Jill L. Matus quotes another self-styled nursing authority of the nineteenth century, Mary Anne Baines: If a married woman hired herself out to nurse another’s child, Mary Anne Baines asserted, her own must suffer. More import-

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antly, her ‘husband’s comforts are not attended to, and thus temptations offer to wean a man from home and to contract irregular habits’ [(Matus’s) italics]. The husband, it would seem, is also in the position of the nursing child, weaned only at the responsible wife/mother’s peril.34 Once again, milk supply is imaged as conflicting with the demands of wifehood, although on this occasion difficulties arise only if the wife suckles children other than her own. Even when she does not do that, however, she can keep her husband only by infantilising him and by becoming, in effect, his mother. As with the wandering nursemaid, then, female sexuality cannot coexist with the ability to nurture. Commenting on the presentation of the vampiric Lucy, Christopher Craft points out: the child Lucy clutches ‘strenuously to her breast’ is not being fed but is being fed upon. Furthermore, by requiring that the child be discarded that the husband may be embraced, Stoker provides a little emblem of this novel’s anxious protestation that appetite in a woman (‘My arms are hungry for you’) is a diabolic (‘callous as a devil’) inversion of natural order, and of the novel’s fantastic but futile hope that maternity and sexuality be divorced.35 Lucy, like the woman who suckles a vampire in an act of infidelity to her husband, collapses codes and taboos about eating, menstruation, sexuality, nurturance and lesbianism36 into one hideous emblem of monstrous motherhood, in which it is always already the woman who is intrinsically perceived as demonic. Critical response to Dracula has generally identified two possible motivations for the deep-seated ambivalence in the portrayal of the novel’s women: Stoker’s attitudes to his own wife and mother, and his uneasiness at the the figure of the ‘New Woman’, about whom Mina jokes during the course of the novel, and who was widely seen as encroaching on the territory of masculinity. Ironically, it may have been the case that Stoker’s wife Florence did indeed divorce sexuality and maternity: Daniel Farson reported that ‘Stoker’s granddaughter believes that Florence refused to have sexual relations with Bram after the birth of their child’,37 though Ann Stoker later disassociated herself from this. The wider cultural context, however, should not be neglected. The text’s explicit reference to New

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Women is a sufficient indicator of their importance in the genesis of Stoker’s conception of his female characters, and of the ambivalence associated with them – as Matthew Brennan comments, even Mina herself, ‘[d]espite her jokes about the New Woman … resembles one in several ways’.38 However, her difference from the New Woman is equally strongly signalled: ‘the New Woman was often a professional woman who chose financial independence and personal fulfilment as alternatives to marriage and motherhood’.39 Even when a New Woman espouses motherhood, she does so in terms which cannot help but ring alarm bells. This is certainly the case for Herminia Barton in Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did, a novel which seems to have been an influence on Stoker – a friend of Grant Allen’s – since the scene in Stoker’s The Man in which Stephen invites Leonard up on to a hilltop to propose to him closely echoes Herminia’s hilltop soliciting of her reluctant lover. Herminia’s opinion is that Every woman should naturally wish to live her whole life, to fulfil her whole functions; and that she could do only by becoming a mother, accepting the orbit for which nature designed her. In the end, no doubt, complete independence would be secured for each woman by the civilized state, or, in other words, by the whole body of men who do the hard work of the world, and who would collectively guarantee every necessary and luxury to every woman of the community equally. In that way alone could perfect liberty of choice and action be secured for women; and she held it just that women should be so provided for, because the mothers of the community fulfil in the state as important and necessary a function as the men themselves do. It would be well, too, that the mothers should be free to perform that function without preoccupation of any sort. Herminia’s utopian vision of the future seems to allow of no space for women to nurture men; she would, therefore, doubtless incur the censure of Mary Anne Baines and Mrs Beeton, as well of moralists in other areas. And in the end, however much Allen may insist on her ‘stainless soul’, her own daughter thinks her choices mad.40 In contrast to many of the New Woman tracts, however, Stoker’s novels work habitually to reinsert his female characters into a

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maternal role. As such, they seem to function in precise antithesis to the New Woman writers; but, as Nicholas Daly argues of a group of novels including Stoker’s early work The Snake’s Pass, ‘[i]t would be an over-simplification to think that the conservatism of these fictions works through a simple reversal of the gender roles presented in the New Woman novels.’41 The opposition in Stoker’s work between the New Woman and the maternal woman is figured not only by difference but by reaction, a reaction which leaves even the apparent sanctity of motherhood radically fissured by an ambivalence which may, in its turn, be further inflected by a psychological as well as a political response shaped by the dynamics of Stoker’s personal relationships with mother-figures. In Dracula, indeed, it may well be that the overt element of engagement with the particularities of the New Woman controversy actually serves to mask a more general malaise which would be more sharply visible in isolation. In fact, the emotional logic of Stoker’s other works suggests that this is indeed the case. Considerable light may be thrown on Dracula by a consideration of representations of monstrous motherhood elsewhere in Stoker’s writing, in texts shaped by imperatives other than what Senf has termed ‘Stoker’s response to the New Woman’. The imaging of motherhood as monstrous recurs throughout his work, from the very early novel The Snake’s Pass to his last novel, The Lair of the White Worm, where, in Alexandra Warwick’s formulation, the usual association between the vagina and birth is inverted because ‘[t]he worm/woman’s hole is where death lives, and not just ordinary death, but dreadful death from disease and corruption.’42 Incrimination of mother-figures surfaces even in the sophisticated comedy Lady Athlyne. In this novel, an exuberant cross between the inns and tight plotting of Tom Jones and the mistaken identities of The Importance of Being Earnest which also, in its frantic car journeys round the Scottish borders, prefigures John Buchan, there seems at first hardly to be space for a monstrous mother, or indeed for a mother at all: the mother of the heroine, ‘something of a valetudinarian’ (LA: 21), is packed off to Ischia for much of the book, and comprehensively eclipsed by her sister Judy, a maiden aunt of considerable gumption. Towards the end, though, Stoker’s characteristic obsessions abruptly find vent. The first hint of them may perhaps be seen when Colonel Ogilvie, the heroine’s irate father, threatens her

38 Bram Stoker

lover Athlyne that ‘for the disrespect in her description as a woman, you will have to answer me’ (LA: 281). When it unexpectedly transpires that having spent the night in the same hotel means that Joy and Athlyne are actually married, we revisit the familiar Stoker motif of the sexless wedding night: the Sheriff takes their having been in adjacent rooms as ‘proof of consummation’ (LA: 298), despite the fact that neither knew that the other was there. Finally, the joyful couple are joined, most unexpectedly, by Athlyne’s old wet-nurse, who, learning that they propose to regularise the situation by a second ceremony, asks improbably which of the two wives she supposes Athlyne to be thus taking ‘will be the mother?’ (LA: 319) and goes on, in the same atrocious brogue as Andy Sullivan of The Snake’s Pass, to make of Joy a strange demand: ‘Me lady, mayn’t I have the nursin’ av yer childher, the way I had their father before them? Though be the same token, it’s not the same nursin’ I can give thim, with me bein’ ould an’ rhun dry’ (LA: 319). No occasion, it seems, is quite complete without a monstrous mother figure present at it. Sometimes, of course, there are good, revered mothers in Stoker – but they are dead. Something of the same urbanity of tone as characterises almost the whole of Lady Athlyne is also found in Miss Betty. The opening of the novel, with the traumatic breaking of a china jar irresistibly recalling The Rape of the Lock, seems to augur social comedy, though we might note that this particular jar had been much cherished by the child’s dead mother (MB: 9); moreover, Betty’s inheritance, albeit channelled through her great-grandfather, is imaged largely as maternal, with the great-grandfather’s memories of ‘my mother, who, when a child like you, stood with her mother on the heights of Portland Bill and saw the great Armada’ (MB: 21) and the three generations of women who link the child to the greatgrandfather. All these women are dead, however, and Betty feels bitterly the want of a mother (MB: 78). The same is true of Stephen Norman in The Man, a book whose agenda is to assert that gender is innate: Stephen Norman may have been brought up effectively as a boy, but she can never truly become one, not least because ‘[i]n the nature of every woman, old or young, there is something of motherhood; and with Stephen this found expression with regard to her father’ (Man: 24). Both her mother and that of Harold An Wolf, her childhood friend and eventual lover, die young, and are revered and

Early Life in Stoker’s Fiction 39

regretted; indeed Stephen faints with grief at the sight of her mother’s coffin (Man: 64–5). Living mothers, though, fare less well. Harold cites motherhood as a reason why women cannot be just: ‘Do you think that Sheriff of Galway, who in default of a hangman hanged his son with his own hands, would have done so if he had been a woman?’ (Man: 7), and Stephen as a baby is nursed by Mrs Jarrold, whose ‘own baby had died as the result of an accident a few days after its birth’ (Man: 18) – not a very encouraging testimony to the quality of its care, especially given the addition that ‘[s]he had no other child alive’. The portrayal of motherhood is hardly more cheering when we are adjured to ‘[s]ee how little babies in the street obey the bigger babies in charge of them, as distinguished from the reluctant yielding to the stronger pressure of maternal power’ (Man: 51), while a subsidiary character dies from what Stephen’s aunt, who very effectively replaces her mother (Man: 106), terms ‘[t]he sin … of woman’s wrong-doing … as woman … of motherhood, without marriage!’ (Man 86). Even Mrs Stonehouse, apparently admirable as a mother, cannot comfort her daughter as the presence of Harold does, and little Pearl, in a passage which would now be unwritable, opts to sleep in his bed rather than her mother’s (Man: 296–7), while the book’s metaphors further undo its explicit project when Stephen is interpellated as future mother only by suffering imaged as motherhood: ‘[t]he motherhood of pain is a factor in the making of a strong life’ (Man: 142). Motherhood may be the natural, desirable state towards which Stephen must move, but its darker side is, once again, well in evidence. The idea is also very pronouced in the short stories which make up the volume Dracula’s Guest. In ‘The Burial of the Rats’, a tale centred on the repeated stripping to the bone of fresh corpses left accessible to rats, the gruesome events are specifically located near the Enceinte (DG: 101), which is the French term not only for a protective fortification but also for ‘pregnant’. In ‘A Dream of Red Hands’, motherhood, being in this case the product of seduction, is a hideous and fatal misfortune which can be only obliquely described: ‘I learned that her shame had come and that she had died in it’ (DG: 132). Most telling of all is the story entitled ‘The Squaw’, a sustained portrayal of monstrous motherhood. The narrative opens on a singularly disenchanted picture of newly married life: ‘My wife and

40 Bram Stoker

I being in the second week of our honeymoon, naturally wanted someone else to join our party’ (DG: 43). They soon find the desired addition in the shape of a brash American named Elias P. Hutcheson, hailing from the suggestively named Bleeding Gulch, who very soon after they meet him accidentally brains a kitten while in their company. The kitten is not one of a large litter, but the only offspring of its mother, who is virtually demented with grief. However, it is not the grief of the cat which becomes the focus of narrative attention, but her lust for revenge, as rather than pitying her or dwelling on the pathos of the situation, we are immediately invited to perceive her as alarming and dangerous: I shall never forget the sight, for she looked the perfect incarnation of hate. Her green eyes blazed with lurid fire, and the white, sharp teeth seemed to almost shine through the blood which dabbled her mouth and whiskers. She gnashed her teeth, and her claws stood out stark and at full length on every paw. Then she made a wild rush up the wall as if to reach us, but when the momentum ended fell back, and further added to her horrible appearance for she fell on the kitten, and rose with her black fur smeared with its brains and blood. Amelia turned quite faint, and I had to lift her back from the wall. (DG: 45) The blood on the cat’s mouth and whiskers is in fact the kitten’s, whose wounds she has been licking, but within the language of the passage it creates an impression not of motherly care but of monstrosity, with its marked association with the blood-sucking mouth of the vampire. Like the mother in The Snake’s Pass, the cat is both driven wild by grief and also physically marked as other, her fur smeared with the brains and blood of her dead kitten just as the human mother’s throat bears the mark of the snake. There is no attempt at all to create empathy with her; we share the narrative point of view of the young couple and their new acquaintaince, looking down on her from above, and the use of the technical term ‘momentum’ marks the difference between our superior, scientifically grounded apprehension of the situation and the cat’s uninformed attempt to scale a sheer wall (mimicking the fruitless gallantry of the human mother who

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climbed the hill where the King of the Snakes lived, and implanting a disturbing suggestion of an equation between motherhood and animality). It was in fact precisely such a superior awareness of the laws of gravity, and a resulting sense of superiority grounded in both literal and emotional distance, that led to the original accident, since Hutcheson’s motive in throwing the stone which brained the kitten was to mystify the animals and demonstrate his greater understanding of spatial laws: ‘I will drop it near the kitten, and they will both wonder where it came from’ (DG: 45). What the passage does not foreground, but what does later become apparent to the reader, is that there is another mother present. That Amelia’s faintness is not to be ascribed solely to the inherent horror of the incident she has just witnessed first begins to become clear when the party immediately afterwards move on to the Torture Tower: Amelia grew quite pale with the horror of the things, but fortunately did not faint, for being a little overcome she sat down on a torture chair, but jumped up again with a shriek, all tendency to faint gone. We both pretended that it was the injury done to her dress by the dust of the chair, and the rusty spikes which had upset her, and Mr Hutcheson acquiesced in accepting the explanation with a kind-hearted laugh. (DG: 50) The reader, however, cannot emulate Mr Hutcheson, since it has been so clearly signalled to us that the explanation which he ‘acquiesced in accepting’ is merely a ‘pretended’ one. Given the situation of the young couple, the obvious explanation will surely be that Amelia’s faintness is caused by her being in the first stages of pregnancy. This may initially seem unlikely, since it is only the second week of the honeymoon, but there are two potential explanations for this: either the honeymoon has not taken place immediately after the wedding – which is perfectly possible – or conception occurred at once, in which case Amelia might just have had time to observe that her period had not arrived as usual, and might also have become aware of some of the physical changes which can mark even the very first stages of pregnancy.

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That this is in fact the true situation is signalled still more plainly in a third episode of fainting, when the party is shown the instrument of torture known as the Iron Virgin: The sight was too much for poor Amelia, and this time she fainted dead off, and I had to carry her down the stairs, and place her on a bench outside till she recovered. That she felt it to the quick was afterwards shown by the fact that my eldest son bears to this day a rude birthmark on his breast, which has, by family consent, been accepted as representing the Nurnberg Virgin. (DG: 51) Amelia’s experiences prove to be disfiguringly written on the body, and in this Stoker precisely echoes the numerous medical manuals of the day which warn that any stress or upset, or any negative emotions, experienced by the mother during pregnancy will leave their physical mark on the baby43 (one wonders what the effect of Mina Harker’s experiences before and during gestation will be on the constitution of her child). At this current stage of Amelia’s pregnancy, however, it is precisely not written on her own body; it can be, and is, concealed – though the phrase ‘acquiesced in accepting’ suggests that Hutcheson may not be actually deceived. Instead, he subscribes to the socially required fiction that the condition of a pregnant woman is too delicate a matter to be openly spoken of – a convention that makes an awkwardness of incipient motherhood by its attempt to render the all-too-visibly pregnant body invisible in speech. Though Amelia’s own pregnancy is delicately dealt with, other representations of motherhood within the text are overtly monstrous. Hutcheson compares the vengeful cat with another vindictive mother of his acquaintance: Wall, I guess that air the savagest beast I ever see – ’cept once when an Apache squaw had an edge on a half-breed what they nicknamed ‘Splinters’ ’cos of the way he fixed up her papoose which he stole on a raid just to show that he appreciated the way they had given his mother the fire torture. She got that kinder look so set on her face that it jest seemed to grow there. She followed Splinters more’n three year till at last the braves got him

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and handed him over to her. They did say that no man, white or Injun, had ever been so long a-dying under the tortures of the Apaches. (DG: 46) This anecdote of matching pairs of mutilated and murderous mothers and children prefaces the climax of the narrative, the party’s encounter with the instrument of torture known as the Iron Virgin, which, despite its title of Virgin, is actually figured as an incarnation of a monstrously destructive maternal womb: the central object in the whole of this chamber of horrors was the engine known as the Iron Virgin, which stood near the centre of the room. It was a rudely-shaped figure of a woman, something of the bell order, or, to make a closer comparison, of the figure of Mrs Noah in the children’s Ark, but without the slimness of waist and perfect rondeur of hip which marks the aesthetic type of the Noah family. (DG: 50) The Virgin is explicitly sexual here, associated with Mrs Noah and clearly showing in her shape either the potential or the actuality of childbearing; she also mimics very closely Victorian ideas of female beauty, which were precisely centred on the female ‘reproductive organs’.44 When the Virgin is further investigated, the emphasis on a ‘womb’ becomes even more pronounced: It was only, however, when we came to look at the inside of the door that the diabolical intention was manifest to the full. Here were several long spikes, square and massive, broad at the base and sharp at the points, placed in such a position that when the door should close the upper ones would pierce the eyes of the victim, and the lower ones his heart and vitals. (DG: 51) To enter the virgin is to lose one’s eyes – the traditional punishment for sexual sin, as in the cases of Oedipus and of Gloucester in King Lear, of whom it is said that ‘The dark and vicious place where thee he got/ Cost him his eyes’.45 It is suggestive, too, that this is the

44 Bram Stoker

sight that directly precipitates Amelia’s third episode of faintness and the consequent revelation of her own pregnancy: the story’s most overt comment on literal human motherhood lies immediately adjacent to its most terrifying metaphorical manifestation of the womb. Elias Hutcheson’s reaction to the Iron Virgin is very different from Amelia’s. Utterly fascinated, he wants to recreate the experience of its original victims as fully as possible by being himself bound and inserted into the hideous belly of the engine. Still not satisfied, he exhorts the custodian to impart even greater verisimilitude: ‘Now, Judge, you jest begin to let this door down, slow, on to me. I want to feel the same pleasure as the other jays had when those spikes began to move toward their eyes!’ (DG: 53). It is while this is being done that the cat finds him, and leaps at the face of the custodian, tearing one eye across and forcing the custodian to drop the lid onto the unfortunate Hutcheson. The narrator, faced with an unconscious wife, a dead friend and a half-blinded custodian, acts decisively. In a ghastly parody of a Caesarian section, he removes the mangled body of Hutcheson from the Virgin and lets it fall on the floor, where the cat immediately pounces on it, ‘purring loudly as she licked the blood which trickled through the gashed socket of his eyes’ (DG: 55); and, says the narrator in the brief paragraph which concludes the story, ‘I think no one will call me cruel because I seized one of the old executioner’s swords and shore her in two as she sat’ (DG: 55). The turn of phrase deliberately invites a reader response, but that response may well not be the one which the narrrator anticipates, for his action is not the natural, inevitable reaction to the situation which he seems to think. To shear the cat in two suggests a bisection which, if imagined literally, could involve cutting through her womb – a second parodic Caesarian on which the narrator’s concern for his unconscious, pregnant wife might well seem to function as a powerful, silent commentary. The horror of the scene has been such that the young husband ‘feared for her very reason if she should wake from her faint to such a scene’ (DG: 55) – the final association of motherhood with madness in a text which, through the unstated logic of its symbolic patternings, has insistently represented motherhood as mania and as destruction, and has penalised its manifestations with the deaths of children and the most brutal of deliveries.

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Mother figures in Stoker, then, are closely and consistently associated with monstrosity. Jeffrey Spear argues that in Dracula, ‘the fantasy of reunion with the pre-Oedipal mother is also the threat of a horrific reabsorption by that which gave suck’,46 and Phyllis Roth similarly suggests that vampirism elicits from the men a blurring between ‘memory of nursing at the mother’s breast with a primal scene fantasy which produces the fear that the sexually desirable woman will annihilate if she is not first destroyed’.47 This seems, in fact, to be the basic logic persistently underlying Stoker’s writing, which on one level insists on a separation of the sexual and the maternal while, at another, radically confounding them, and seeing maternity as in fact impossible to confine within its appointed bounds but dangerously, monstrously, manifesting itself elsewhere. This is a patterning which seems, ultimately, only partly explicable in terms of a response to the unease generated by the New Woman; underpinning it, surely, is a far more wide-reaching and deeperseated psychological unease with woman as mother which may well be attributable to Stoker’s own feelings of ambivalence about the devouring mother and the maternal wife, and a marker of the process by which Abraham Stoker the Dublin boy grew into Bram Stoker the author of Dracula.

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2 At the Theatre

Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving began with a simple statement of the event which was to prove the most momentous of his life: ‘The first time I ever saw Henry Irving was at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, on the evening of Wednesday, August 28, 1867’ (PR I: 1). Stoker was then aged 20. After that first encounter, when Stoker realised that there were no regular theatre reviews appearing in the Dublin press, he offered his own services for free, and was thereafter associated with the theatre for the rest of his life. Nine years after first seeing Irving on stage, he was finally introduced to the great man, and the two bonded for life over an odd episode in which Stoker was apparently reduced to hysterics by Irving’s recital of ‘The Ballad of Eugene Aram’, a long narrative poem which focuses on the guilty conscience of a murderer: as Stoker himself put it, ‘In those moments of our mutual emotion he too had found a friend and knew it. Soul had looked into soul!’ (PR I: 33). Jeffrey Richards suggests that ‘It is perhaps significant that Stoker’s father died aged 77 in 1876, the year he had his momentous encounter with Irving’,1 and that Stoker was thus perhaps subconsciously seeking a replacement father-figure. Whether this was so or not, he had found in Irving a man who from now on would be at the emotional centre of his life. Eventually, Irving invited Stoker to join him in London, rescuing him from the clerk’s position at Dublin Castle to which he had hitherto been confined,2 and as Stoker remembered years later, ‘In my diary that night, November 22, 1877, I wrote: “London in view!”’ (PR I: 54). The history of that connection is central to the meanings of Stoker’s work, affecting every level of his texts from the 47

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construction of his plots to the extent and functions of his allusions to plays and dramatic characters. In his collection of Stoker’s short stories, Midnight Tales, Peter Haining unequivocally traces the origin of all the tales in the volume and many others of Stoker’s works to the post-theatre dinners regularly hosted by Irving at the Lyceum (MT: 6). Haining suggests, for instance, that Dracula may have been influenced by the Greek actor Jacques Damala, husband of Sarah Bernhardt, of whom Stoker wrote in his diary, ‘He looked like a dead man’ (MT: 7), and Haining also ascribes the origin of the Gombeen man story to one of Stoker’s many talks with Gladstone about Ireland in the Beefsteak Room (MT: 71). Stoker himself openly advertises the Irvingesque origins of his short story ‘The Squaw’ when he writes in the opening paragraph, ‘Nurnberg at the time was not so much exploited as it has been since then. Irving had not been playing Faust, and the very name of the old town was hardly known to the great bulk of the travelling public’ (DG: 43). Haining claims that ‘in the course of an atmosphere-gathering trip to the Brocken Mountains, where the final scenes of Goethe’s Faust, one of Irving’s favourite pieces, were set, Stoker and Irving visited Nuremberg and saw the Iron Maiden’ (MT: 85); in fact Paul Murray points out that, although Barbara Belford unequivocally asserts it,3 there is no evidence that Stoker went to Nuremberg, though other members of the Lyceum Company did. 4 However, the Crown Prince of Germany, the future Emperor Frederick, certainly discussed Nuremberg with Stoker at the Lyceum (PR I: 179). Murray does though think that ‘The Atlantic storm in The Man … had its genesis in a hurricane which struck when Stoker was crossing the Atlantic on the SS Marquette in 1899 with the Lyceum Company’,5 while Haining traces ‘The Red Stockade’ to Stoker’s and Irving’s entertainment of the officers and crew of the US cruiser Chicago in 1894, particularly Admiral Erben, who had coined the phrase ‘Blood is thicker than water’ (MT: 120). Stoker’s most vivid portrait of theatrical life as he knew it comes in the collection of short stories Snowbound: The Record of a Theatrical Touring Party. Structured on the principle of The Canterbury Tales, this offers a picture gallery of briskly sketched characters, headed by Mr Benville Nonplusser, the Irvingesque manager. The collection deliberately teases the reader about the extent to which it is based on

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actual experience. The preface to the volume reads (in its entirety) ‘The Truth – or rather Accuracy – of these Stories may be accepted or not as the Reader pleases. They are given as Fiction’, and the Wardrobe Mistress says Mr Sparbrook’s story is a lie because he was never in Australia (Snowbound 89), and that the story of the star trap is also not true (Snowbound: 145). However, Bruce Wightman argues that the events are certainly based on the experiences of the Lyceum Company: In Volume II of Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving Stoker records that in January 1904, while Irving was touring the USA and Canada, the company’s train became ‘snowbound’ in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York. The experience evidently played on Stoker’s mind, though in his fictional account he switches the setting from the United States to Scotland. (Snowbound: 9) Indeed the Guard’s remark that ‘the Stoker has gone out to prospect’ (Snowbound: 14) looks almost like an advertisement of personal involvement. The stories certainly, and conspicuously, testify to a precise and detailed knowledge of the theatrical scene. The Manager, organising the making of a fire on the snowbound train, orders: Now, Hempitch, you get out the thunder and lay it here on the floor on the lee side of the car opposite this window; you will see, Guard, that the iron sheet will protect the floor. You, Ruggles, get a good lump of modelling clay from Pygmalion and make a rim all round to keep in the ashes. Then, Hempitch, have halfa-dozen iron braces and lay them on billets or a couple of stage boxes. On this platform put down one of the fireplaces – any one will do. Then, Ruggles, you will put a Louis XI chimney over it, with a fire backing behind, and make an asbestos fire-cloth into a chimney leading out of the window; you can seal it up with clay. (Snowbound: 16–17) There is also a cleverly sustained tension developed not only through the match between teller and tale, as in the Chaucerian

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model, but also in that between teller’s personality, as revealed by the tale, and teller’s rôle in the company, since most of the characters are identified primarily or exclusively by titles such as the Singing Chambermaid or the Second Low Comedian. There is a degree of narrative control here not often found in Stoker, and indeed this is for the most part one of the most measured and tonally assured of all his works, apart from the utter vitriol animating the portrait of the Tragedian, Mr Wellesley Dovercourt. There is, however, one note persistently sounded which aligns Snowbound directly with Stoker’s more disturbing writing. Early in the sequence of tale-telling, the Sewing Woman threatens to recount a story about ‘a dead byby’ (Snowbound 37). She is never allowed to do this, but nevertheless the fantasised deaths of babies haunt the narrative, as they do elsewhere in Stoker: a baby is eaten in Dracula, and in Miss Betty we are told that ‘Lucy … lay beside her baby and her husband too in the deep sea beyond the Dogger Bank where the Queen of Sheba went down with all hands’ (MB: 26). In Snowbound, the Tragedian declares that Dead babies are always cheerful. I love them on the walls of the Academy. The Christy Minstrels’ deepest bass as he trills his carol, Cradle’s Empty, Baby’s Gone, fills me with delight. On such a night as this, surrounded as we are by the profound manifestations of Nature’s feller forces, the theme is not uncongenial. Methinks the very snow-wreaths with which the driving tempest smites the windows of our prison-house are the beatings of dead baby fingers as they clamour to lay ice-cold touches on our hearts. (Snowbound: 38–9) Along similar lines, the Second Heavies declares: When a man has a large family – I regret to say that at that time my first wife was nursing her seventh – he acquires a certain indifference to infantile querulousness. As a matter of fact, he does not feel sympathy with the child at all, his pity being reserved for other people. All babies are malignant; the natural wickedness of man, as elaborated at the primeval curse, seems to find an unadulterated effect in their expressions of feeling.

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I confess that the sight of a child crying, and especially crying angrily – unless, of course, it disturbs me in anything I may be doing – affords me a pleasure which is at once philosophical, humorous, contemplative, reminiscent and speculative. (Snowbound: 92) And the other people on the train with a crying baby object to its presence in distinctly threatening terms: ‘Say, mister! What kind of a howling-piece is it you have got there? Have none of you boys got a gun?’ There came from the bunks a regular chorus of acquiescence: ‘The durned thing had ought to be killed!’ (Snowbound: 93) Danger is only averted when, in a scene reminiscent of Harold’s rapport with Pearl in The Man, a young man dressed only in his under-flannels succeeds in pacifying the baby, which goes to sleep on him (Snowbound: 94–5). Nevertheless, the disturbing note has been sounded, and the intrusion of one of Stoker’s darker obsessions is, I think, a telling indication of the extent to which his emotions and indeed the deepest fibre of his being were touched in his work at the theatre. Though surrounded by actors throughout his time at the Lyceum, Stoker himself was not acting. Initially, the story of the Lyceum was a story of success. Irving’s popularity was assured from the moment he gave his first performance as Mathias in The Bells on 25 November 1871, ‘catapulting him to stardom’.6 Irving’s knighthood was announced on 25 May 1895 and the actual ceremony was performed on 18 July of the same year, making him the first actor ever to be knighted. Stoker’s association with the Lyceum gave him an entrée to the very highest levels of society. The people he knew ranged from crowned heads and American presidents to writers, including Hall Caine, dedicatee of Dracula, who Stoker thought looked like Shakespeare7 and for whom he worked as a literary agent after Irving’s death, as well as pruning his autobiography for him (Snowbound: 7); Mark Twain; Conan Doyle, whom Stoker met in 1891 when he brought the manuscript of his play Waterloo to the theatre and who subsequently became a regular guest at the Beefsteak Room; and Tennyson, whom he follows in

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deploying Arthurian mythology in The Shoulder of Shasta when Reginald is the only one who can pull Dick’s knife out of the floor (Shasta: 125). The literary scene in which Stoker’s novels appeared, moreover, was one conditioned by Irving and his performances at the Lyceum. A particularly interesting example of this is afforded by another book which nearly threatened to eclipse Stoker’s own most successful work. As its most recent modern editor notes, Richard Marsh’s book The Beetle was published in September 1897, just two months after Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and was, initially at least, even more of a popular success with the reading public than Stoker’s now canonical work. There is an apocryphal tale that Stoker and Marsh had a wager to see who could produce the most successful supernatural novel.8 There are in fact no known links between Marsh and Stoker, though Julian Wolfreys notes that ‘Marsh’s writing, from the earliest examples onwards, demonstrates the occasional depiction of somewhat sadistic sexuality or, as in the schoolboy stories, the expression of homoerotic affection’ (Beetle: 10), which might well seem reminiscent of Stoker’s own sexual attitudes. There are, however, a number of points of similarity between this text and Dracula, and they help to illustrate the way in which deployment of theatrical allusion was a crucial tool in both novels’ repertoire for the making of meanings. Julian Wolfreys opines that What is truly unsettling, I would suggest, for the late Victorian reader of The Beetle, is that a ‘science,’ already seen in a highly ambivalent light by the end of the century, is appropriated by a non-European monstrous other for clearly criminal and sexual purposes, all of which are aimed at undermining any self-reflective certainties about the stability of identity, whether one is speaking of class-position, masculinity, femininity, national identity, or secure belief in one’s own position as a subject of empire. That mesmerism is employed to achieve this in the hands of the ‘degenerate’ gothic foreigner, proves all the more efficacious as a narrative device in unleashing the irrational and unconscious fears at the

At the Theatre 53

heart of Englishness. As in Dracula, mesmerism provides the opportunity for the unscrupulous predatory alien to control and devastate not merely through physical attack and corporeal destruction, but also through the psychic erasure of the boundaries which one imposes on oneself as the necessary limits of self-definition. From this it can be suggested that mesmerism is readable as an act analogous with sexual penetration, an analogy borne out in both Dracula and The Beetle. (Beetle: introduction, 12–13) (Mesmerism, as we shall see, will also be a concern in Stoker’s last novel, The Lair of the White Worm.) There are certainly strong similarities between Dracula and Richard Holt’s narrative in The Beetle, which declares, among other things: That the man in the bed was the one whom, to my cost, I had suffered myself to stumble on the night before there could, of course, not be the faintest doubt. And yet, directly I saw him, I recognized that some astonishing alteration had taken place in his appearance. To begin with, he seemed younger, – the decrepitude of age had given place to something very like the fire of youth. His features had undergone some subtle change. His nose, for instance, was not by any means so grotesque; its beak-like quality was less conspicuous. The most part of his wrinkles had disappeared, as if by magic. And, though his skin was as yellow as saffron, his contours had rounded, – he had even come into possession of a modest allowance of chin. But the most astounding novelty was that about the face there was something which was essentially feminine; so feminine, indeed, that I wondered if I could by any possibility have blundered, and mistaken a woman for a man; some ghoulish example of her sex, who had so yielded to her depraved instincts as to have become nothing but a ghastly reminiscence of womanhood. (Beetle: 61) This uncertainty about gender is a crucial concern in Stoker’s work in general, and the sinister man who rejuvenates himself obviously recalls Dracula in particular.

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Equally reminiscent of Dracula are Atherton’s remark about his Arab visitor, ‘He must have made pretty good travelling, because, before I had a foot in the hall, I heard the front door slam’ (Beetle: 106), and the episode in which Atherton kidnaps what he takes to be Lessingham’s cat to demonstrate his killing machine (Beetle: 136), just as Renfield wishes for a cat to experiment on in order to test his theory of life. Moreover, Marjorie in The Beetle, like Lucy in Dracula, receives three proposals, from Lessingham, Atherton and Woodville, while Sydney, cornering the alien in his rented house, is oblivious to the fact that Marjorie, left alone, is in danger (Beetle: 228–9), just as Mina falls victim to Dracula while the Crew of Light are searching Carfax. Lessingham echoes Jonathan Harker’s reaction to the three women in Castle Dracula when he says of ‘the Woman of the Songs’: ‘Leaning over, she wooed my mouth with kisses. I cannot describe to you the sense of horror and of loathing with which the contact of her lips oppressed me’ (Beetle: 241). Holt is discarded like Renfield, and two good men and one tainted one, who correspond closely to the Crew of Light, pursue Marjorie and the Arab by train and telegraph. Gender proves as unstable in this text as in Dracula when Champnell says of Lessingham, ‘This Leader of Men, whose predominate characteristic in the House of Commons was immobility, was rapidly approximating to the condition of a hysterical woman’ (Beetle: 292), and the Inspector finds on Holt’s body ‘two abrasions on the skin, – one on either side of the man’s neck’ (Beetle: 303). Moreover, both texts seem to have syphilis as a subtext, since we are told of the dying Holt that ‘Even his nose was wasted, so that nothing but a ridge of cartilage remained’ (Beetle: 303) and Champnell opines, ‘I doubt … if this man has been murdered. It looks to me like a case of starvation, or exhaustion, – or possibly a combination of both’ (Beetle: 303). Syphilis notoriously destroys the nose, and as has been so much remarked on in connection with Stoker’s own death certificate, ‘exhaustion’ was a common euphemism for the effects of syphilis. It is also possible that the name Marjorie prompted that of the heroine of Stoker’s later The Mystery of the Sea, especially since both women make a miraculous recovery from near or apparent death. It is, therefore, suggestive that both texts choose to play out their parallel concerns in highly theatricalised language steeped in allusions to Shakespeare in particular. There are a number of references

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in The Beetle to Shakespearean texts. Macbeth, for instance, is remembered when Holt says ‘If I could I would not have stood upon the order of my going, but gone at once, anywhere, anyhow’ (Beetle: 74; Macbeth III.iv.118), or when Marjorie says of her father, ‘He has not actually forbidden me to speak to Paul, – his courage is not quite at the sticking point’ (Beetle 193; Macbeth I.vii.61). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is echoed when Atherton says, ‘Now, cabman, don’t go driving further on, – you’ll have to put a girdle round the earth if you do’ (Beetle: 258; Dream II.i.175–6), and The Merchant of Venice when Marjorie says, ‘The mere suspicion of a harmless, and, I am told, necessary cockroach, being within several feet has always made me seriously uneasy’ (Beetle: 205; Merchant IV.i.55). There are shades of Antony and Cleopatra when Marjorie is kidnapped by the Arab, has her clothes removed, and is dressed as a boy. Her friends even think that she has been wrapped in the carpet, as Enobarbus says that Cleopatra had been (Antony IV.vi.68–70). Jonson’s praise of Shakespeare is recalled when Holt says, ‘I gazed at the frightened figure in front of me, and realized that it was that of the great Paul Lessingham, the god of my political idolatry’ (Beetle: 76), and there is an attempt at a direct quotation from Twelfth Night when Sydney Atherton says of Marjorie, ‘all that time – well, I was nearly persuaded that the whole of the time I had loved her. If I had not mentioned it, it was because I had suffered my affection, “like the worm, to lie hidden in the bud,” – or whatever it is the fellow says’ (Beetle: 97). King Lear is recalled when Lessingham says to Atherton of Holt after Atherton has seen him jumping out of the window, ‘Poor fellow! more sinned against than sinning!’ (Beetle: 101; Lear III.ii.59–60), and Othello when Champnell says of Lessingham, ‘He shook Sydney as if he had been a rat, – then flung him from him headlong onto the floor. It reminded me of nothing so much as Othello’s treatment of Iago’ (Beetle: 253). Above all, there is a particular quantity of references to Hamlet. Atherton says that ‘The cat which I choose to believe is Paul Lessingham’s has received its quietus’ (Beetle: 137; Hamlet III.i.75), and notes that after Woodville has accidentally gassed himself: ‘I was conscious of exclaiming, – remember the saying about the engineer being hoist by his own petard’ (Beetle: 138; Hamlet III.iv.209). When the Arab offers to make Marjorie love him, Atherton asks, ‘pray how is this consummation which is so devoutly

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to be wished to be brought about?’ (Beetle: 143; Hamlet III.i.63–4). Lindon goes behind a screen to eavesdrop on Atherton and Marjorie (Beetle: 161) shortly before Marjorie herself remarks, Claudius-like, that ‘I knelt down, and I prayed, but the words couldn’t come’ (Beetle: 166, Hamlet III.iii.97–8), an episode which is rounded off in a manner multiply reminiscent of Hamlet when Atherton warns Lindon of Marjorie that ‘You don’t want people to say you have driven her into a lunatic asylum’ (Beetle: 171). Finally, Champnell calls the apparent destruction of the beetles’ lair ‘a consummation devoutly to be desired’ (Beetle: 321; Hamlet III.i.63–4 again). The parallels between Dracula and The Beetle should alert us to the extent to which Stoker’s novels need to be read against a general background of the theatre. Jeffrey Richards declares that Dracula ‘is steeped in the atmosphere and imagery of the Lyceum’,9 while Barbara Belford maintains that ‘Dracula is all about Irving as the vampire and Terry as the unattainable good woman’.10 It is certainly true that Dracula abounds in theatrical memories and language – Stephanie Moss, for instance, relates Dracula’s lack of reflection to the theatrical trick known as ‘Pepper’s ghost’11 – and at one point the novel even reflects directly on Stoker’s Lyceum experiences: ‘Our correspondent naïvely says that even Ellen Terry could not be so winningly attractive as some of these grubby-faced little children pretend – and even imagine themselves – to be’ (D: 177). Also, and more particularly, the parallels between Dracula and The Beetle draw our attention to the ways in which theatrical allusion is associated with danger, and likely to accrue to villains in particular, or to those whom the text is overtly or covertly incriminating. The specific influence of Irving in this process should not be underestimated; Barbara Belford’s DNB article on Stoker declares that ‘Stoker also wanted to create a dark, sinister role to swell the actor’s repertory of villains, from Mathias to Macbeth to Mephistopheles. Dracula was a homage to Irving’, while John Pick and Robert Protherough claim that Dracula was based specifically on Irving as Macbeth,12 the part which his dresser claimed was his best on the grounds that he sweated twice as much in that as in Hamlet.13 Stoker’s novels in general are indeed particularly interested in rôles which Irving performed, Hamlet and Macbeth in particular (The Watter’s Mou’, for instance, speaks of a church built by Malcolm, Macbeth’s successor [WM: 47–8]), and the mesmeric power of Edgar

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Caswall in The Lair of the White Worm, for instance, might well recall Irving’s experiments in this area. Dracula openly announces its own status as a novel influenced by Hamlet. Quite apart from the obvious reference to ‘“My tablets! quick, tablets!/” Tis meet that I put it down’ (D: 36), John Allen Stevenson observes of Mina’s scar that ‘the caste mark is also a kind of venereal scar, not only because it results from the count’s seduction of Mina but also because the echo of Hamlet’s accusation against Gertrude is far too strong to be accidental’,14 while Philip Holden argues that ‘The continual direct quotation of and reference to Shakespearean tragedy in the early part of the novel ally Harker’s own conflicted masculine subjectivity with that of Hamlet and Macbeth, characters through whose example, Henry Irving suggested, “higher moral education” might be achieved.’15 Hamlet is first echoed when ‘All at once we heard the crow of a cock coming up with preternatural shrillness through the clear morning air’ (D: 25) and Dracula leaves immediately, the Hamletian overtones of which are made clear when Jonathan writes, ‘Mem., this diary seems horribly like the beginning of the “Arabian Nights,” for everything has to break off at cockcrow – or like the ghost of Hamlet’s father’ (D: 30). Like Elsinore, where Horatio fears that the Ghost may tempt Hamlet to fall from a cliff, Dracula’s ‘castle is on the very edge of a terrible precipice. A stone falling from the window would fall a thousand feet without touching anything!’ (D: 26); like Hamlet, Jonathan exhorts himself, ‘Let me not think of it. Action!’ (D: 46). Van Helsing comically misremembers the language of Laertes’ resolution of revenge when he declares ‘this case of our dear miss is one that may be – mind, I say may be – of such interest to us and others that all the rest may not make him kick the beam, as your peoples say’ (D: 119), which distorts Laertes’ vow to Ophelia: ‘By heaven, thy madness shall be paid with weight/ Till our scale turn the beam.’16 Lucy writes that she is ‘hoping for sleep, and lying like Ophelia in the play, with “virgin crants and maiden strewments”’ (D: 132); and Seward, like Hamlet, ‘determined … to “be cruel only to be kind”’ (D: 270). It is sometimes even suggested that Van Helsing’s name should be traced back to Helsingor, the Danish version of Elsinore. Macbeth is also recalled: indeed it is a play which Barbara Belford sees as central to the genesis of Dracula, arguing that ‘Many similarities exist between Macbeth and Dracula’ and that 1888

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was the year of the first Ripper murders and of the Lyceum Macbeth: ‘At this time Stoker conceptualized a story that would intermingle Shakespeare’s dark psychology with contemporary evils’. (Michael Valdez Moses points to Stoker’s comment, in the preface to the Icelandic edition of Dracula, that ‘the 1888 Whitechapel murders of Jack the Ripper “originated from the same source” as the murders in Dracula’.)17 One notable pattern is that those who quote Hamlet in Stoker are likely to prove more reliable or more accurate than those who quote Othello, and this may well derive from Irving’s very different attitude towards the two plays. Virtually every aspect of the conception of Othello changed during the course of the nineteenth century, largely as a result of the scientific racism to which Darwinian theory gave rise. In the earlier half of the century, William Charles Macready, touring the United States in the rôle, had been appalled by the conditions in which he saw black slaves being kept and had felt that it was an outrage against humanity: he wrote in his journal, ‘I should neither wonder nor blame if I saw these black and dusky men strike their knives into the brutal bosoms of those who assert the right of might over them.’18 This is language strongly suggestive of identification – he empathizes with the position of the slaves as opposed to that of those who have power over them, whose possible murder he contemplates with complete equanimity. The same repudiation of any possibility of identification with white Americans is found again when he notes, ‘I am sick of American audiences; they are not fit to have the language in which Shakespeare wrote.’ 19 A very different attitude characterizes later imaginations of Othello, however. Irving’s was compared to a sepoy, an Other rather than a Self, like that of Fechter (to whose Hamlet Ellen Terry played Ophelia, 20 and who offered Irving himself an engagement) 21 before him, and the Italian-language performances of Tommaso Salvini, one of the century’s most notable Othellos, equally estranged the Moor from the English-speaking cast around him. It might also be worth noting that Stoker claimed not to have expected the Lyceum’s proposed staging of a play on the life of Mohammed to prove controversial (as it did) in a Christian country, suggesting little interest in or understanding of Islam, and though he would of course know that Othello seems to be represented as a convert from Islam

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rather than an adherent to it, he would also know that Iago at least believes the change to be only skin-deep. It is therefore unsurprising that in The Jewel of Seven Stars, for instance, it is the astute Dr Winchester who refers to ‘more things in heaven and earth’ (Jewel: 60), echoing Hamlet’s words to Horatio, while in Snowbound, the unpretentious Prompter twice echoes Hamlet, first when he says of the heat: ‘It was just a miracle how moustaches stuck on; and as for the flush of youth and beauty on the girls’ cheeks! – well, “there is a Providence that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will”’ (Snowbound: 62–3) and then when he laments that I suppose I must confine myself to some personal experience, and that connected with the theatre. It is a pity I am so limited; as if I were free to speak of the adventures of my youth by flood and field, ‘I could a tale unfold’ that would ‘freeze your young blood and make each particular hair to stand on end like quills upon the fretful porcupine’. (Snowbound: 61) Hamlet can also be used as a benchmark for shoddiness of aspiration or achievement, as when we are told in Snowbound that ‘he had, with the best and purest intention, he assured us, dared the blue ribbon of histrionic achievement in essaying the part of Hamlet in the Ladbroke Hall’ (Snowbound: 77). It might perhaps be pertinent here to note that it was when Irving was playing Hamlet that fire broke out in the theatre and only Stoker’s prompt action prevented panic and a possibly fatal stampede for the doors, and that when he first came to work at the Lyceum he found that Irving had already taken such financial gambles that ‘[e]verything depended on the success of Hamlet’.22 By contrast, the callow Juvenile Lead who makes such a foolish confession on the train which faces possible derailment at Bayou Pierre, in contrast, quotes Othello when he speaks of how ‘That evil quality, which, like jealousy, “mocks the meat it feeds on,” had grown with the enlarging successes which seemed to whirl upon him like giant snowflakes from the Empyrean’ (Snowbound: 76). And in Lady Athlyne the remark that Athlyne watching Joy and her father ‘knew they would be starting out after tea time which meant, he

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knew, something after five o’clock; and not for a world of chrysolite would he miss being there’ (LA: 148), which echoes Othello, proves the ironic prelude to a spectacular failure to be in the right place at the right time. Othello himself seems to be regarded as untrustworthy by Stoker. In The Lair of the White Worm, Adam says of the loathsome Edgar Caswall that ‘He seems to think he had only to throw his handkerchief to any woman, and be her master’ (WW: 31), an image which seems to recall Othello’s gift of a handkerchief to Desdemona, while in The Shoulder of Shasta, watching the growth of the clearly undesirable intimacy between Dick and Esse, After a while Mrs Elstree came to understand something of the feelings of Brabantio, as he afterwards reflected on the method of Desdemona’s wooing by Othello – with the exception that she assured herself that in no way had Dick the smallest intention of making love. (Shasta: 81) This clearly suggests that Mrs Elstree at least, and presumably Stoker as well, does not take Othello’s apparent disingenuousness at face value. Stoker’s fiction, then, is rooted in Irving’s Shakespearean repertoire. It was probably also the case that Stoker hoped that Irving would act Dracula, but he never did; Barbara Belford suggests that the part may have been too small for him, since ‘Dracula is present on only sixty-two pages out of a total of 390 in the first edition’.23 However, I think the direct influence of Irving on Stoker’s fiction is overestimated. In the first place, here is what seems clearly to be a testimony to the influence of Irving on Stoker’s work: in Stoker’s novel The Primrose Path, a ‘tall mesmeric Irving-like actor “who was performing the part of ‘Mephistopheles’”’ (Path: introduction, 9) in a production which was ‘a version of Faust, and the dresses were the same as those used in Gounod’s opera’ (Path: 51) interferes in the destiny of a young Irish immigrant and ultimately leads him astray. The novel clearly attests to an intimate knowledge of the theatre: we are told that ‘The outside of a small theatre is at the best of times unpromising’ (Path: 50); that ‘Theatrical life, save on occasions, begins late’ (Path: 55); and that ‘It is the misery of all those whose

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work is connected with the arts that there is a spice of uncertainty in everything’ (Path: 56). Moreover, the authentic note of the author of Dracula is surely sounded when we hear that ‘Jerry kept dreaming of slots, and flies, and wings, and flats, and vampire traps, and grooves, and PS (prompt side), and OP (opposite prompt side)’ (Path: 57). In particular there are some significant Shakespearean references to plays that were central to Irving’s repertoire: ‘Jerry awoke with an evil conscience, that which makes “cowards of us all”’ (Path: 64), and when Jerry confronts Katey in her bed, believing that she has been unfaithful, ‘The big veins stood out on his forehead and his eyes rolled’ (Path: 103); he then kills first her and then himself. However, The Primrose Path was first published in 1875 as a serialisation in The Shamrock, and thus predates Stoker’s first actual meeting with Irving, even if not his first sight of him, by almost two years. The awareness of theatre that permeates this novel thus cannot be ascribed solely to Irving. Moreover, Irving was not the only reason that Stoker referred to Shakespeare, and nor was he by any means the only writer of his time to do so. Shakespeare was a crucial cultural reference point for Victorian and Edwardian England. Allusion to Shakespeare shored up cultural capital and also offered a quick and ready means for writers to make a number of points with maximum economy. In the first place, allusion to Shakespeare offered a shortcut to asserting the importance of traditional gender norms. Again, this is an established pattern in late Victorian and early Edwardian culture: Edward Drinker Cope, who spoke of leaving the prince out of Hamlet, was violently opposed, on allegedly scientific grounds, to the New Woman movement. In The Lady of the Shroud, the Lady, like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, flees at the crowing of the cock (Shroud: 73). Although she is eventually revealed as non-vampiric, she is nevertheless, in traditional Stoker fashion, still to some extent incriminated and belittled, first by association with Dracula – we are told of her ancestors that ‘this was the race of that first Voivode Vissarion, of whom, in legend, it was prophesied that he – once known as “The Sword of Freedom,” a giant among men – would some day, when the nation had need of him, come forth from his water-tomb in the lost Lake of Reo’ (Shroud: 145), and the aeroplane on which she rides is imported from Whitby (Shroud: 211) – and second by a brief but ominous reference to Othello, when she asks Rupert to take

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her to the Silent Tower and he replies ‘Not for a world of chrysolite!’ (Shroud: 169). Second, allusion to Shakespeare inevitably brought with it a sense of metatheatre, of rôle play, and of the doublings which were both a requirement of the conditions of Shakespearean theatre and a powerful psychological tool. This was particularly useful for Dracula, since it is a text which is interested above all in uncanny doublings and mirrorings, something which was indeed firmly in line with Irving’s theory of the double consciousness of an actor. As Michael Valdez Moses points out, In his notes for Dracula, Stoker projected a scene (never written) in which a painter attempts to render a lifelike portrait of the vampire but discovers that, ‘however hard the artist tries, the subject always ends up looking like someone else’.24 John Allen Stevenson suggests that ‘The vampire, “the other,” “the monster” – everything that Dracula represents, and represents so powerfully – depends on our refusal to see the ways in which he is also a mirror. After all, it is Harker who can see nothing in the glass’,25 and certainly when Jonathan asks, ‘Where his body has gone why may not another body go?’ (D: 46), he postulates a dangerous equivalence between the two people between whom the novel is officially trying to put most distance. The uncanny similarity between Harker and Dracula is repeatedly suggested, and indeed Joseph Valente calls Dracula ‘[s]omeone whose occupational temper and expertise are unexpectedly cognate with Harker’s own, but of superior merit, perhaps even forming something of an ego-ideal for the younger man’. He cites in particular Harker’s remark that Dracula ‘would have made a wonderful solicitor’, and notes that Harker first sees Dracula in London on his way back from the funeral of Mr Hawkins, his surrogate father. Valente also poses the question ‘How does Harker know how vampires multiply? … How does he even know that they multiply?’ and points to ‘a detailed pattern of affinities and correspondences that align the vampire with the various vampire fighters in London, much as he is twinned with Jonathan Harker in Transylvania’. As he well observes, ‘Renfield in effect informs Mina that he is on her side – he wishes only her safety – and that, in a structural sense, he is on the other

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side.’26 But then the women themselves are also ambiguous: as Alan P. Johnson notes, ‘In the case of each woman, Dracula symbolizes her inner rebelliousness, and its crisis coincides with her commerce with Dracula.’27 Equally sinister is Seward musing on allowing Renfield to continue his experiments: ‘If only there were a sufficient cause! I must not think too much of this, or I may be tempted; a good cause might turn the scale with me, for may not I too be of an exceptional brain, congenitally?’ (D: 71). The suggestion of a doubling here is bolstered when Seward gets out of the window Renfield had escaped through (D: 101). More systematically, there is a sustained pattern of doubling between humans and animals. Not only can Dracula effortlessly cross the border between the two, but the wolf-keeper says, ‘there’s a deal of the same nature in us as in them there animiles’ (D: 136). His wife confirms this – ‘’E’s got mindin’ the animiles so long that blest if he ain’t like a old wolf ’isself!’ (D: 137) – and it is also demonstrated by the behaviour of Renfield, who is found ‘lying on his belly on the floor licking up, like a dog, the blood which had fallen from my wounded wrist’ (D: 141). Equally, Franco Moretti declares that Quincy Morris is a highly suspect character: Morris is a vampire … Lucy dies – and then turns into a vampire – immediately after receiving a blood transfusion from Morris … Morris, shortly afterwards, tells the story of his mare, sucked dry of blood in the Pampas.28 Perhaps most alarming is the suggestion of a bond between two ostensible opposites, Dracula and Van Helsing, when Van Helsing appears to be able to read his enemy’s mind: ‘he have gone back to Transylvania. I know it so well, as if a great hand of fire wrote it on the wall’ (D: 315). Joseph Valente also points out that ‘the one figure in the novel whose eyebrows are said to fit Lombroso’s category, “bushy,” is Van Helsing’,29 and it might be worth noting that Van Helsing’s pronunciations and grammatical slips are very close to those of the villainous Jew Mendoza in The Watter’s Mou’: ‘For you, mein frient Keith, this check, which one week you cash, and for you, my tear Miss Alice, these so bright necklace, which you will wear, ant which will sell if you so choose’ (WM: 27). As Valente comments,

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‘the character bearing perhaps the most varied metonymic and metaphorical links with the Count is Van Helsing’.30 As part of the novel’s interest in uncanny doubling, there are also, alongside its references to Hamlet, allusions to other plays by Shakespeare, and these do not always work in the same direction as those in Hamlet. Jonathan in Castle Dracula exhorts himself, Great God! merciful God! Let me be calm, for out of that way lies madness indeed. I begin to get new lights on certain things which have puzzled me. Up to now I never quite knew what Shakespeare meant when he made Hamlet say: – ‘My tablets! quick, tablets! ’Tis meet that I put it down’ (D: 36) This ends with one of the novel’s most overt allusions to Hamlet, but it also encodes within itself a quiet but potent recollection of a different play, King Lear, echoing Lear’s ‘O! that way madness lies; let me shun that’.31 The same passage is also echoed when Jonathan writes, ‘Whilst I live on here there is but one thing to hope for: that I may not go mad, if, indeed, I be not mad already’ (D: 36), and a third time when Seward exclaims ‘Stop; that way madness lies!’ (D: 225). Renfield quotes poor Tom in Lear when he says of spiders, ‘“Rats and mice and such small deer” as Shakespeare has it’ (D: 271; III.iv.135) and Seward recalls Goneril when he says of Renfield that ‘These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man are too paltry for an Omnipotent being’ (D: 100). Othello is also evoked: Lucy on being proposed to by Quincey Morris declares, ‘I sympathize with poor Desdemona when she had such a dangerous stream poured in her ear, even by a black man’ (D: 57), and Seward says Van Helsing has ‘a temper of the ice brook’ (D: 112; Othello V.iii.253). Nor is the fourth of the great tragedies forgotten, for Lucy tearing the paper while still asleep is an obvious image of Lady Macbeth (D: 152). Barbara Belford also argues that one of the tragicomic last plays is evoked in Dracula, since she suggests that ‘Bedroom visitations recall Cymbeline’.32 Even when an undoubted comedy, Twelfth Night, is briefly remembered, it is only for one of its darkest parts, as Seward observes that Renfield ‘smiled on me in quite a superior sort of way – such a smile as would have become

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the face of Malvolio’ (D: 268) (and a performance of Twelfth Night was the occasion of a rare Lyceum failure and audience unrest).33 Obviously this rapid reference-check of Shakespearean tragedy serves to keep the overall tone of the novel suitably dark and ominous. However, it also does other cultural work as well. To associate Lucy with Lady Macbeth serves as a further incrimination of an already compromised character, linking her with the three sisters in Castle Dracula as Lady Macbeth can be linked with the witches and confirming how much the men need to band together to dispose forever of the threat she poses. But this is an allusion that can cut two ways, for Lady Macbeth’s exhortations to her husband to commit murder are clearly based on the premise that he does not fulfil her idea of a man. This is also what is implied by Goneril’s ‘Oh! the difference of man and man’ (IV.ii.26), which is what can be heard lying behind Seward’s ‘These infinitesimal distinctions between man and man’; she is complaining that the man whom society has assigned to her does not offer the same level of excitement as the one who is seeking her illicitly, a suggestion which Dracula too can all too readily be seen as making and one which does no favours to the Crew of Light. Finally, both Morris and Van Helsing are metaphorically blackened by the references to Othello, since Morris is compared to the hero of that play while Van Helsing quotes him. In the debate about gender rôles which was so fed by Darwinian theory, reference to Shakespeare was generally felt to function as a guarantor of the safe separation of women from men, but Shakespeare when actually quoted does not so readily lend himself to neat schematisation. In Dracula, as so often in Stoker, the quotations from Hamlet may allow for an ennobling vision of man and his capacities, but the quotations from other plays reveal something much less safe and comfortable about Victorian society and what it holds dear. Not long after the publication of Dracula, the Lyceum began to fall on hard times. Irving fell and strained his knee on 19 December 1896, after the unpromising opening night of Richard III. In his review of this, George Bernard Shaw suggested that Irving was drunk, which whether true or not damaged his reputation. At around the same time, a production of a play about Peter the Great mounted by Irving’s son Laurence was a financial disaster for the theatre, and Irving himself developed pneumonia and pleurisy in

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1898. A disastrous fire on 18 February 1898 damaged almost the entirety of the theatre’s expensive, irreplaceable, and insufficiently insured stock, and from then on the story of the Lyceum is a sad tale of steady and irrevocable decline. The end finally came with Irving’s death on 13 October 1905, after performing in Bradford, and Stoker’s connection with the theatre was finally ended. If Stoker had finished with the theatre, though, the theatre – and much more so its indirect successor the cinema – had by no means finished with Stoker. His own adaptation of Dracula, probably intended simply to protect his copyright (he later had Miss Betty acted at the Lyceum for the same reason), was first performed on 18 May 1897. A centenary read-through took place at the Spaniards Inn, Hampstead, on 18 May 1997, at which it was noted that, even when read at great speed, it still took six hours to perform. As its editor notes, ‘There is every reason to believe that the original reading was much the same, except that it is likely that the original reading had the futher handicap of having only the one manuscript to read from’, and she concludes that ‘Irving himself is reported to have looked in and to have described what he saw as “Dreadful!”. In all probability he was right’.34 Quite apart from the question of length, adapting Dracula for the stage also brought to the fore issues of censorship: Later efforts to adapt the play for the stage certainly brought out the censor’s blue pencil. The Lord Chamberlain would have nothing to do with phrases such as ‘reeking lips’ which were initially included in Hamilton Deane’s dramatic adaptation of the novel in 1924.35 Nevertheless, adaptations were allowed and did well:36 in his memoirs, the actor Geoffrey Kendal recalls acting in Hamilton Deane’s Dracula well into the 1930s.37 It has prospered even more on the silver screen, not least because, as Jonathan Bignell notes, ‘contemporary film and TV Draculas recast the story in order to address the fears of our own time’.38 The Internet Movie Database lists 13 exact hits for Dracula and 132 other titles related or derived from Dracula in a variety of languages, culminating in Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, whose distinctively modern sensibility has led Kenneth Jurkiewicz to call it ‘a New Age parable of free will, eternal

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love, and second chances gratefully taken’. Jurkiewicz proposes that its message is ‘[t]here’s hope for everybody, … even for an embittered centuries-old Byronic Übermensch with a bad attitude and an even worse drinking problem’.39 The film not only bestowed notoriety on Gary Oldman, who played Dracula, but also inspired a short story which was printed in a centenary collection of Dracula spin-offs. The author, Kim Newman, says that the premise of this ‘is what it would have been like if Francis Ford Coppola had made Dracula as one of his good films’, and it is modelled on the ‘process of the making of Apocalypse Now’.40 Instead of Keanu Reeves, this fictional version would have starred Martin Sheen (who nearly dies of a heart attack during filming, although Coppola won’t stop the camera rolling for it, and is resuscitated by the vampire heroine Kate Reed), and Marlon Brando, who does endless method-inspired renditions of the same mumbled line, ‘I am Dracula’; it would have been filmed on location in Romania during the days of Ceacescu, would have gone massively over both budget and schedule, and would have bled all those associated with it dry (sometimes literally). It is hard to imagine what could follow this masterpiece of postmodern parody. There have also been films of the short story ‘Burial of the Rats’ and The Lair of the White Worm, and, most notably, The Jewel of Seven Stars. These include Blood From the Mummy’s Tomb (1971, directed by Seth Holt) and The Awakening (1980, directed by Mike Newell), not to mention Jeffrey Obrow’s 1997 Bram Stoker’s Legend of the Mummy and, subsequently, David DeCoteau’s Ancient Evil: Scream of the Mummy (2000). There are also clear parallels between The Jewel of Seven Stars and Stephen Sommers’s The Mummy (1999) and, to a lesser extent, The Mummy Returns (2001).41 Performance, which was so central an element of Stoker’s daily life, has thus proved central, too, to his literary afterlife.

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3 London with its Teeming Millions

Stoker is almost as ambivalent about England as he is about mothers. ‘London with its teeming millions’ is what Count Dracula hopes he will be able to prey on when he leaves his Transylvanian crypt. When Stoker left Dublin for London in 1878, he entered a world which offered him many more opportunities.Certainly Stoker’s work, and particularly his early work, registers a distinct sense of frustration with Ireland as a small and indeed cramping arena, as when we read in The Snake’s Pass of how the priest tells Phelim Joyce that he should be thankful because he has ‘such a boy as Eugene, winnin’ name and credit, and perhaps fame to come, even in England itself’ (SP: 41), or that At Dublin Mr. Caicy met me, as agreed; and together we went to various courts, chambers, offices, and banks – completing the purchase with all the endless official formalities and eccentricities habitual to a country whose administration has traditionally adopted and adapted every possible development of all belonging to red-tape. (SP: 191) Similarly in Famous Impostors we read in relation to the Perkin Warbeck episode that ‘It cannot be denied that the Irish people were in this matter as unstable as they were swift in their judgments’ (FI: 14), while Andrew Smith points to the importance in Stoker’s fiction of his ‘view that Ireland would benefit, economically, by becoming part of Britain although crucially it would not have to 69

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surrender its own cultural history’;1 as Mrs O’Brien says of the earl of Athlyne in Lady Athlyne, ‘An Irishman!God be thanked he is.But me Lady, av it’ll plaze ye betther he’s an Englishman too, an’ a Welshman an’ a Scotchman as well!’ (LA: 13). The Snake’s Pass also shows an acute awareness of the kind of language all too often used by the English about the Irish, when Moynahan says ‘He’s a nagur, anyhow – Black Murdock the Gombeen – bloody end to him!’ (TSP: 196). Taken together with the earlier discussion about how Norah is dark but not a ‘nigger’ (STP: 101), this illustrates only too clearly Stoker’s awareness of how dangerously volatile and floating the concept of negritude could be, and how easily it could be affixed to the Irish.2 Although ‘Stoker’s cousin John Dillon proclaimed that the Irish deserved Home Rule “because we are white men”’, in 1895 Lord Salisbury, then Prime Minister, openly compared the Irish to Hottentots in their incapacity for self-rule,3 and the phrase ‘the Niggers of Europe’ was all too often applied to them. Under such pressure as this, a form of self-deprecating humour might well seem to the only possible gambit. Arthur Conan Doyle, a friend of Stoker’s who was also of Irish origin, resorted to selfparody in his short story ‘The Fiend of the Cooperage’ in which two Irishmen, Severall and Walker, are the only white men on a distant island: ‘What do we do?’ said the Doctor, when I had begun asking questions in my turn.‘Our business keeps us pretty busy, and in our leisure time we talk politics.’ ‘Yes, by the special mercy of Providence Severall is a rank Radical, and I am a good stiff Unionist, and we talk Home Rule for two solid hours every evening.’4 Stoker, too, sometimes registers a clear sense of the Irish as comic, as when he records how Lady Wilde greeted a woman whom Stoker had introduced to her as ‘half English and half Irish’ with ‘Your English half is as welcome as your Irish bottom’.5 However, he also had a persistent sense of national identity, and the two impulses did not always sit easily together. After all, as David Glover notes, ‘to be a “believer” in physiognomy who was also Irish, let alone a “believer” in Irish Home Rule – no matter how “philosophical” – was to find oneself torn by a contradictory set of allegiances’.6 In

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Stoker’s novels, however, the Irish feature primarily for comic effect, like Andy O’Sullivan in The Snake’s Pass or as when Mrs O’Brien declares in Lady Athlyne, ‘An’ him in Bowness – for that’s where he tells me he’s shtoppin’ – an’ his wife in Ambleside – on their weddin’ night!Begob!Ireland’s changin’ fast, fur that usen’t to be the way. I’m thinkin’ that the Shinn-Fayn’ll have to wake up a bit if that’s the way things is going to go’ (LA: 326). Stoker himself, however, never forgot Ireland. Joseph Valente points out that ‘the stage-minded Stoker regularly took up the works of Dion Boucicault, Anglo-Ireland’s most successful playwright, as sources for his Irish fiction’,7 and Dracula in particular has often been related to Ireland. Although some scholars have tried to trace a descent for the vampiric count from the real-life Transylvanian warlord Vlad Dracul,8 David Glover argues rather that ‘Paradoxically it is Dracula, at first glance among the least Irish of all Stoker’s texts, that goes furthest in establishing his pedigree as a distinctively Irish writer. For Dracula properly belongs within the Anglo-Irish Gothic tradition’,9 and Joseph Valente well observes that ‘A founding insight of the Irish Dracula school of criticism has been that Harker’s observations in Transylvania refer in whole or in part to the features of life in Ireland in the nineteenth century.’10 Cannon Schmitt, who compares the hyphen in Anglo-Irish to the hyphen in Un-Dead, argues that ‘The savage bestiality of [Dracula’]s vampiric attacks combined with the aristocratic hauteur of his manner suggests the peculiarly Irish double threat of Fenianism and Catholic feudalism.’ He points out that ‘Dracula is feeding Mina, feeding her from his breast’ and compares this with the fears voiced about Irish wet-nurses.11 Joseph Valente argues that ‘the literal meaning of the name Transylvania, “beyond the forest,” irresistibly suggests “beyond the Pale”’; he also points to ‘the name of Dracula’s self-identified tribal group, the Szekelys, which means “at the frontier or beyond”’, and notes that ‘[w]hen Dracula finally comes into direct confrontation with Jonathan Harker, Van Helsing, and the rest … he derides them as “pale faces” (D: 267), an odd ethnic slur considering the Count’s own “extraordinary pallor”’. For Valente, what is crucial is that ‘this dramatic encounter with Little England occurs in a London townhouse whose purchase was arranged in Sackville Street, eponymous with the main thoroughfare of Dublin, the very heart of the Pale … Moreover, Dracula’s phrase picks up on the prior usage of his agent /

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victim, R. N. Renfield, who complains, “I don’t care for the pale people” (D: 245)’.12 Noting that ‘the sole indisputably Irish classification of Dracula in Stoker’s own working notes consists of a single word, Fenian’ and that Mina’s ‘full Christian name, Wilhelmina, is the Dutch feminine form of William and, as such, alludes to the most famous Dutch William of them all, William of Orange’, Valente suggests that the figure of Dracula recalls Percy Bysshe Shelley’s comment, long before the famine, that ‘the Aristocracy of Ireland sucks the veins of inhabitants’ or Fanny Parnell’s reprobation of the same class as ‘coroneted ghouls.’And surely Dracula is intended to bring to mind Michael Davitt’s castigation of the Irish landowners as ‘cormorant vampires’ – after all, Dracula’s initial assault on Lucy Westenra leaves her with ‘an appetite like a cormorant’ (101).13 Equally, Michael Valdez Moses, noting that ‘In May 1887, Charles Stewart Parnell coolly attended a performance at the Lyceum Theatre in London’, suggests that ‘Parnell serves as a model (and a particularly malleable and politically suggestive one) for Stoker’s aristocratic vampire’. In particular, Valdez Moses argues that ‘Though Renfield is nowhere referred to as Irish, his condition as an imprisoned subject under direct British supervision, one who in the absence of his English warder, John Seward, must be monitored by an Irish doctor named Patrick Hennessey, provides fertile ground for an allegorical reading.’14 Similarly, and suggestively in view of Stoker’s central concern with writing, Gary Day argues that ‘All writing in the novel is subordinated to the style of the professional middle class, which aims at the clear communication of facts. This is incompatible with a foreigner’s use of English and this is why neither Dracula nor Van Helsing are allowed to write their own record of events.’15 A particularly interesting insight into Stoker’s conflicted attitudes to Irishness can be found in his various references to the so-called Shakespearean authorship controversy. As might be expected of someone who was ultimately to write a book called Famous Impostors, Stoker was interested in the idea that the plays of Shakespeare might have been written by someone else, an idea often played with in his

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circle, as when W. S. Gilbert naughtily enquired ‘Do you know how they are going to settle the Shakespeare-Bacon dispute?They are going to dig up Shakespeare and dig up Bacon and let Tree recite Hamlet to them. And the one who turns over in his grave will be the author.’16 Stoker recounts how It was quite a treat to hear Irving and Robert Browning talking. Their conversation, no matter how it began, usually swerved round to Shakespeare; as they were both excellent scholars of the subject the talk was on a high plane. It was not of double-endings or rhyming lines, or of any of the points or objects of that intellectual dissection which forms the work of a certain order of scholars who seem always to want to prove to themselves that Shakespeare was Shakespeare and no one else – and that he was the same man at the end of his life that he had been at the beginning. These two men took large views. (PR II: 89) Also in the Personal Reminiscences, he tells how Tennyson, referring to the theory that Sir Francis Bacon wrote the plays, ridiculed the idea. ‘From the Shakespeare side he was indignant of a doubt. From the Bacon side he was scornful’ (PR I: 235). Stoker then proceeds to tell a story about how an Irishman in a bar, asked to adjudicate on the authorship of the plays, decides, ‘thim plays was not wrote be Shakespeare! But they was wrote be a man iv the saame naame!’ This presumably notional Irishman displays none of the finesse of Irving, Tennyson or Browning in his approach to the subject: he merely comes out with a palpable absurdity. Although Ellen Terry’s father was of Irish descent, Stoker was the only Irishman at the Lyceum, and these anecdotes clearly register that his situation as an Irishman in England was not an easy one, not least because, as the DNB article on Irving notes, he was perforce at war with one of the other prominent Irishmen in London: From January 1895 until 1898 George Bernard Shaw was theatre critic for the Saturday Review, and during that time he pursued an implacable course of harassment against Irving, ostensibly because he did nothing for contemporary playwrights and ignored the new direction which the theatre had taken from the example of Ibsen.

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Stoker’s open reference to Ibsen in The Lady of the Shroud – ‘Think of that, Hedda!’ (Shroud 244) – might perhaps be seen as something of a peace offering in this respect, especially since Ellen Terry was by now acting in Ibsen. Given the sense of Ireland and Irishness as constricting, the move to England in December 1878 was understood as a liberation and advancement, and the Stokers’ life in London was comfortable: on the 1881 census Bram Stoker, who gives his occupation as ‘Theatrical Manager M.A.’ and his age as 33, is living at the desirable address of 27 Cheyne Walk with Florence, 21, born Falmouth, son Irving N. Stoker, 15 months, Stoker’s brother George, who gives his occupation as physician and surgeon, Elizabeth Jarrald, aged 30, nurse, Harriett Daw from Notting Hill, aged 21, cook, and Emma Barton from Woodford, Essex, aged 15, housemaid; on the 1901 census, when the family are living at 18 St Leonards Terrace, Chelsea, Stoker is ‘Barrister at Law’, and Irving Noel Thornley Stoker is Accountant Apprentice. The other members of the household are Maria Mitchell from Dorking, 63, housekeeper, and Louisa Driver from London, 27, parlourmaid, so although they no longer needed a nurse now that Noel had grown up, they are still maintaining enough servants to spare Florence from any domestic work. At the same time as registering the way in which the census records these servants, however, it is also worth noting that both Stoker’s personal affairs and his literary works show many signs of resistance to this kind of formalised knowledge-gathering and to what David Glover has termed ‘the various “régimes of truth” upon which [Stoker] draws’,17 and that this was an aspect of life as a public figure in London which he might well have found irksome. Paul Murray notes, for instance, that ‘It is difficult to square Stoker’s tortuous progress towards finalising a four-year BA course in almost six years with his claim that he had graduated with “Honours in Pure Mathematics”’,18 and the information supplied on the 1881 census both exceeds the bounds of what was formally required and at the same time misleads: Stoker himself has given not only his occupation but also his qualification – ‘M.A.’ – which was something the census was not designed to elicit. Stoker was exceptionally proud of his MA: when he left Dublin Castle, ‘His colleagues presented him with a handsome silver wine-ewer, inscribed “To Bram Stoker MA from the Members of his office”’,19 and as Paul Murray notes, The

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Daily News in 1894 mocked Stoker for his insistence on possessing an MA,20 while Barbara Belford observes that ‘On passenger lists his name was followed by “M.A.,” a form he also used on business cards’ and that ‘For the twenty-five years Florence outlived her husband, she referred to him in publications only as a barrister – never as the author of Dracula or the acting manager for the late Sir Henry Irving’.21 Nevertheless, Joseph Valente claims that ‘Even Stoker’s university degree, the only one among the Lyceum company, failed to earn him the respectability he craved, mainly because it was conferred by an Irish institution.’22 Other information on Stoker’s census entry is equally unhelpful or not to the point. His son, always known as Noel, appears accurately but unhelpfully as ‘Irving N. Stoker’;23 on the 1901 census Stoker’s stated profession of ‘Barrister at Law’ is entirely unrealistic and bears no relation to reality – although Stoker was called to the Bar in 1890, he never practised – while Florence Stoker, who was listed as 21 on the 1881 census and should therefore now be 41, has stayed at an elegant 39. (She had also given Thornley Stoker’s address rather than her parents’ on the marriage certificate.)24 Stoker was well aware of the imperatives to collect and categorise infomation: his mother Charlotte was ‘an active member of the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society of Ireland’, and his own first book ‘The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions has been seen as part of what Thomas Richards calls the “imperial archive” – “a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire” which, in Stoker’s novel, is responsible for the defeat of Dracula’, in which particular attention is paid to the importance of systematically tracking dog ownership by observance of the licensing system.25 He also made great use of statistics in his talk on ‘A Glimpse of America’.26 Nevertheless the dominant impression in his fiction is one of resistance to such projects, and to the inquisitive bureaucratic gaze. Although Colonel Ogilvie in Lady Athlyne declares that ‘Those people who go under an alias are to my mind the worst of criminals’ (LA: 37), Stoker’s novels are full of people who change their names, Lord Athlyne himself being a case in point. Moreover, although Athlyne initially regrets his adoption of an alias, it proves the providential mechanism for bringing him and Joy together, and Stoker takes a visible delight in minute description of the process by which

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Athlyne evades official scrutiny of his disguises. When Athlyne goes to America as Mr Hardy, he was altogether in a disappointed and a discontented frame of mind. The acute cause of this was the filling up of the immigration paper which is so exhaustive as to details as to become inquisitorial. The answering of each question seemed to him like telling a lie – as indeed it was. As, however, he had nothing to declare and was without obvious objection he had no trouble. (LA: 58–9) Indeed Betty in Miss Betty expressly wishes that she could say to Rafe, ‘You have given me your name – a woman who has none worth having in our English law’ (MB: 42), which explicitly legitimises name-changing for women at least. Dracula has a number of such concealments, which sit in ironic tension with Stoker’s official position. David Glover comments, Though Dracula is clearly a quasi-legal narrative of the kind pioneered and popularised by Wilkie Collins, it also needs to be read against the background of Stoker’s exhaustive compilation of The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland (1879), written with the aim of enhancing bureaucratic effectiveness throughout ‘the whole British Empire’ while the author was still employed as a civil servant in Dublin. There … Stoker itemised the formal requirements in preparing evidence for use in court proceedings in words which echo those of the novel’s prologue … Empirically, … Dracula pretends to the status of ‘simple fact,’ assembling an impressive variety of sources, predominantly journal or diary entries, but also including newspaper articles, letters, fragments from a ship’s log book, and an alienist’s case notes. Yet the opening chapters of the novel present us with the law’s fallibilities.27 All the main events of the Victorian life-narrative – birth, marriage and death – are represented in Stoker’s novel, but in each case they are represented and transacted in such a way as to mystify the vigilance of Victorian civic authority and evade and indeed destabilize the proliferating categories devised to describe and circumscribe

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identity. Although Jonathan Harker comments on the clerk who observes that ‘“The affairs of their clients are absolutely safe in the hands of Mitchell, Sons & Candy”’ that ‘This was manifestly a prig of the first water’ (D: 266), the Crew of Light are anxious to keep such knowledge to themselves, and systematically evade the information-gathering processes of others: ‘We think that we shall not have much trouble with officials or the seamen. Thank God! this is the country where bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money’ (D: 334), while Seward has no qualms about the fact that ‘I gave Renfield a strong opiate tonight, enough to make even him sleep, and took away his pocket-book to look at it’ (D: 70) and Van Helsing serenely declares that ‘All chambers are alike to the doctor’ (D: 281). Van Helsing is indeed so confident in his right to be omniscient that he even usurps spiritual authority, for amidst its plethora of professional men in the shape of solicitors, medical and psychiatric practitioners, there has perhaps been insufficient attention paid to who doesn’t appear in Dracula: there is no priest, in any shape, denomination or form. Gary Day suggests that it was not only that ‘The language of religion, organized around the opposition of good and evil, was being replaced by a language of expediency; the priest was giving way to the professional’, but that ‘Religion … exists in some tension with the professional ideology of Dracula. A religious view of the world, for example, entails notions of individual responsibility which are less pronounced in professional society’.28 Van Helsing alone exercises some priestly functions, but his authority to do so remains unclear. At no time does Mina turn to a representative of established religion for consolation, despite the spiritual distress which one must presume to be caused by the mark left by the Eucharist on her brow and her growing fear of eternal damnation. We hear much of the ruins of ecclesiastical buildings like Whitby Abbey and the chapel of Carfax, but nothing of any living incumbent, and the fact that Jonathan’s and Mina’s wedding takes place abroad further obviates the need for any mention of an English clergyman. Indeed the silence on the subject is so profound (who officiates at Lucy’s funeral service?) that one might well refer to the Church of England as the dog that doesn’t bark in Dracula. (Its absence seems similarly marked in The Jewel of Seven Stars, where one might well feel surprised that it never occurs to anybody to call

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for spiritual guidance in dealing with the obviously supernatural trance of the Egyptologist.) All the paraphernalia of Victorian policing and observation are paraded in Dracula. Ordnance Survey maps are mentioned on the first page, and Jonathan’s comments on the ancestry of those amongst whom he finds himself follow almost immediately. He finds in Castle Dracula ‘such books of reference as the London Directory, the “Red” and “Blue” books, Whitaker’s Almanack, the Army and Navy Lists, and – it somehow gladdened my heart to see it – the Law List’ (D: 19) (Michael Kline suggests that ‘the “red” and “blue” books … are probably references to Burke’s Landed Gentry and Burke’s Peerage’).29 Harker also notes that ‘I found the Count lying on the sofa, reading, of all things in the world, an English Bradshaw’s Guide’ (D: 22). However, in marked contrast to the pinpoint accuracy with which the times of trains are observed, the times of crucial events in the lives of the characters are obfuscated. Jonathan and Mina are married abroad, in a ceremony which would prove difficult to trace afterwards; Seward and Van Helsing conspire to keep the truth about Mrs Westenra’s and Renfield’s demises off their death certificates (D: 150 and 290), the date of Lucy’s true death is also different from any which could have been officially recorded, and Mrs Westenra leaves the most irregular of wills (D: 166–7). Mr Swales comments on the falsity of what is written on the tombstones at Whitby (D: 66–7), particularly that of the suicide: ‘He blew nigh the top of his head off with an old musket … That’s the way he fell off the rocks’ (D: 67); Van Helsing laughs at the similar falsity of Lucy’s funeral service (D: 175); and Harker when reporting Seward’s views on Renfield’s death declares, ‘the question of an inquest had to be considered, and it would never do to put forward the truth … As it was, he thought that on the attendant’s evidence he could give a certificate of death by misadventure in falling from bed’ (D: 288–9). The records of these events thus become as misleading as those on the gravestones which Mr Swales so viciously critiques (D: 65), or as the ostensibly ‘[a]ccurate note … of the state of things’ (D: 79) on board the Demeter which so signally fails to register the truth of what has happened. Dracula wishes to disperse knowledge of his legal affairs amongst several solicitors so that none may see the full picture and travels by a ship too small to be listed in The Times (D: 316), and the Captain of the Demeter

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writes what he knows on a paper in a bottle rather than in the official log (D: 81). Mina even goes so far as to destroy the originals of Seward’s diary because, like so many records, they ‘contained more than you intended me to know’ (D: 222). Even Jonathan’s and Mina’s decision to live with Mr Hawkins can be seen as running counter to the Victorian information-gathering project, since none of all the many modes of classifying relationships offered by the census could stretch to accommodate this: ‘Lodger’ or ‘Boarder’, the closest available approximations, would hardly have done for Jonathan, and since the relationship recorded for any person was solely that to the householder, Mina’s position would have been even harder to define. Most subversive in its implications and connotations is Jonathan and Mina’s decision to name their son after the names of all their friends (in what order is not said). Middle and other multiple names, previously the preserve of the gentry (like the middle names ‘Fingal O’Flahertie Wills’ of which Stoker’s friend Oscar Wilde was so proud), were indeed spreading to other sections of the population, but they were used primarily to advertise a family connection or, occasionally, an important friendship: Stoker himself called his only son Irving Noel Thornley Stoker, announcing his friendship with Henry Irving and his relationship with his most successful brother, the prominent surgeon Thornley Stoker (later Sir Thornley) – a choice which would have seemed particularly pointed since Stoker’s other brother George was actually recorded as living with him on the 1881 census, but had given no name to the then 15-month-old Noel. The other principal reason for the growth in popularity of middle names during the period was, implicitly, to guard against the possibility of inbreeding, with its associated threat to the future of the species. In the anxious post-Darwinian atmosphere of concern over breeding groups, particularly in small communities, there seem to have been specific, if only vaguely understood, motivations for the recording of the maternal surnames of preceding generations which patriarchal nomenclature had buried (as there may also have been in the spiralling codes for classification of physical and mental disabilities which appeared on the census as the nineteenth century progressed). And Stoker – who lists the degeneration theorist Professor Ray Lankester as among the frequenters of Henry Irving’s Lyceum (PR I: 322), and who has Van Helsing ask Seward, ‘Do you

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know the altogether of comparative anatomy?’ (D: 192) – was well aware of the genesis and impact of Darwinian thought: he declares that Irving had recreated the appearance of a character in Two Roses ‘just as Cuvier or Owen could from a single bone reconstruct giant reptiles of the Palaeozoic age’ (PR I: 10), while in ‘A Lesson in Pets’, one of the stories in Snowbound, Mr Benville Nonplusser notes that ‘The carriages became by a sort of natural selection divided into two camps’ (Snowbound: 26) and the Acting Manager ‘had become by a sort of natural selection, manifested by tacit consent of the Company, Master of the Ceremonies’ (Snowbound: 29). Finally, in The Shoulder of Shasta we are told of Esse and the Indians that ‘she went with them through somewhat of those phases with which one comes to regard a monkey before its place in the scale of creation is put in true perspective’ (Shasta 52), and in Lady Athlyne, à propos of the idea that very masculine men and very feminine women are attracted to each other, that ‘This is the true principle of selection which is one of the most important of Nature’s laws; one which holds in the lower as well as in the higher orders of life, zoological and botanical as well as human’ (LA: 82). It is not, however, interrelationships or family history which the complicated nomenclature of Jonathan and Mina’s son records, but an eccentric, arguably homoerotic, and wholly uncategorisable set of alliances which have entirely failed to result in any more tangible or certificatable product. It is in fact left to the villain, Dracula himself, publicly to display all the links in an ancestry which has kept names transparent and unchanged, and he does so fully and freely in his long account of his antecedents (D: 28–9). The only one of the ‘Crew of Light’ who even approaches such certainty of descent is Quincey Morris, who in Stoker’s earliest drafts was originally intended to be named Brutus P. Morris, thus gesturing to the traditional account of continuous, demonstrable British descent from the Trojans emblematized in the mythical figure of Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas and supposed colonizer of Britain, which, in this account, took its name from him. (In this context, it is also suggestive that Stoker originally intended the Sortes Virgilianae to play a part in the story.30) By contrast, Godalming’s original name of Holmwood disappears on his accession to the title just as a woman’s did on her marriage, and Mina’s nickname never quite succeeds in deflecting attention from the fact that its full version is

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so strongly suggestive of Teutonic rather than indigenous origins. In short, though Harker the lawyer, with his notarial functions, and Seward the classifier of lunatics may both be central planks of the Victorian project of categorisation of identity, the novel itself vigorously resists it. Like the tombstone which lyingly pretends to stand above the body of Edward Spencelagh (D: 65) and the mass of typewriting which has resulted in the destruction of all original documentation – or, indeed, like its creator’s constant use of ‘Bram’, even on the census, rather than the ‘Abraham’ which was his baptismal name – Dracula constantly makes a nonsense of the recording processes of officialdom, and seems even to glory in it when Mr Bilder declares with relish that if the wolf does not come back ‘and some nursemaid goes a-walkin’ orf with a soldier, leavin’ of the hinfant in the perambulator – well then I shouldn’t be surprised if the census is one babby the less’ (D: 140). For Dracula, indeed, even evolutionary change seems less threatening than the means which officialdom has devised to record it. Similar scepticism about official repositories of knowledge is found in other Stoker novels. As Carol A. Senf observes, in The Lair of the White Worm, ‘as in Dracula, the surviving characters do not follow normal scientific protocol’,31 and Sir Nathaniel, in splendidly deadpan fashion given the circumstances, observes of Lady Arabella ‘we know, by our own experience of her movments, that for some reason she shuns publicity’ (WW: 121). Moreover, the typical Stoker motif of a secret or irregular marriage recurs here, when we are told that even though ‘when it began to be noticed that he walked beside Mimi Watford and seemed to desire her society, all their friends endeavoured to give the promising affair a helping hand’ (WW: 30), nevertheless when it comes to the point The advice and assistance of Sir Nathaniel was a great help to Adam in carrying out his idea of marrying Mimi Watford without publicity. He went with him to London, and, with his influence, the young man obtained the license of the Archbishop of Canterbury for a private marriage. (WW: 115) In The Lady of the Shroud Roger Melton states in his will his desire ‘to keep my secret trusts secret’ (Shroud: 21) and writes to Rupert that

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‘When you ran away to sea, I used in secret every part of the mechanism of commerce to find out what had become of you’ (Shroud: 37), while in Snowbound a young actress reaps bitter consequences from an insufficiently regular union: ‘in her youth she had run away with a man whom she thought she loved; they were married at a registry, but after a while she found out that he was married already … Then her baby was born dead, and she found herself alone’ (Shroud: 83). In Famous Impostors, we hear of ‘Princess Olive’s’ forging of marriage and birth certificates (FI: 54–5). In The Snake’s Pass, Dick Sutherland says to Arthur Severn: ‘You can imagine how devoid of knowledge we are, when I tell you that even the last edition of the “Encyclopedia Britannica” does not contain the heading “bog”’ (SP: 55). And another doubt of the efficacy of the census is found in Arthur’s remark that ‘It would seem that so many inhabitants had been allured by fairies, and consequently had mysteriously disappeared, that this method of minimisation of the census must have formed a distinct drain on the local population’ (SP: 107). Stoker – who would undoubtedly have been well aware of the complex and wholly irregular history of Ellen Terry’s marriages – also shows himself markedly interested in many of his novels in having his characters sidestep the law altogether by having their marriages solemnised in Scotland, as Stoker’s friend Hall Caine had done when he married his mistress, by whom he already had a child, in Edinburgh. The most sustained exploration of this is in Lady Athlyne, where Athlyne and Joy pass Gretna Green without thinking of going there (LA: 190), but find themselves in any case married by the distinctive laws of Scotland, although Athlyne then further muddies the issue by decreeing that ‘In addition to this we can have a “regular” marriage to follow these two irregular ones. I shall go to London and get a special license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, who is a connection of my own’ (LA: 310). Despite this apparent scepticism about some of the city’s protocols and institutions, Stoker’s life in London was generally successful, not least after the publication of Dracula by Constable in 1897.32 ‘Louis Frederick Austin, Stoker’s colleague and sometime rival at the Lyceum, claimed that Stoker had spent £700 getting Sunset published’, but Stoker’s agreement with Constable for the publication of Dracula stipulated that at least 3000 copies were to be produced in that year alone, though no royalties were to be payable

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on the first 1000.33 (Barbara Belford notes that ‘The initial printing was three thousand copies; no records survive on the total number sold or whether there were reprints. The next printing was a Constable paperback in 1901’, and that the book was more shoddily presented than previous Stoker works had been: ‘Dracula arrived at booksellers on May 26, 1897, bound in yellow, the color of the French novel that Oscar Wilde draws attention to in The Picture of Dorian Gray’.)34 It was generally favourably received, however, perhaps because, as Barbara Belford suggests, by now ‘part of London’s cultural establishment, Stoker never had a book panned; something positive was always said’.35 Although the Athenaeum had acerbically remarked of The Shoulder of Shasta that ‘Mr. Stoker can probably do much better than this; so perhaps the less said about “The Shoulder of Shasta” the better for everyone concerned’,36 even that ‘received at least a baker’s dozen of notices and reviews. Nearly all of them had high praise for its description of natural scenery.’37 Dracula itself was received with quiet appreciation. A number of other writers wrote to congratulate Stoker, including Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Anthony Hope Hawkins, author of The Prisoner of Zenda.38 The Daily Mail, reviewing Dracula on 1 June, noted that ‘We started reading it early in the evening’ and ‘By ten o’clock the story had so fastened itself upon our attention that we could not pause even to light our pipe.’39 By 1901 the first translation, into Icelandic, had appeared, and a few years later The Sketch, reviewing Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, wrote that Dracula would be ‘reprinted in the cheap series of 2000 A.D’,40 a prediction which has proved entirely correct. The principal note of reservation related to the novel’s sexual content. David Glover observes that ‘The Keighley News, in an otherwise fairly favorable notice, primly stated that “the nature of Count Dracula’s adventure may not be hinted at in this domestic column”.’41Some critics also thought the novel derivative: The Athenaeum opined on 26 June that ‘Mr. Stoker is a purveyor of so many strange wares that “Dracula” reads like a determined effort to go, as it were, “one better” than others in the same field’, and The Spectator on 31 July wrote that Mr. Bram Stoker gives the impression – we may be doing him an injustice – of having deliberately laid himself out in Dracula

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to eclipse all previous efforts in the domain of the horrible, – to ‘go one better’ than Wilkie Collins (whose method of narration he has closely followed), Sheridan Le Fanu, and all the other professors of the flesh-creeping school. The Bookman in August was also moved to think of Wilkie Collins, but sounded a more definitely favourable note in this respect – ‘Since Wilkie Collins left us we have had no tale of mystery so liberal in manner and so closely woven.’42 Stoker’s later books also tended to attract generally respectful attention in the wake of Dracula, and indeed Punch placed The Man ‘among the best halfdozen novels of the year’,43 while it is tempting to see a reflection of Lady Athlyne in the bestowal of the Christian name Athlyne on a child born in America in the year of its publication.44 Even despite this generally favourable treatment by the British establishment,however, there are many signs in his fiction that Stoker had something less than an unequivocal admiration of the English. In the excised original beginning to Dracula, later separately published as the short story ‘Dracula’s Guest’, this note is struck from the outset. The stupidly overconfident narrator foolishly dismisses his guide with the lordly ‘Go home, Johann – Walpurgis Nacht doesn’t concern Englishmen’, before noting that ‘His English was quite gone now. In his anxiety he had forgotten that his only means of making me understand was to talk my language, so he jabbered away in his native German. It began to be a little tedious’ (DG: 12); under the circumstances, it is hard not to detect a note of sarcasm when we learn that Dracula’s letter instigating the search warns ‘He is English and therefore adventurous’ (DG: 21). In the final version of the novel we find Sister Agatha’s sly remark ‘Seeing from his violent demeanour that he was English’ (D: 99), and an interesting indictment of one of London’s prime repositories of imperial knowledge: In plot terms, it would have been sufficient to have a wolf escape, but Stoker gives us the lengthy Pall Mall Gazette interview with a keeper (165–71) in his cottage ‘in the enclosure behind the elephant-house’. Why so much detail?Jonathan Schneer points out that the Zoo was a conscious emblem of Britain’s imperial victories, with animals from every corner of the globe. By the end of

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the century, ‘visiting the zoo has become a common form of popular recreation. More than half a million people attended annually.’ Thus to locate Dracula in the zoo is not only to identify his animalistic and dangerous drives, but also to point up his threat by placing him in relation to a popular imperial signifier.45 It is certainly true that Stoker had an even more jaundiced view of other nationalities and ethnic groups – it is notable, for instance, that no tears are shed when, in the short story ‘Crooken Sands’, the man who dies in the quicksands turns out to have been a Jew masquerading as a Scot, as his partner also is (DG: 159), and the Jewish Solomon Mendoza is the villain of The Watter’s Mou’. Nevertheless, as we see perhaps most clearly in The Lady of the Shroud, the English are by no means immune from criticism either. A particularly provocative instance of this comes towards the end of The Lady of the Shroud, in a scene which features a monarch identified only as the Western King. The identity of this personage is heavily riddled: he himself is presumably from a Western country, though he is also the monarch of many races of the East, and his wife is ‘the fair Northern Queen’ (matters are not made any easier by the fact that Irish Rupert and Serbian Teuta are here identified as the ‘Southern Queen’ and ‘the giant King of the South’ [Shroud: 255], probably because ‘southern’ is Elinor Glyn’s term for her Balkan queen). One thing, though, is clear: the Western King is not Edward VII, who is mentioned by name several times elsewhere in the novel, because we are explicitly told that Rupert is ‘the former subject of another King’ (Shroud: 255) – that is, a king other than the Western King. We must, then, conclude that the Western King is a veiled representation of Kaiser Wilhelm, and this may make it rather alarming when we read that he and his wife are ‘the King and Queen of the greatest nation of the earth’ (Shroud: 255). (It is presumably also Kaiser Wilhelm who is referred to in The Shoulder of Shasta, where Reginald has a knife which ‘was given me by an emperor, who was good enough to say I had done him some service when a wild boar charged him in a Thuringian forest’ [Shasta: 126].)Coupled with the apparently irresistible rise of the Land of the Blue Mountains and the Balkan Federation which it heads, this provides yet another warning sign that, as is also predicted in George Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking and Saki’s When William Came,

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English supremacy in world affairs is imperilled. Even nations are subject to degeneration, as Rupert reminds us when he speculates that ‘Germany wished to link the North Sea to the Mediterranean by her own territory, and thus stand as a flawless barrier across Europe from north to south. When Nature should have terminated the headship of the Empire-Kingdom, she, as natural heir, would creep southward through the German-speaking provinces’ (Shroud: 240). A notable and underrated Stoker theme, related both to the question of Englishness and Irishness and also to the issue of proper keeping of records, is the redistribution of land. The idea of rearranging the land/setting the world to rights again is found in a number of Stoker texts, starting with The Snake’s Pass when Arthur Severn buys back the land that the Gombeen Man had extracted from Phelim Joyce. It is found too in The Man, where Harold, under the alias of John Robinson, changes the landscape: ‘when the second year of his exile was coming to a close, and Robinson City was teeming with life and commerce, when banks and police and soldiers made life and property comparatively safe …’. (Man: 352). It culminates, perhaps most bizarrely, in Sir Nathaniel’s surprising concern about the ownership of the land in The Lair of the White Worm, when, although certain that Lady Arabella must be destroyed, Sir Nathaniel nevertheless advocates delay: There were all sorts of legal cruxes to be thought out, not only regarding the taking of life, even of a monstrosity in human form, but also of property. Lady Arabella, be she woman or snake or devil, owned the ground she moved in, according to British law. (WW: 111) Consequently, Adam Salton buys the land first, and only then kills its monstrous occupant. Although it is sometimes, as here, a question of purchase, often the desired change in the structure of land or its ownership is to be effected through the means of technology. David Glover argues that ‘Like many advanced Liberals, Stoker looked to scientific growth as the key to modernization,’46 and certainly Stoker had a great interest in technology, partly for its own sake and partly, too, for the effect

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it could create in fiction: in The Snake’s Pass, Arthur after hearing of the effects of the bog, says ‘for real cold-blooded horror, commend me to your men of science’ (SP: 59). Throughout his books, Stoker delights in showing that he could use the language of science, as in his reference to ‘the Thomassin “infernal machine,” which was suspected of having been the means by which many ships had been sent to the bottom. These machines were exploded by clockwork set for a certain time, and were made in such fashion as would not excite suspicion’ (he also records how he and Irving were once in a boat when they realised there were underwater torpedoes all around them) (PR II: 49 and 268), an episode remembered in The Lady of the Shroud in the operation of the crab (Shroud: 184–5). As Carol A. Senf notes, à propos of the public preference for Dracula, ‘Stoker wrote seventeen other books; and many of them reveal his interest in areas that seem antithetical to the Gothic and its mysteries. Included among those are areas are an interest in science and technology’. In particular, she observes that ‘Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving reveals his fascination with the technological aspect of theatrical special effects’.47 He was also interested in cars, as is vividly illustrated in Lady Athlyne, though it might have caused some tension that one of W. S. Gilbert’s attractions for Florence Stoker, who was his frequent companion, was that he could take her out in his car. The most sustained signs of Stoker’s interest in technology, however, cluster on this theme of land change. The result of the redistribution or rearrangement of land is frequently a quasi-biblical garden. In The Shoulder of Shasta, As the train, after leaving Sacramento, wound its way by the brawling river, its windows brushed by the branches of hazel and mountain-ash, the whole wilderness seemed like the natural pleasaunce of an old-world garden. The road took its serpentine course up and above its own track, over and over again. (Shasta: 24) This motif is perhaps most notably found in The Lady of the Shroud: whatever the garden may have been, and no matter how it was guarded, it is a most lovely place. There are whole sections of garden here of various styles – Greek, Italian, French, German,

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Dutch, British, Spanish, African, Moorish – all the older nationalities. I am going to have a new one laid out for you – a Japanese garden … If it should ever turn out that the climate does not suit, we shall put a great high glass roof over it, and make a suitable climate. (Shroud: 55) The idea is present too in The Snake’s Pass, where Dick Sutherland promises Arthur that we can make the place a paradise. The springs are evidently high up on the hill, so that we can not only get water for irrigating and ornamental purposes, but we can get power also!Why, you can have electric light, and everything else you like, at the smallest cost. And if it be, as I suspect, that there is a streak of limestone in the hill, the place might be a positive mine of wealth as well!We have not lime within fifty miles, and if once we can quarry the stone here we can do anything. We can build a harbour on the south side, which would be the loveliest place to keep a yacht in that ever was known – quite big enough for anything in these parts – as safe as Portsmouth, and of fathomless depth. (SP: 178) It is notable that in this mass redistribution of wealth and territory many things which most Victorians would take to be static are in fact imagined as fluid, not least class, as when Phelim Joyce says to Arthur Severn of Norah that ‘Of course, we’re not of your class, an’ if ye wish for her it is only right an’ fair that she should be brought up to the level of the people that she’s goin’ into’ (SP: 159). It it part of this potentially radical undertone that this theme of land redistribution is frequently related, implicitly or explicitly, to Ireland. Most notably, Dracula, as has often been observed, is not only a colonisation novel but also specifically an Irish novel. The DNB article on Stoker claims that ‘More Irish than Transylvanian, Count Dracula embodies the Celtic phenomenon known as ‘shape shifting’, the ability to become anything – a wolf, bat, rat, or swirling mist’, and there is certainly considerable evidence for this

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idea. In particular, there are notably strong links between Dracula and the Gombeen Man of The Snake’s Pass. Sutherland refers to Murdock as ‘that human-shaped wolf’ (SP: 87), and Joyce says to Murdock ‘I put my mark upon ye once – I see it now comin’ up white through the red of yer passion!’ (SP: 113), foreshadowing the white complexion and red blood associated with Dracula. Arthur remarks that when he saw Norah ‘To this day I cannot make out whether I took a bee-line for that isolated table of rock, and from where I was, slid or crawled down the face of the rock, or whether I made a detour to the same end’ (SP: 125) to the girl he recognises but cannot name. This closely foreshadows both Dracula’s descent from his castle by crawling down the face of the rock and the troubling sense of familiarity which the three female vampires spark in Jonathan Harker. Stoker himself favoured Irish Home Rule, and it is notable that Joyce when accepting the treasure says, ‘Take it I will, an’ gladly; but not for meself. The money was sent for Ireland’s good – to help them that wanted help, an’ plase God!’ (SP: 240), while the cave in which the crown is found contains Ogham writing (Stoker first met the explorer Richard Burton, whose adventures suggested the name of the Land of the Blue Mountains in The Lady of the Shroud, in 1878 when he visited Ireland to lecture on Ogham).48 The crown itself is described as being very similar to those now to be found in the Museum of Ireland (which have been on display to the public since 1890, the year in which The Snake’s Pass was first published): In her hand she held an ancient crown of strange form. It was composed of three pieces of flat gold joined all along one edge, like angle iron, and twisted delicately. The gold was wider and the curves bolder in the centre, from which they were fined away to the ends and then curved into a sort of hook. In the centre was set a great stone, that shone with the yellow light of a topaz, but with a fire all its own! (SP: 241–2) Indeed Stoker sent a copy of The Snake’s Pass to Michael Davitt, who founded the Land League to support tenants’ rights against those of landlords.49 However, even though his elder brother Sir Thornley Stoker later knew James Joyce’s friend Oliver St John Gogarty, it is of

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course a joke that Stoker could not have intended that his ideal Irishwoman should be called Norah Joyce. Stoker, then, positions himself ambivalently as an Irishman writing in England. Doubly an outsider, he capitalises on his liminality to interrogate both countries and expose strengths and weaknesses in each. In his professional career, Stoker was confined to discussing questions of governance and reform with Gladstone on his visits to the Lyceum. In his fiction, untrammelled by the demands of either reality or realism, he proposed bolder solutions to what he seems to have seen as the two principal problems of the two sides of the coin of citizenship and rule. In the first place, he clearly proposes a model in which successful results are achieved only by individual citizens clawing back some of the autonomy and freedom of comment which the state is shown as trying to wrest from them. Second, throughout his fiction he imagines a radical redistribution of ownership, with an Irishman being king of a Balkan country in The Lady of the Shroud, an Australian acceding to the ownership of a large estate in the Peak District in The Lair of the White Worm, an Englishman presiding over the literal realignment of territory in Ireland in The Snake’s Pass, a Transylvanian buying an estate in England in Dracula, an American and a Spaniard contesting seigneurial rights over a Scottish castle in The Mystery of the Sea, and an Egyptian queen apparently planning to install herself in England in The Jewel of Seven Stars. In such a world, anything can happen: all Europe, it seems, is on the move, and there is no predicting where the representatives of various nationalities will finally end up. England and Ireland must compete with the rest, and Stoker, with his acute awareness of the power of America, is well aware that neither is guaranteed to succeed (indeed Gary Day suggests that ‘The death of Quincey Morris … may … be seen as a symbolic way of coping with the economic threat posed by America’).50 By thus triangulating the relationship of England and Ireland with America, however, Stoker has at least imagined the possibility of the forging of a bond of common interest between them; and at the close of The Lady of the Shroud at least, the Englishman, for the first time, is proud of his Irish cousin.

4 On Holiday

Almost as important to Stoker’s fiction as London are the places to which he travelled during the years that he lived there. For Stoker, travel represented freedom, adventure, and a loosening of the constricting standards of Victorian morality: as Rupert Sent Leger remarks in The Lady of the Shroud, ‘To travel in strange places amongst strange peoples with strange views of their own is to have odd experiences and peculiar adventures now and again; a man without human passions is not of the type necessary for an adventurous life, such as I myself have had’ (Shroud: 72). Rupert’s view gives an important clue to one of the recurrent themes of Stoker’s depictions of non-London locations: they offer sites both of sexual opportunity and of sexual discrimination, in the form of allowing the demonisation and incrimination of women. At home, Stoker might be the dutiful husband of Florence, but outside it, his imagination brings him into dangerous proximity with wayward, wicked women whom he is free to demonise and punish however he likes. In new locations, new truths can be revealed; and indeed specific locations in Stoker often function effectively as tropes, offering, as it were, dis-locations of the familiar and expected and revealing strange new levels of meaning and association for them. Consequently, after offering an overview of Stoker’s use of locations, this chapter will move to detailed examination of two texts in particular, The Mystery of the Sea and Dracula, in both of which Stoker delineates a detailed, intricate, and ultimately incriminating connection between women and the associations generated by specific places. 91

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Probably we do not know the full extent of Stoker’s travels, because we do not have complete records of his journeys. For instance, he noted in Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving that after their first meeting, he did not see Irving for another five years because ‘my work did not allow my going to London except at times when he was not playing there’ (PR I: 12), but there is no other indication of any such visit, though Stoker’s travels between England and Ireland leave their mark in the comment in The Primrose Path that ‘The south coast of England is full of charming scenery, which one sees much of in passing from port to port’ (Path: 48), with Plymouth and Portsmouth particularly commended. In 1876 Stoker went to Cava di Terreni, near Naples, for his father’s funeral, something which may well be reflected in the descriptions of Ischia and the Amalfi coast in Lady Athlyne (LA: 28–9) (which also contains a description that shows knowledge of the Lake District [LA: 189]). He also visited Vienna, Amsterdam and Paris – which Florence loved – frequently:1 amongst other visits, he stayed there with his friend the actress Geneviève Ward in 1875, and it too is important in his fiction, even, I shall suggest, when its presence is not openly advertised: for instance, the three vampiric women in Dracula may well owe something to the ‘three unmarried women’ with ‘chalky complexions, those eyes blackened with kohl and the scarlet stains of their painted lips, like bloody wounds gaping in the flesh of those dead faces’ who bring men to ruin in the short story ‘Magic Lantern’ by Jean Lorrain, associate of Oscar Wilde.2 Although we can probably feel confident that Stoker never went to Transylvania, since his accounts of it are so clearly based on his reading, and perhaps not to Nuremberg, I would not be surprised if evidence were one day to emerge that he had been at least in the vicinity of Montenegro, since he certainly seems remarkably well informed about it, transparently alluding to the battle of Kosovo – ‘For more than a thousand years – ever since its settlement after the disaster of Rossoro’ (Shroud: 33) – and referring to ‘a Vladika somewhat similar in power and function to the Prince-Bishops of Montenegro’ (Shroud: 33), as well as speaking of a time ‘when it would seem that Montenegro was to be deprived for all time of the hope of regaining the Bocche di Cattaro’ (Shroud: 239–40). Of particular importance in a wide range of Stoker’s fiction is the fact that from 1883 the Lyceum company, and Stoker with it,

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toured America almost annually, although there was no tour between spring 1888 and autumn 1893. This is reflected in novels like The Shoulder of Shasta and Lady Athlyne, as well as in the important rôle played by the Texan Quincy Morris in Dracula and the Americans Marjory Drake in The Mystery of the Sea and Elias P. Hutcheson in ‘The Squaw’. Andrew Smith argues that America is a crucial presence in Stoker’s fiction: ‘Stoker’s account of racial Otherness is not solely predicated on a perception of the racial inferiority of apparently primitive cultures, rather it is directed towards a vision of the most modern and powerful of societies: America.’ He points out that ‘“The Squaw” was first published in the Christmas issue of The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News in 1893 and it suggests that Stoker already had ambivalent ideas about America before writing Dracula’ and argues that ‘It is America’s involvement in a colonial war that links Marjory with the figure of the vampire. This is also evidenced in some telling similarities between Count Dracula’s speech concerning his genealogy and Marjory’s account of her forefathers.’3 Other locations also loom large in Stoker’s fiction. In 1890 Stoker visited Whitby, a trip which he famously revisits in Dracula in ways which do not only contribute a picturesque setting to the novel but also inform its examinations of domesticity versus foreign threats and of evolutionary theory, since it was already famous for the fossils which proved so important a support to Darwinian theory. In 1892 Stoker holidayed at Boscastle in Cornwall (PR I: 221), which surfaces in The Jewel of Seven Stars, and his sister-in-law told her grandson that Stoker’s glowing reports were the principal cause of its subsequent popularity.4 1893 saw the first of his subsequently regular trips to Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire, which he had first spotted five years previously on a Lyceum trip north to research Macbeth.5 This became the setting for The Watter’s Mou’ and The Mystery of the Sea, and possibly also an impetus for Dracula: the DNB article on Stoker claims that ‘During a holiday in Whitby, Stoker drafted the scene in which the count arrives in the fishing village on a ghost ship, and during other holidays at Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire he walked daily to the ruined Slains Castle, considered the inspiration for Dracula’s castle.’ David Glover argues that such a Scottish setting would be intimately linked with the novel’s overall Irishness, since ‘in a number of his stories the Scottish countryside or Scottish people appear to stand in

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for their counterparts across the Irish Sea’;6 as Mrs O’Brien says in Lady Athlyne, ‘Begob! av it’s Ireland y’objict to ye can take him as Scotch’ (LA: 13). Stoker was also influenced by places he had not visited personally, but of which he had heard accounts from friends or Lyceum connections. The Transylvanian setting of the opening scenes of Dracula is the most famous instance of this, but the references to Australia in Snowbound and The Lair of the White Worm may well have been prompted by the fact that Irving’s friend J. L. Toole played in Melbourne in 1891 and Sarah Bernhardt acted there in June of the same year, while it was presumably Stoker’s long friendship with the Manx-born novelist Hall Caine, dedicatee of Dracula (under his childhood nickname of ‘Hommy-Beg’), which led to the choice of the Isle of Man as a place of safe refuge for Mimi in The Lair of the White Worm. When a location is used in Stoker’s fiction, it is invariably important. The scenes set at Whitby form only a small part of the narrative of Dracula, but they seem to be deeply rooted in the imaginative genesis of the novel; indeed as Paul Murray notes, ‘The anonymous author of a profile of Stoker in the Literary World in 1905 divided his fiction into two categories, the supernatural and the marine’,7 and the Whitby scenes of Dracula allow the two to be combined. (Barbara Belford attributes the obsession with the marine to a childhood spent looking out of the window while an invalid at Clontarf, and the interest in danger at sea will also have been fed by the fact that on 13 April 1887 Florence and Noel were shipwrecked and fetched ashore at Fécamp, which thereafter became an annual site of pilgrimage for the family.8) In a pamphlet entitled Whitby and the Dracula Connection, the author declares that his maternal great-grandmother, Fanny Harker, was Stoker’s landlady at 7 Royal Crescent Avenue, now 7 Crescent Avenue,9 and if he is right (although the Lyceum scenepainter Joseph Harker said Stoker had told him he was the source of the name10) then the recollection of Whitby clearly pervades the book as a whole rather than being simply confined to the section explicitly set there, and certainly Barbara Belford points out that Stoker did a lot of reading for Dracula while at Whitby.11 Nor was the influence of Whitby confined to Dracula. It has recently been established that a mummy originally but erroneously identified as that of a princess was brought to Hull from Whitby,

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where the Egyptologist Joann Fletcher contends that it must have been seen by Stoker in 1890. It belonged to Sir George Elliot MP, a friend of Disraeli, who had gone to Egypt as advisor to the Khedive before settling in Royal Crescent. Fletcher argues: Think of the seaside location, the fact that Elliot’s mummy is described as an Egyptian princess in correspondence of the time and then [The Jewel of Seven Stars] is published in 1903, with its original scary ending where the princess goes bonkers and kills everybody. And all of a sudden, in 1903, a mummy is suddenly donated to the Whitby museum and right round the country, people seem anxious to donate mummified body parts to their own local museums.12 Whitby, then, is of an importance to Stoker which well justifies its current status as Gothic capital of England, with its Dracula Experience and regular Goth weekends. Cruden Bay in Aberdeenshire was even more influential on Stoker’s fiction, most notably in The Mystery of the Sea (1902), and here the setting does not simply function as a backdrop: in a move which I shall be suggesting also occurs in Dracula, location here becomes dislocation as the Scottish setting becomes a miniature melting-pot in which a variety of tensions between different races and nationalities can be ultimately resolved by displacing nationalised conflicts onto gendered ones. The Mystery of the Sea is a novel no more amenable to generic classification than the rest of Stoker’s fiction. Part love story, part political tract, part treasure quest and part tale of the supernatural, its closest antecedents are Rider Haggard (at one point Marjory actually refers to Hunter as ‘King Solomon’ [Mystery: 45], and the trust that has been handed down from father to son in the De Escoban family is obviously reminiscent of that which has passed down the Vincey family in She) and Stoker’s own Dracula. The novel is set against the background of the contemporary hostilities between Spain and America, yet although it frequently refers to these and other events, principally, as I shall discuss, the A. T. Stewart ransom case, the novel puts distance between itself and its historical moment. It does this by confining its action entirely to Scotland, where its American heroine Marjory Drake (a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, to whom Stoker himself was compared in appearance by Irving’s son

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Laurence)13 meets the second-sighted hero, Archibald Hunter, prompts him to decipher a sixteenth-century manuscript, and assists him in uncovering a vast treasure which has lain undetected in Scotland since the time of the Armada but which now, providentially, can be used to fuel the war against Spain, of which Marjory Drake has become a virtual icon. At the same time, however, the invocation of the language of war, in which masculine valour is paramount and women become damsels to be rescued, allows the novel to unleash the full force of its covert animus against its heroine: as ironically befits a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, whose actions oscillated between piracy and legitimate seamanship depending on the perspective of the observer, it is Marjory who can thus be demoted from legitimate combatant to pirate. As Andrew Smith observes, ‘the putative heroine of the novel, Marjory Anita Drake, is resourceful and powerful, but this is contained within a discourse of chivalry which re-writes her as victim.’14 The novel’s treatment of Marjory can only be understood in terms of its complex and multiple cultural contexts, for which the ostensibly Highland setting becomes a multi-faceted symbol as the tiny community turns host to a steady influx of people from a wide variety of backgrounds trailing with them a complex set of heritages, just as on Lammas Eve it becomes the gateway to the past as well as the present. In the first place, the Spanish-Cuban-American war of 1895–98 forms the crucial historical backdrop for the novel. Because of it, Marjory, an American, hates Spaniards: ‘Look at the way they are treating Cuba! Look at the Maine!’ (Mystery: 49). The battleship Maine was blown up in Havana in 1898. There is in fact no evidence that the Spanish were responsible and the captain of the sunken ship recorded that the crew of the Alfonso XII, which was in the vicinity, afforded instant assistance and rescued many of those on board; nevertheless, the event gave rise to the popular cry ‘Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!’. In one of the few critical responses to The Mystery of the Sea, Andrew Smith has analysed the significance of this historical moment for Stoker’s novel. He points first to the ways in which perception of the war was racialised: America disguised its imperial expansionist interests by turning the war into a moral crusade against the Spanish. In order to do this a

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complex process of othering was required which, to pamper [sic] to populist American sentiments, imaged the largely black Cuban insurgents as white; conversely the ‘swarthy’ complexion of the Spanish was seen as indicative of their barbarism.15 Second, he discusses how this in turn can be made to map onto Stoker’s more immediate concerns: ‘the novel can also be read as Stoker’s response to Catholic and Protestant relations. As in The Snake’s Pass and The Lady of the Shroud, The Mystery of the Sea constructs a settlement between Catholic and Protestant which is the product of appeasement and compromise’.16 Certainly these two issues are important in The Mystery of the Sea. Race becomes a crucial issue towards the end of the novel, when the potential ‘swarthiness’ of Don Bernardino is in fact comprehensively displaced onto the far more threatening figure of the ‘buck nigger’ to whom it is threatened that Marjory might be given, allowing for the eventual recuperation of Don Bernardino and the defusion of any sense of remaining hostility between America and Spain. It certainly seems at least possible, too, that we should read this idea of reconciliation as to be extended to the ideological and political tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism which had proved so divisive in Ireland, though that is something much less strongly signalled in this text than in the earlier The Snake’s Pass. The war also, however, raises another issue, which is the question of whether combat, and the strategies used in it, are legitimate or not. This is something which Marjory’s reference to the Maine brings directly to the fore, since the allegation from the American side was that the destruction of the Maine had been achieved by illegitimate means. Marjory ventures onto more dangerous ground, however, when she alleges that the Spaniards are also deviating from the rules of war by interning women in concentration camps (Mystery: 160) – for if the point is that these women are not legitimate combatants, then, by the same token, neither is she. Ironically, then, what began as a cause of war between different nations melts away: the enemy Spaniard is accepted, while the woman is manoeuvred into the position of opponent. The novel’s repeated allusions to a second real-life event with which there are close parallels also work in the same direction. This

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is the A. T. Stewart ransom case. This is referred to in the chief of the detectives’ description of the gang that has abducted Marjory: I take it that ‘Feathers’ is none other than Featherstone who was with Whisky Tommy – which was Tom Mason – in the A. T. Stewart ransom case. If those two are in it, most likely the one they called the ‘Dago’ is a half-bred Spaniard that comes from somewheres over here. That Max that she named, if he’s the same man, is a Dutchman; he’s about the worst of the bunch. Then for this game there’s likely to be two Chicago bums from the Levee, way-down politicians and heelers. It’s possible that there are two more; a man from Frisco that they call Sailor Ben – what they call a cosmopolite for he doesn’t come from nowhere in particular; and a buck nigger from Noo Orleans. A real bad ’un he is; of all the … But I hope he isn’t in the gang. If he is, we haven’t no time to lose. (Mystery: 225) Appropriately for someone figuring in a story by an Irish writer which is set in Scotland, A. T. Stewart was a Scottish-Irish immigrant from Belfast who had arrived in America in 1818. The case which was to make him a household name, certainly in America, is best summed up by Howard Baetzhold in his account of Mark Twain’s parody of it: The news story that sparked Mark Twain’s investigative fiasco broke on November 8, 1878, when headlines announced the theft during the night before of the body of multi-millionaire dry-goods merchant, Alexander T. Stewart, from a family crypt in St. Mark’s churchyard. Lurid column headings gasped to their readers that ‘GHOULS IN NEW YORK CITY’ had perpetrated this ‘UNPRECEDENTED AND GHASTLY CRIME,’ the New York Times, for instance, devoting six of its seven front-page columns to details of the robbery and speculations about motives and methods.17 Mark Twain made no bones about the fact that he was directly inspired by the case when writing his short story ‘The Stolen White Elephant’: Writing on January 21, 1879, from Munich he announced to William Dean Howells that he had given up work on his Simon

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Wheeler detective story because he had decided that the novel was not his forte. ‘But,’ he continued, ‘when the detectives were nosing around after Stewart’s loud remains, I threw a chapter in my present book in which I have very extravagantly burlesqued the detective business – if it is possible to burlesque that business extravagantly.’ That ‘chapter,’ ultimately omitted from A Tramp Abroad, was ‘The Stolen White Elephant,’ later published as a title piece of a collection in 1882.18 In Stoker’s novel, the chief’s description of the suspects comes suggestively close to Twain’s: in Twain’s story all newspaper accounts of the theft of the elephant ‘concluded with Blunt’s own assurances that the principals in the crime were the “noted villains,” Brick Duffy and Red McFadden, whom he could apprehend any moment he chose’.19 However, the only two people to be arrested were released without charge and the actual fate of the body remains a mystery: Clue after clue, lead after lead petered out. It soon was apparent that Burke and Vreeland had had nothing to do with the crime. A Dr. Hatch, once named as ‘chief conspirator’ and thought to be a notorious Chicago ‘resurrectionist,’ proved equally innocent. Another prime suspect, Kelly the Hackman, alias ‘Bull’ Kelly, was also eliminated, though not until after two New York detectives detailed to find him had been with him one evening in a Patterson, N.J., bar but failed to recognize him.20 The affair, however, did not fade from the public imagination: further tips in 1881 and 1882 led to additional investigations … again with no results. The case then rested again until April, 1887, when a pre-publication review of George W. Walling’s Recollections of a New York Chief of Police once more revived it by summarizing Walling’s supposed first-hand account of robbery, investigation, $20,000 ransom, return, and reinterment … But the reviewer also emphasized the ‘imagination’ in Walling’s account and the fact that ‘those in possession of the facts’ now refused to say whether or not the remains had ever been returned.21

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The story, then, was an ongoing mystery when Stoker referred to it. The Stewart ransom case is a particularly ominous precedent for Stoker to invoke because not only did it originally concern a corpse, but also the white elephant – the stolen object in the Twain satire – is already dead when found; moreover, the failure to solve the crime does not bode well for the events of a novel whose title explicitly describes it as a mystery. The details of the Stewart case also contain an eerie foreshadowing of Dracula: Baetzhold notes that ‘Especially detailed were the numerous analyses of exactly how Stewart’s body had been removed from the walled churchyard, the gates of which remained locked’,22 just as Lucy Westenra proves able to escape from a locked tomb. In itself, then, the allusion to the A. T. Stewart ransom case assists in the creation of a powerful atmosphere of the uncanny and of a sense of the odds that are stacked against the novel’s hero in his attempt to unravel the mystery of the sea. However, it also has another effect. The Stewart case baffled all the efforts not only of the regular police force but also of the famous Pinkerton detective agency, which is directly satirised in Twain’s short story. (Though I cannot say for sure that Stoker had read ‘The Stolen White Elephant’, his strong interest in both literature and America would make it odd if he had not; he certainly knew Mark Twain, whom he first met in 1883 and who visited the Lyceum in 1899, and with whom he had financial dealings,23 and he also recorded in his diary that he had discussed crime and criminals at length with Roosevelt in 1895 when he was Commissioner of Police [MT: 143]; his attention might also have been caught by the fact that news of the crime had broken on his birthday.) Reference to the fiasco therefore affords Stoker an understated, but unmistakable way of counteracting the American reputation for efficiency and organisation by reminding the audience of at least one occasion when American surveillance agencies, which are closely parallel to those at work in the novel, had spectacularly failed to deliver. As such, it also constitutes another way of incriminating Marjory, and indeed her entire nation, and of redressing the balance in favour of Don Bernardino, whose own investigative efforts are rather more successful. When Hunter enquires what the expression ‘to be shanghaied’ (Mystery: 235) means, the detective chief explains that it is illegal detention of the person by those operating against the law, whom he thus effectively characterises as pirates; but in the A. T. Stewart

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case it had been the police force who had been guilty of unjust if not illegal detention, since they had eventually had to release both of the men whom they had too hastily arrested. In the context of the novel as a whole, the reason for Stoker’s animus would seem to be the idea regularly found in his fiction (as seen not only in this book but also in Lady Athlyne and The Shoulder of Shasta) that American women are particularly free and forward in their dealings with men. The references to the A. T. Stewart case, then, like the backdrop of the war, serve as a clear reminder that running counter to the official narrative of Stoker’s novel is a rather different one, and in this dark other self of the novel Marjory Drake is not only the heroine but the enemy. When she is first introduced, Marjory, for all her descent from a famous seafarer, has, ‘like a woman’ (Mystery: 36), just made the ridiculous mistake of failing to tie up her boat, so she is stranded and has to be rescued by Hunter; later, no sooner has she announced her political opposition to Spain than Hunter switches the conflict to a very different arena, declaring that ‘I felt instinctively that there rested some advantage with me in the struggle of sex’ (Mystery: 50), the one arena in which Stoker’s men, however embattled they may be in other areas, can always win. The novel continues its incrimination of Marjory. It is a clear pattern in Stoker’s novels that his heroines always have false or misleading names or riddled identities – Stephen Norman in The Man is a woman, and in any event accedes to the wildly suggestive title of Lady de Lannoy towards the end of the book; Norah Joyce in The Snake’s Pass is jokingly referred to by the hero’s servant as ‘the bog’; Mina Harker’s real name is Wilhelmina; Joy Ogilvie in Lady Athlyne calls herself Lady Athlyne; and Teuta in The Lady of the Shroud appears to be a vampire, but is in fact a living woman – but no other of these aliases or assumed identities does as much damage as Marjory Drake’s passing herself off as Miss Anita threatens to do. In the first place, Hunter’s ignorance of her real identity places him in a completely false position when he meets up with his old friends Cathcart and Sam Adams, to the extent that Cathcart has to take him aside for a private word and say, ‘I didn’t like to say a word downstairs, old chap; but I could see you were in some difficulty. Of course I know it’s alright; but ought you not to know something of the lady? With any one else

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but Sam and myself such a thing might have conveyed a false impression. Surely you can best protect the lady by knowing how to avoid anything that might embarrass her!’ This was all good sound common sense. For a moment I weighed up the matter against the possibility of Marjory’s wishing to keep her name a secret. Looking back, however, I could see that any concealment that had been was rather positive than negative. The original error had been mine; she had simply allowed it to pass. The whole thing had probably been the passing fancy of a bright, spirited young girl; to take it too seriously, or to make too much of it might do harm. Why, even these men might, were I to regard it as important, take it as some piece of deliberate deceit on her part. (Mystery: 87) It is clear here that unless the situation is very carefully handled, either Hunter’s or Marjory’s reputation is at stake – and even if her action is innocently intended (and not even the heavily partisan Hunter can go further than feeling that that is probably the case), its consequences are still potentially serious. Hunter’s concern for Marjory’s reputation becomes even stronger when Cathcart informs him that ‘Her name is Anita; but it is only her second Christian name. She is known to the world as Miss Marjory Drake, of Chicago’ (Mystery: 87). This is a turn of phrase which considerably alarms Hunter: ‘“Known to the world.” Was this a mere phrase, or the simple expression of a fact!’ (Mystery: 88). It certainly conflicts sharply with Rousseau’s definition of a good woman as one never heard of half a mile from home, and it gives rise to some extremely alarming thoughts in Hunter: Here a terrible doubt assailed me. Other Princesses had played hide-and-seek; and, having had their sport, had vanished; leaving desolation and an empty heart behind them. Was it possible that she too was like this; that she had been all the while playing with me; that even whilst she was being most gracious, she was taking steps to hide even her whereabouts from me? Here was I, who had even proposed marriage; and yet who did not even know when or where I should see her again – if indeed I should ever see her again at all. I could not believe it. I had looked into her eyes,

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and had seen the truth. Here was no wanton playing at bowls with men’s hearts. My life upon her faith! (Mystery: 89) Unfortunately, this is not quite such a satisfactory resolution as it might appear, for as Stoker would be only too well aware from his evenings at the Lyceum, ‘My life upon her faith’ is a direct quotation from Othello, a play in which the hero is so far from confident of the heroine’s faith that he eventually murders her in the mistaken belief that she has committed adultery. It is also ironic that ultimately the only solution to Marjory’s slipperiness of identity is for her to adopt yet another name, as we see when Hunter tells her ‘I should be the last person in the world to object to your changing your name!’ (Mystery: 99). Even though Hunter does eventually trust Marjory in this, moreover, her reputation in other areas is not so easily cleared. She is irresponsible: when she first hears of the plot against her she exclaims ‘Oh, that is too delicious!’ (Mystery: 119), and Sam Adams is proved abundantly right when he warns Hunter that ‘If she were to know that the matter of her protection was a Government one, nothing on earth would make her yield herself to our views’ (Mystery: 92). She is misguidedly political: nothing in the text contradicts Don Bernardino when he tells her ‘oh Senora, before even your nationality comes your sex’ (Mystery: 160), and when she is glad that Hunter has deciphered the code because he will keep it from the Spaniards, he records that ‘I felt a little piqued. I would have thought that her concern would have been rather individual than political’ (Mystery: 78). Finally, she has to be informed of her duty by Mrs Jack: when a woman takes a husband she gives up herself. It is right that she should; and it is better too, for us women. How can we look after our mankind, if we’re thinking of ourself all the time! And they want a lot of looking after too, let me tell you. They’re only men after all – the dears! Your bringing-up, my child, has not made you need them. But you would understand it, if when you was a child, you was out on the plains and among the mountains, like I was; if you didn’t know when you saw your daddy, or your brother, or your husband go out in the morning whether

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you’d ever see him come back at night, or would see him brought back. And then, when the work was over, or the fight or whatever it might be, to see them come home all dirty and ragged and hungry, and may be sick or wounded – for the Indians made a lot of harm in my time with their good old bows and their bad new guns – where would we women and girls have been. Or what sort of women at all, if we didn’t have things ready for them! My dear, as I suppose you know now, a man is a mighty good sort of thing after all. He may be cross, or masterful, or ugly to deal with when he has got his shirt out; but after all he’s a man, and that’s what we love them for. (Mystery: 185–6) But perhaps the ultimate disgrace for Marjory comes in the fact that the text ultimately parallels her with her own worst enemy, for Don Bernardino’s ancestor gave a ship to his country just as Marjory did (Mystery: 197). It is also parallelism that is used to deadly effect in the text’s incrimination of its other major female character. Throughout the novel, women in general get short shrift: Hunter, for instance, tells Don Bernardino he will not trust Spain because ‘Your King is a minor; his regent is a woman’ (Mystery: 207), despite the fact that the regent in question (the King’s mother, Queen Maria Cristina) was generally esteemed a careful ruler. However, none is portrayed as being as dangerous and unreliable as the second-sighted Gormala MacNeil. Not only does her gift prove less than Hunter’s, but she is depicted in terms directly reminiscent both of Rider Haggard’s monstrous witch-figure Gagool and Stoker’s own Dracula. Gormala says of her powers that They hae come doon to me through centuries. Frae mither to dochter, and from mither to dochter again, wi’ never a break in the lang line o’ the tellin’. Know ye, young master, that I am o’ a race o’ Seers. I take my name from that Gormala o’ Uist who through long years foresaw the passing o’ mony a one. That Gormala who throughout the islands of the west was known and feared o’ all men; that Gormala whose mither’s mither, and mither’s mither again, away back into the darkness o’ time when coracles crept towards the sunset ower the sea and returned not,

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held the fates o’ men and women in their han’s and ruled the Mysteries o’ the Sea. (Mystery: 13–14) Compare this with Dracula’s account of his ancestry: We Szekelys have a right to be proud, for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship … What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins? … Who more gladly than we throughout the Four Nations received the ‘bloody sword,’ or at its warlike call flocked quicker to the standard of the King? When was redeemed that great shame of my nation, the shame of Cassova, when the flags of the Wallach and the Magyar went down beneath the Crescent; who was it but one of my own race who as Voivode crossed the Danube and beat the Turk on his own ground! This was a Dracula indeed. (D: 29) Moreover, Hunter awakes mysteriously at night and feels impelled to go to where Gormala is (Mystery: 18), just as Lucy is nocturnally drawn to the cemetery where Dracula is. It is particularly suggestive that at the end of the book, when the previously separate plot strands involving Marjory and Gormala begin to converge, echoes of Dracula cluster more strongly. First there is Marjory’s message, ‘written’ in books: Tomorrow off north east of Banff Seagull to meet whaler Wilhelmina. To be Shanghaied – whatever that means. Frightful threats to give me to the negro if any trouble, or letters to friends. Don’t fear, dear, shall die first. Have sure means. God with us. Remember the cave. (Mystery: 235) This echo of Mina Harker’s full name is soon followed by another detail taken directly from Dracula, when Hunter records that ‘I asked Adams to have the touching of the Wilhelmina at any port telegraphed to him at once from Lloyds’ (Mystery: 236), which directly parallels the arrangement made by Arthur Holmwood in Dracula.

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Finally, we hear of the death of Don Bernardino in terms clearly recalling the description of the death of Quincey Morris: Strangest of all was the finding of Don Bernardino. The body of the gallant Spanish gentleman was found washed up on the shore behind the Lord Nelson rock, just opposite where had been the opening to the cave in which his noble ancestor had hidden the Pope’s treasure. It was as though the sea itself had respected his devotion, and had laid him by the place of his Trust. Marjory and I saw his body brought home to Spain when the war was over, and laid amongst the tombs of his ancestors. We petitioned the Crown; and though no actual leave was given, no objection was made to our removing the golden figure of San Cristobal which Benvenuto had wrought for the Pope. It now stands over the Spaniard’s tomb in the church of San Cristobal in far Castile. (Mystery: 270) Collectively, these echoes of Dracula leave us in no doubt of the presence of danger – but here that danger is caused by and centred on women, and it is, as in Dracula, only the gallant and chivalric actions of men which can avert it. However, women are suitably punished. Gormala dies, and Marjory very nearly suffers a fate worse than death when she is kidnapped by a gang of piratical criminals and carried off to their ship, only to be rescued in the nick of time by the heroic Hunter. Her rescue, though, is not without its attendant humiliations, since Hunter records that, concerned because ‘Marjory … had only lately learned to swim … I made my wife loose her skirts which fell away in the drag of the water; she could then swim more freely and to the best of her power’ (Mystery: 267). This forced undressing is a cruelly ironic punishment for a woman who has previously resisted the consummation of her marriage, and it makes it abundantly clear that in its representation of its ostensible heroine, Stoker’s novel subtly displaces the topos of ownership versus piracy away from its ostensible political context onto the battle of the sexes, because for Stoker, the most fearful form of piracy and usurpation is female power. Stoker’s most famous novel also uses an exotic location and a set of historical events to discredit and incriminate its female characters, but it does so in ways which have not been previously noticed

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because neither the location nor the events are advertised in the novel. However, I think signs of their presence are clear, and that they provide a fruitful way in which to read Dracula, in that here too the connotations of a setting are mobilised to condition the representation of women in the text. Stoker’s close friendship with the actress Geneviève Ward and his travels with Irving and Florence had ensured that he knew Paris well, and he set his short story ‘The Burial of the Rats’ there. The year in which Dracula was both finished and published, 1897,24 was also the year of the Jubilee pilgrimage to Lourdes, designed to celebrate 25 years of pilgrimages to the shrine after the 18 alleged appearances of the Virgin Mary to the 14-year-old Bernadette Soubirous in the Grotte de Massabieille between February and July 1858. Lourdes, which had grown steadily both in size and fame in the years since Bernadette’s series of visions, had become a renewed focus of prominence and controvery after the publication in 1893 of Zola’s novel Lourdes, which had offered fictionalised versions of some of the actual ‘miracles’ associated with the shrine (and in one case, in the service of Zola’s own rationalist, naturalist agenda, had invented a relapse for a devotee who in fact continued to protest herself cured). Zola did not believe in miracles, but he did believe in what Charcot had called ‘La foi qui guérit’, the faith which heals, and it is round this distinction that the novel is built.25 Zola’s reliance on Charcot – mentioned by name in Dracula by John Seward (D: 191) and also in The Jewel of Seven Stars – takes us very close to the intellectual terrain of Stoker’s novel, and so too do several other aspects of the nineteenth-century history of Lourdes. Both what Dracula has in common with Zola’s narrative and the areas in which they diverge cast illuminating light on Stoker’s novel, as do elements found in other accounts of the experiences of Bernadette and the subsequent history of the shrine. Lourdes is, I think, a paratext for Dracula, and as Gérard Genette says, ‘watch out for the paratext!’.26 Ruth Harris’s magisterial study of Lourdes argues that the story of the shrine was inextricably interwoven with conflicts between science and faith, debates over women’s suffrage, and the burgeoning development of the concept of the unconscious, with the attendant idea of hysteria. (The Medical Bureau which was established to attest to the veracity of cures was heavily dominated by doctors either trained under or influenced by Charcot.) Harris chronicles the

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way in which the history of events was retold with different emphases and in the service of different agendas – a phenomenon very close to the interests of Stoker, whose most famous novel offers not simply a narrative but a meditation on narratology. Moreover Stoker’s attention might well have been drawn to the Pyrenees in general by the fact that interest in the Cathars escalated in the 1890s, fed by freemasons. Napoléon Peyrat, who first found Montségur in 1861, saw ‘l’épopée des Cathares’ as something of a new Iliad. Peyrat’s two works, Les Albigeois et l’Inquisition (1870–72) and La Croisade; La Civilisation romane (1880–82), fuelled the interest. Montségur was identified with the Montsalvat of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parsifal (something which would certainly have been of interest to the Wagner devotee Stoker), and the important Cathar figure Esclarmonde of Foix came to be understood as a mysterious, muse-like female. Rosicrucians were particularly interested in Catharism, but so were Freemasons of all sorts, and even if Stoker was not himself a Mason (something which cannot be determined because the relevant records have been lost), his brothers and Irving certainly were. Whatever the specific prompt, events at Lourdes between 1858 and the Jubilee of 1897 offer a significant paratext for Dracula, not only in what they tell but in the manner of their telling. It is unsurprising that Stoker, who himself was (for reasons that have still never been explained) apparently paralysed until the age of 7 before suddenly beginning to walk, should be attracted by stories of the miracles at Lourdes, of which several, like the cures of the real Justin Bouhohorts and of Zola’s fictional Marie de Guersaint, involved the miraculous acquisition of the ability to walk.27 The interests in hypnotism and in mesmerism which are so clearly signalled both in Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm would also have led him in the direction of the study of miracles; in an article entitled ‘De l’hypnotisme dans la genèse des miracles’ (‘Of hypnotism in the genesis of miracles’), largely focused on Lourdes and published in the 1894 number of the Revue de l’hypnotisme, Félix Regnault declared that ‘le rôle de l’hypnotisme est surtout prédominant dans la vie religieuse des peuples. Liebeault et Charcot ont les premiers developpé ce point de vue’ (‘the role of hypnotism predominates above all in the religious life of nations. Liebeault and Charcot have been the first to develop this point of

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view’), and affirmed ‘je puis avouer qu’en ce qui concerne la production des miracles, Lourdes présente sur tous les autres une supériorité marquée’ (‘I can avouch that as far as the production of miracles is concerned, Lourdes has a marked superiority over all other [places of pilgrimage]’). Regnault cites a number of reasons for Lourdes’ superiority, many of which chime with Stoker’s text – the exclusion of all beggars and homeless people from the grotto area and a resulting emphasis on the middle classes, the presence of medical doctors – but most importantly, he says, ‘[l]es pèlerinages se font par provinces … Elles chantent les cantiques dans leur patois, qui est évidemment bien plus suggestif pour eux que la langue nationale’ (‘pilgrimages are undertaken by provinces … [The bands of pilgrims] sing canticles in their local dialect, which is obviously much more meaningful for them than the national language’).28 Bernadette herself spoke no French, and recorded that the Virgin spoke to her in the heavily Spanish-based patois of the Pyrenees; Stoker, for whom the representation of accent is invariably the fatal Cleopatra, is careful in Dracula as elsewhere in his fiction to demarcate people according to national origins which find their primary expression in modes of speech. Finally, Regnault remarks: L’étude des miracles de la Bible n’a pas été faite par Renan; bien que merveilleux logicien, il n’a pu comprendre la part de vérité qui existait dans ces récits. Il a fallu le développement récent de la science hypnologique et de la sociologie pour les expliquer. En ce qui concerne cette dernière, on sait le rôle capital qu’Herbert Spencer fait jouer à l’idée du double. D’elle dérive le culte des morts, et par suite la réligion et toute la complication sociale telle que nous l’observons actuellement. Cette théorie du double servait à cette époque à expliquer les miracles. Généralement Jésus-Christ guérissait des possédés, des lunatiques, des muets, des paralytiques et des cataleptiques; les lépreux et les aveugles sont bien rares. Or ces gens étaient possédés par un double, un esprit, un démon et quelquefois même par une légion. Jésus conversait avec ces démons et les chassait. Quelquefois il les faisait entrer dans le corps d’autres animaux, tel un troupeau de porcs qui fut ainsi possédé. (1894: 273)

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The study of the miracles of the Bible has not been undertaken by Renan; although a wonderful logician, he has been unable to understand the essential truth which exists in these accounts. It has taken the recent development of the sciences of hypnosis and sociology to explain them. As far as sociology is concerned, the importance ascribed by Herbert Spencer to the idea of the double is well known. From that derives the cult of the dead, and, in turn, religion with all the attendant social complications we now see. This theory of the double served in those days to explain miracles. Generally, Jesus Christ cured the possessed, the mad, the dumb, the paralytic and the cataleptic; lepers and the blind are far more rare. Now these people were possessed by a double, a spirit, by one demon or sometimes by a legion of demons. Jesus talked to these demons and exorcised them. Sometimes he made them enter the bodies of other animals, such as a herd of pigs which was possessed in this way. There is an astonishing mixture here of knowledge of nineteenthcentury science and willingness to take the Bible literally which may well remind us of Van Helsing, and also takes us very close to the idea of the ‘dual life’ which has been so extensively commented on in Stoker, not to mention Freud’s developing theories of the Unheimlich (and Stephanie Moss has recently argued that Stoker was aware of Freud’s earliest theories).29 A similar mixture of faith in both old and new can be traced in the history of the development of the shrine at Lourdes. As in Dracula, a novel which, as has often been remarked, is obsessively interested in technology and the very latest in modes of transport and communication, it was not only the medieval and the supernatural that were in evidence at Lourdes. The amenities and technological advances of the modern world were also given full play, and were indeed crucial to the development of the site: one large and influential pilgrimage group switched from La Salette to Lourdes because the latter was so much more readily accessible by rail, and the special white trains which brought the very sick to Lourdes became a fundamental part of the shrine’s success and indeed of its identity. It also made early use of electricity and hence the telegraph.30 Alison Milbank has recently argued that Dracula is in fact very concerned with religion in Ireland, and with the effects of the

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tension between Protestants and Catholics. 31 Here, too, the history of Lourdes offers a resonant paratext for the novel. Bernadette herself, like the roughly contemporary visionaries at La Salette, was very young, and so too were the earlier Pyrenean visionary Anglèze de Sagazan and the great majority of the other Lourdais whose claims that they too had had a religious experience subsequent to Bernadette’s were ultimately rejected by the church.32 In Dracula, too, children playing on a remote heath see a vision of a beautiful lady dressed all in white, as was the apparition which Bernadette saw in the then wild and remote Grotte de Massabieille. Adults do not believe them, and dismiss their story as the product of childish imagination. Of course, the apparition in this instance is of diabolic origin (as the young Lourdaise Marie Courrech, initially taken almost as seriously as Bernadette, eventually came to believe that her own visions of the Virgin had been), but nevetheless the children are right, and what they see is no delusion. This seems to me not any kind of parody or inversion of experiences like those of Bernadette, but very much in line with the gestures towards reconciliation of the apparent antinomies between Protestantism and Catholicism which Alison Milbank detects elsewhere in the novel. The age of miracles is not past; as audiences were later to be warned at the end of the stage version of Dracula, such things do happen. No church, however, has a monopoly on their interpretation. One final element of the story of Lourdes in which one might have expected Stoker to be interested is the fiercely contested nature of its historiography; at a crucial point in Zola’s novel, for instance, Chassaigne takes Pierre to the aborted remains of an alternative church whose very memory, he says, various groups within the church are attempting to destroy, and in Henri Lasserre’s fiercely partisan 1869 account of the shrine, ‘probably the greatest bestseller of the nineteenth century, … translated into at least eighty languages by 1900 and apparently selling over a million copies’,33 there is much emphasis on the ways in which different interest groups are alleged to have tried to suborn the representation of events for their own purposes. Lasserre’s praise for the stalwart adherence to tradition of mountain people like the Pyreneans comes very close to Stoker’s own attitude to the Men of the Blue Mountains in The Lady of the Shroud, and

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there may well seem too to be a similarity of method between Stoker and Lasserre, who announces at the outset of his account: I have been satisfied neither with official documents, nor letters, nor legal proceedings of courts, nor written attestations. But I have wished, as much as possible, to know everything, to see everything by myself, to make everything be renewed before my own eyes by the remembrance and the narrative of those who have been eyewitnesses. I have made long journeys across France in order to interrogate all those who had taken a part, whether as principals or as witnesses, in the events which I had to describe, to check their statements by one another, and to arrive thus at a complete and luminous knowledge of the truth.34 In the English version, supplementary verification is offered by the translator, and there is a long footnote about lost documents which recalls the surprise experienced by Harker at the end of the novel when he realises that all the originals have been lost.35 However, Stoker might also have been able to get wind of how many of Lasserre’s emphases and details were disputed in the Rankean, document-oriented Jesuit Père Léonard Cros’s book, which proved so controversial that it was not published until the twentieth century. Just as Zola’s Pierre casts aside the account of Bernadette which he is asked to read aloud and offers his own account of her instead, so Cros’s text develops and occasionally contradicts Lasserre’s in ways very reminiscent of the proliferation and multiplication of documentation in Dracula, with the notions of originality and authenticity receding in similar ways in both cases. There is thus an ironic contrast between the omniscient narrative voice by means of which Zola asserts doubt and the splintered and fragmented tones in which Stoker assures us that such things do happen. Pericles Lewis has recently pointed to ‘some of the ways in which Bram Stoker anticipated contemporary questions about the reliability of individual perception through his use of the documentary form … Dracula shares with other, more canonical texts a focus on both the problems of perception and the struggle between modernity and ancient superstition’.36 It is not only individual perception which seems to me to be at stake, however, but collective perception in the sense of the varying points of view espoused and

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prescribed by the different clerical authorities. Zola’s account of the development of the shrine bristles with the hostility he depicts between the Abbé Peyramale, to whom Bernadette first took the apparition’s request for a chapel, and the Garaison Fathers whom the Bishop of Tarbes, Mgr Laurence, ultimately put in charge of the Grotto; Lasserre is more diplomatic, but he too makes it clear enough that there was by no means unanimity in the clerical response to Bernadette and her visions. Even more polarised, obviously, was the difference in responses between Catholics, for whom miracles remained a possibility, and Protestants, for whom they did not, since Protestant doctrine is that the age of miracles is past. If Dracula’s musings on the status of documents walk a tightrope over the doctrinal splits between Protestants and Catholics, so surely does its endorsement of the fact of miracles while inverting much of the imagery most closely associated with the most famous of nineteenth-century locations of miracles. Other elements of the story of Lourdes chime even more urgently with Stoker’s own concerns. The chivalry which overtly motivated the male stretcher-bearers and informed their iconography in pictorial representations of the shrine is the same spirit as animates Stoker’s neo-Arthurian heroes; the anti-Semitism which ultimately gave rise to the Dreyfus Affair, in which Zola was again to be concerned, provided an ugly subtext to the enthusiasm for Lourdes and is also, as many critics have argued, an important element informing the representation of Dracula, with pseudo-scientific theories of race and the imagery of bloodsucking prominent in both cases. Stoker was indeed concerned with scientific advances, and so was Lourdes, ‘the only major sanctuary in Christendom to possess a Medical Bureau of international renown’, in which sceptical doctors wondered whether the apparent cures were produced by Freud’s newly discovered unconscious and fretted over the peasantry’s absurd reliance on garlic bulbs as talismans.37 There are also more specific overlaps between events in Dracula and events at Lourdes. The opening description of the town in Henri Lasserre’s contemporary account of the shrine – ‘[t]he houses, seated irregularly upon an uneven plot of ground, are grouped almost in disorder, at the base of an enormous rock, isolated entirely, and upon which is perched, like an eagle’s nest, a formidable fortress’38 – suggests a topography and an effect not entirely

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dissimilar to that imagined by Stoker for Castle Dracula, where the ‘formidable’ relic of the feudal past still towers over the territory of the peasants and keep them in awe. (In any attempt to consider the story of Lourdes, it is important to understand that the topography of the present-day town differs significantly from that of the Lourdes which Bernadette knew; Massabieille was a wild and rural area at some distance from the town, which was clustered under the fortresss, and the Gave was not then embanked.) In both Stoker’s novel and Zola’s, hysterical women pray for cures: Zola’s Marie de Guersaint is confident that the Virgin will heal her, Mina supposes that ‘I was hysterical, for I threw myself on my knees and held up my hands to him, and implored him to make my husband well again’ (D: 184). Dracula seeks a refuge in Piccadilly ‘only a few doors from a big white church or somethink of the kind, not long built’ (D: 263), and is vulnerable to the branch of the wild rose; Bernadette’s vision occurred in a grotto edged with wild rose and led to the erection of a big white church on the rocks of Massabieille. Perhaps the most suggestive area of overlap is the shared interest of Zola, Stoker and Lasserre in hypnotism, mesmerism and hysteria. Zola’s Ferrand is an intern at the Pitié-Salpêtrière, Charcot’s hospital, and the cure of the heroine Marie is attributed entirely to the alleviation of the hysteria which has earlier led her, like Lucy, to be imagined as a somnambulist.39 At the height of one of the historical Bernadette’s visions, a local doctor, Dozous, took her pulse, and was surprised to find it entirely normal; there were also unsuccessful attempts to mesmerise her.40 Both these moments are closely echoed in Van Helsing’s taking of Mina’s pulse and in the increasing difficulty he experiences in hypnotising her. Not for nothing does Mina conclude that ‘[i]t was like a miracle’ (D: 377), for the discourses surrounding the nineteenth-century response to the apparently miraculous are indeed what are being deployed here, just as Van Helsing’s mockery of Seward’s scepticism echoes Lasserre’s jovially dismissive summation that ‘[a] miracle in the midst of the nineteenth century, exhibiting itself all at once without demanding permission and without procuring authorisation, appeared to some an intolerable outrage to civilisation, an attack on the safety of the state, and it was important for the honour of our enlightened age to bring good order to it.’41 Finally, the uncorrupted body of the exhumed Lucy directly echoes Zola’s ‘[u]n dernier miracle émerveilla

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le couvent, le corps ne changea pas, on l’ensevelit au troisième jour, souple, tiède, les lèvres roses, la peau très blanche, comme rajeuni et sentant bon’ (‘a last miracle astonished the convent, the body did not change; it was buried on the third day, supple, warm, the lips red, the skin very white, as if rejuvenated and sweet-smelling’).42 (Bernadette was still alive at the time when Lasserre wrote, so there is no opportunity for any comparable observation to be made in his text, and Stoker’s novel also preceded the first exhumation of Bernadette’s body to check on its state of preservation.) Suggestive though the occurrence of parallel passages and language in these three texts may be, however, even more suggestive is what Zola dares to say that Stoker does not. Both texts share an emphasis on the blood and the mouth, with Zola’s sufferers from tuberculosis and stomach cancer coughing up blood and Stoker’s Lucy and Mina having it drip from their lips; but Zola is prepared to go much further than Stoker in exploring what that blood might mean, and in articulating the extent to which the virginal heroines of nineteenth-century fiction are always already compromised. Early in the novel, describing the pools in which the very sick were encouraged to bathe, he writes, ‘[l]a science était bafouée, on ne prenait pas même les précautions les plus simples, baignant les femmes à toutes les époques du mois, plongeant les phtisiques en sueur dans l’eau glacée, laissant les plaies à leur putréfaction, sans aucun soin antiseptique’ (‘science was disregarded, even the most simple precautions were not taken; women were bathed at all times of the month, sweating sufferers from tuberculosis were immersed in freezing water, sores left to weep, without any thought of antiseptic’). The hint at menstruation here is significantly developed in his description of the cure of Marie: ‘[p]uis, tandis qu’elle sentait jaillir d’elle la source de sang, la vie de la femme, de l’épouse et de la mère, elle eut une dernière angoisse, un poids énorme, qui lui remontait de ventre dans la gorge. Seulement, cette fois, il ne s’arrêta pas, ne l’étouffa pas, il jaillit de sa bouche ouverte, il s’envola en un cri de sublime joie’ (‘then, while she felt flowing in her the source of the blood, the life of the woman, the wife and the mother, she had a last agony, of an enormous weight mounting from her stomach to her throat. Only this time it did not stop, did not suffocate her, but flew out of her open mouth, leaping out in a cry of sublime joy’) – verily the suddennest of all suddenly sexual women.43

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The disappearance of Marie’s hysteria sets her ovaries to their proper functioning, something which, Zola’s narrator several times notes, was never allowed to Bernadette: ‘Bernadette, le nouveau Messie de la souffrance, si touchante dans sa réalité humaine, est la leçon terrible, l’holocauste retranché du monde, la victime condamnée à l’abandon, à la solitude et à la mort, frappée de la déchéance de n’avoir pas été femme, ni épouse ni mère, parce qu’elle avait vu la sainte Vierge’ (‘Bernadette, the new Messiah of suffering, so touching in her human reality, is the terrible lesson, the sacrifice pulled back from the world, the victim condemned to be abandoned, to loneliness and to death, smitten with the failure of never having been a woman, neither a wife nor a mother, because she had seen the holy Virgin’).44 Here, once again, there are echoes of Lucy, the victim whose death prevents the spread of the vampire contagion, the woman whose hopes of imminent marriage and motherhood are blasted by an encounter with a supernatural being, and whose uncorrupted body is consigned to the grave only to be disinterred for inspection, as Stoker’s knowledge of Catholic practice would surely have been able to tell him Bernadette’s body was also bound to be in due course (the first exhumation of the body did in fact occur in Stoker’s lifetime, though after the publication of Dracula).45 In Catholic thought, as Zola notes, Bernadette’s virginity is a prime component of her sanctity, but Zola himself not only sees it as a waste, he also takes the hugely inflammatory step of speculating to what extent it was actually preserved. Chassaigne wonders whether Bernadette était restée vierge d’esprit, ainsi qu’elle l’a été sûrement de corps? C’est fort possible, car remarquez qu’elle était d’un tempérament lent et chétif, malade presque toujours; sans parler du milieu innocent où elle a grandi, Bartrès d’abord, le couvent ensuite. Pourtant, un doute m’est venu, lorsque j’ai appris le tendre intérêt qu’elle portait à l’Orphelinat, bâti par les soeurs de Nevers sur cette route même. On y reçoit les petites filles pauvres, on les y sauve des périls de la rue. Et, si elle le voulait très grand, pouvant contenir toutes les brébis en danger, n’était-ce pas qu’elle se souvenait d’avoir battu les chemins pieds nus, tremblante encore à l’idée de ce qu’elle aurait pu devenir, sans le secours de la sainte Vierge?

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did she stay a virgin in her spirit, as she surely did in her body? It is very possible, for remember that she was always of a slow and weak temperament, almost always ill; not to mention the innocence of the location in which she grew up, first Bartrès, then the convent. Nevertheless, I did wonder, when I heard about the tender interest she took in the Orphanage which the sisters of Nevers built on this very road. There poor girls are taken in and saved from the dangers of the street. And, if she wanted it to be very large, able to contain all the endangered flock, wasn’t it because she remembered walking these streets barefoot, still trembling at the idea of what might have become of her, without the help of the holy Virgin?46 Though Chassaigne does concede the physical intactness of Bernadette, the daring of these speculations enraged the Catholic Church, and indeed the recorded facts of Bernadette’s life afford no warrant for them except in the mind of a man convinced that sexuality must always be a dominant force in human behaviour. What they do show, however, is how vulnerable any and all women were to speculation about their behaviour and doubt about the purity of their thoughts, and, as both Mina and night-walking, barefooted Lucy discover to their cost, how thin the line that separates respectability from the imputations of wantonness. One of the great mysteries of Dracula may well seem to be why Dr John Seward, apparently equipped with both the motives and the knowledge to investigate and cure Lucy’s condition, is so astonishingly slow to ask the question which at once leaps to Quincey Morris’s lips, why and how she is losing so much blood. Zola’s imagery of menstruation may perhaps give us the answer: a nineteenth-century doctor such as Seward or Zola’s Chassaigne both thought he knew the answer to that question and hoped that he would never have to confront what he believed to be its inevitable implications. Zola initially seems to distinguish between the barrenness of Bernadette’s life in the convent and the prospect of marriage which awaits the recovered Marie, but the distinction collapses when the latter vows herself to celibacy for Pierre’s sake, just as the worldly shopgirl Apolline looks astonishingly like the pure-minded Bernadette. Similarly, Stoker’s novel troublingly comes closest to the story of Bernadette at precisely those moments when it focuses on

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events most dramatically opposite to those with which she was associated. Instead of an apparition of heavenly virtue, there is one of hellish wickedness; instead of a girl whose visions and humility seemed to mark her out as a living saint, there are women scarred and rejected by God, harming children rather than healing them and unable to come into contact with the signs of holiness. If such scenes were written by Zola, they might well seem to form a logical part of his anti-miracle agenda; but Dracula freely admits, and indeed insists on, the miraculous. Whereas Zola inveighs against the supposedly supernatural component of the story of his miraculées (female beneficiaries of miraculous cures) but compassionates their femininity, railing against a church whose doctrines imagine a virgin mother, Stoker’s novel inverts Zola’s priorities by presenting its equivalent of miraculées as acceptable in their miraculous status but profoundly troubling in their gender. It was a young girl who first claimed to have seen the Virgin at Lourdes, girls and women who predominated (by nine to two) amongst the other visionaries whose testimonies were eventually disallowed by the church, and women, from the Empress Eugénie downwards, who were most active and eager in believing in, funding, promoting and developing Lourdes. The great majority of those claiming to have received miraculous cures were also women; in Zola’s novel, the leading male character is too rational to believe in miracles himself, but sees the lead female as an unconscious hysteric who can be manipulated into experiencing an apparently miraculous cure through the power of suggestion. Similarly, in Dracula, it is only women who are vamped; Harker is merely threatened with it, and then only at a time when he occupies the passive, supine, dependent position more typically associated with women. To a nineteenth-century observer, trained in Darwinian ideas of sexual selection and keenly alive to fears of degeneracy and feminisation, the explanation for the preponderance of female influence would be simple: women were weaker, less mentally developed, more gullible, and more prone to hysteria, and indeed Zola’s Pierre, telling the story of Bernadette, muses on how ‘[s]elon le mot brutal d’un médecin, cette fillette de quatorze ans, tourmentée dans sa puberté tardive, déjà ravagée par un asthme, n’était en somme qu’une irrégulière de l’hystérie, une dégénérée à coup sûr, une enfantine’ (‘according to the harsh verdict of a doctor, this little girl

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of 14, struggling with her belated puberty, already ravaged by asthma, was really nothing but an unsteady hysteric, certainly a degenerate, and childish’).47 In France, a prime reason for denying women the vote was their feared susceptibility to clerical influence and the threat which would consequently be posed to the growing secularisation of society;48 across the Channel, men like Stoker were, as Carol A. Senf has shown, mocking the pretensions of the New Woman in a tone sufficiently edgy to suggest that a real uneasiness had been generated, and punishing spirited, bicycle-riding Marjory Drake, heroine of The Mystery of the Sea, with the threat of rape by a giant ‘negro’ and a para-drowning. Stoker’s use of location, then, goes far beyond the simple provision of colourful backdrops. Stoker’s settings, which are for the most part so obviously based on the locations of his own holidays, bring with them something of the logic of holiday, enabling the suspension of the norms and mores of the everyday. Ultimately, whether we are reminded of France or of a Scotland rich with associations of America and Spain, Stoker’s presentations of locations far from home allow him to explore some issues which are in fact very close to home without having to observe the conventions and pieties of home. Away from home, women need not be revered as respectable wives and mothers, but can stand revealed as wild and hysterical, and be suitably punished for it.

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5 The Cave

Many of Stoker’s novels feature a cave, crypt or other dark subterranean place, ranging from Dracula’s tomb to the crypt of St Sava’s in The Lady of the Shroud and the cave of The Mystery of the Sea and the cellar of The Jewel of Seven Stars, and all cry out to be read as spaces of the mind. As David Glover observes: It is tempting to see these elaborate scenarios of caves and clandestine ceremonies as a purely private species of fantasy, a hollowing out of narrative space so that illicit desires may be both voiced and hermetically sealed. And clearly these moments in the text would have to be among the touchstones for a fully developed queer reading of Stoker’s romances.1 Stoker himself was so secretive that several key questions about his life remain unanswered, but all too often his novels seem to tell the stories that he himself will not. This chapter will explore the darker side of Stoker’s fiction, especially its obsessions with sex, gender, disease and forms of secret knowledge, particularly mesmerism and freemasonry. It will start with an exploration of representations of literal caves in Stoker’s fiction and then move on to look at the way in which the novels also dwell on more metaphorical hidden spaces and secret repositories, before finally suggesting that the two can in fact be seen as liked through masonic theory. 121

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Caves in Stoker are of interest for a number of reasons. First, Stoker himself and many of his characters seem to be fascinated by them for their own sake. Sir Nathaniel explains that he lives in Derbyshire, a county more celebrated for its caves than any other county in England. I have been through them all, and am familiar with every turn of them; as also ith other great caves in Kentucky, in France, in Germany, and a host of other places. (WW: 108) Indeed not just caves, but enclosed spaces of all sorts are envisaged as curiously fascinating: in the short story ‘The Squaw’, Elias P. Hutcheson wants to get inside the Virgin (that is, the Iron Maiden of Nuremberg, a mediaeval instrument of torture), because I’ve been in some queer places in my time. Spent a night inside a dead horse while a prairie fire swept over me in Montana Territory – an’ another time slept inside a dead buffler when the Comanches was on the war path an’ I didn’t keer to leave my kyard on them. I’ve been two days in a caved-in tunnel in the Billy Broncho gold mine in New Mexico, an’ was one of the four shut up for three parts of a day in the caisson what slid over on her side when was settin’ the foundations of the Buffalo Bridge. (DG: 52) Second, caves in Stoker have obvious psychological resonance, and this is rarely clearer than in The Mystery of the Sea. In her introduction to the book, Jessica de Mellow remarks that ‘[a] cartoon of the period shows Oscar Wilde trying inexpertly to bottle-feed a baby, while in the background his wife smokes a cigarette and studies a book.’2 The comment is apposite, for The Mystery of the Sea is centrally concerned with gender roles. Its typically Stokerean hero, Archibald Hunter – who, in his size and pragmatism, bears a distinct resemblance to Stoker himself as well as to Arthur Severn of The Snake’s Pass and Rupert Sent Leger of The Lady of the Shroud 3 – does battle with two interestingly varied menacing and insubordinate females, and also, as the imagery of the book insistently intimates, with a more abstracted version of a monstrous femininity which continually threatens to swallow and entrap him.

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From the outset, Hunter faces engulfment. The narrative begins with the drowning of a child (Mystery: 1), and not only is it consumed by the sea, but Hunter’s prior intimation of its imminent fate leads to an attempt by the second-sighted crone Gormala to subsume Hunter’s gift and his identity for her own purposes. Indeed Hunter, whose name suggestively belies his essential passivity, sees the potential for devouring everywhere, even in the scenery, which he thus describes: If Cruden Bay is to be taken figuratively as as mouth, with the sand hills for soft palate, and the green Hawklaw as the tongue, the rocks which mark the extremities are its teeth. (Mystery: 2) This is only the first of many mouths and other orifices in the text. Don Bernardino says that ‘the cipher of my Grandfather … has many mouths’ (Mystery: 71); when he makes these mouths speak, and tell him of the location of the treasure-cave, Hunter writes that ‘I believe that I regarded the treasure as already my own; as much as though I had already recovered it from the bowels of the earth’ (Mystery: 72). Indeed, in a brilliantly suggestive manoeuvre, it is virtually in his own bowels that he will actually find it, since, as in Ann Radcliffe’s The Sicilian Romance, it proves to be in the cellarage of his own house that he finds the concealed entrance to the cave system (Mystery: 73). (Radcliffe may indeed have been an influence on Stoker, since her 1789 novel The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne opens with the sentence ‘On the north-east coast of Scotland, in the most romantic part of the Highlands, stood the castle of Athlin’, which comes close to the title of Stoker’s Lady Athlyne.4) Nor is this the only time that Hunter himself seems to have been virtually drawn into the landscape: In one of these bays … stands an isolated pillar of rock called locally the ‘Puir mon’ through whose base, time and weather have worn a hole through which one may walk dryshod. (Mystery: 3) The eroded ‘Puir mon’ provides a not inappropriate image for Hunter himself, for he is repeatedly assaulted by elemental forces throughout the novel.

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The first of these is Gormala MacNeil. Though merely a peasant, Gormala is continually invested with power by the language used to describe her: Hunter notes that she ‘accepted my apology with a sort of regal inclination’ (Mystery: 8), and that ‘she seemed to read my face like an open book. There was a suppressed impatience in her manner, as of one who must stop in the midst of some important matter to explain to a child whose aid is immediately necessary’ (Mystery: 11). The suggestion of the maternal here is boosted when Gormala tells him that her power comes ‘[f]rae mither to dochter, and from mither to dochter again’ (Mystery: 13), while when Hunter tries to investigate for himself by making enquiries of an Aberdeen professor, he finds that the terminology of the latter ‘wrapped my swaddling knowledge in a mystery all its own’ (Mystery: 16). Gormala here is associated with two figurings of women as powerful: as mother and as queen, since she is so much a Lady Macbeth figure. This text, like others of Stoker’s, is also generous in other imagings of these two roles. Francisco de Escoban’s narrative records that ‘it may be necessary that a branch of our house may live in this country in obedience to the provision of the Trust and so must learn to speak the English as though it were the mother tongue’; his son repeats that he ‘so schooled myself in the English that it is now as my mother tongue’ (Mystery: 71). In both instances, the unnecessary intrusion of ‘the’ is not merely comic; its alienating, defamiliarising effect also serves to make strange the very concept of the maternal – appropriately enough, in this story of a succession from father to son in which mothers are never mentioned. As for the theme of queenship, it is most strongly stated in relation to the novel’s problematic heroine, Marjory Drake, who lives in a castle explicitly dated to ‘the later days of Queen Elizabeth’ (Mystery: 115) even though it is in Scotland, where Elizabeth never reigned. The queen, who founded Trinity College, Dublin, which Stoker attended,5 and whom he discussed in Famous Impostors, is often referred to in his fiction: in The Man, for instance, Stephen puts Harold in the bedroom which had been Queen Elizabeth’s (Man: 380), while in The Lady of the Shroud Rupert Sent Leger speaks of the architecture of Castle Vissarion as spanning all periods up to ‘where such things seemed to stop in this dear old-world land – about the time of Queen Elizabeth’ (Shroud: 50). The Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, on whom Queen Tera in The Jewel of Seven Stars

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seems partly to have been based,6 was compared to her, and the theory that she was actually a man is discussed in Famous Impostors. At an early stage of her acquaintance with Hunter, Marjory calls him ‘King Solomon’ (Mystery: 45). Soon afterwards, he tells her, ‘I know that I would rather die with you in my arms, than live a king with any other queen!’ (Mystery: 64). Though the tenor of these passages may well seem to be similar, their drift is in fact rather different. In the first, Hunter is figured as a king; in the second, kingship is actually something he renounces, preferring Marjory. When the image is next used, he is definitively not a king, since Marjory tells him that ‘Her Majesty is pleased with the ready understanding of her Royal Consort, and with his swift obedience to her wishes’, although Hunter reminds us her that above them both is ‘the great Over-Lord, Nature’ (Mystery: 167). The recession of the possibility of Hunter’s kingship within the relationship is also touched on in a passage overtly describing a physical journey, a bicycle ride, but which is clearly also mapping an emotional one: Oh, but that ride was delightful! There was some sort of conscious equality between us which I could see my comrade felt as well as myself. Down the falling road we sped almost without effort, our wheels seeming to glide on air. (Mystery: 81) Indeed the novel itself virtually makes explicit this link between landscape and the revelation of thought, as they proceed down the river and Hunter notes: There is something soothing, perhaps something … hypnotic, in the ceaseless rush of water. It unconsciously takes one’s thoughts on and on, till the reality of the present is in some measure lost and the mind wanders towards imagination through the regions of the unknown. (Mystery: 81) Where this apparently idyllic scenery actually takes the mind towards, however, is an abrupt recurrence of the imagery of orality and orifices – for ‘before us lay a dark alley between the closing pines’ (Mystery: 81).

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It is indeed in a landscape almost entirely of passages and openings, whose symbolic meanings are only too abundantly evident, that the relationship of Hunter and Marjory will develop. Almost all of these passageways will prove difficult to open or to negotiate, in ways which clearly figure the reluctance and recalcitrance of Marjory herself, who, like Mina Harker in Dracula, is uneasily poised between New Woman and proper wife.7 Although the bicycle ride confers ‘equality’ on her – and although bicycling was in itself an activity strongly associated with New Women – Marjory, again like Mina, explicitly disavows any sympathy with the most prominent of the New Women’s aims, and even denies that she fully understands their ideas: We women have to give something in order to be happy. The stronger-minded ones, as we call them, blame the Creator for this disposition of things – or else I do not know who or what they blame; but the rest of us, who are wise enough to accept what cannot be altered, try to realise what can be done for the best. (Mystery: 83) Moreover, in sharp contradistinction to Gormala, Marjory, whose name is already that of a male bird, celebrates only her male ancestors, most especially Sir Francis Drake (Mystery: 104–5). This pride in her status as daughter of great men, and her disavowal of any personal ambition, may seem to align her not only with Mina Harker but also with the self-abnegating and well-descended Teuta, of The Lady of the Shroud; but Marjory’s robustness and self-reliance work against this, as does the fact that she is referred to by Hunter as his queen, a rôle which Stoker’s good women explicitly disavow. In Lady Athlyne, for instance, the truly womanly Joy declares that ‘I would rather a thousand times see the two men I love best in all the world going so, than walk in front of them as a Queen’ (LA: 311). Indeed the distance between Margery and Teuta is tellingly measured when Gormala ‘sees’ Marjory in the water with a floating shroud (Mystery: 110) – a potential punishment for her insubordination rather than, as in the case of Teuta, an emblem of glory, and also a pointer to the ways in which here, too, the wife is threateningly conflated with the mother: immediately after Hunter has said to Marjory what Hamlet says to Gertrude, ‘Your woman’s intuition is quicker than my

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man’s ratiocination. “I shall in all my best obey you, Madam!”’, he promptly proceeds to imagine her as an Ophelia-like bride (Mystery: 59). It is notable, too that Marjory is effectively designated as Hunter’s kin when he refers to ‘the hunter spirit hereditary in her’ (Mystery: 145), and when we are told that ‘[t]here came back to my recollection passages in Belzoni’s explorations in the Pyramids’ (Mystery: 148), we may well wonder if something of the same sinister mummy/mother pun as plays over Stoker’s Egyptian-themed novel The Jewel of Seven Stars is visible here too. Marjory’s assertiveness has an unnerving effect on her lover, who records that ‘the sense of impotence grew upon me’ and that ‘I understood, as she did, that my kisses meant acquiescence in her wishes’ (Mystery: 105). When he first visits the castle where Marjory is staying, they go up an avenue where ‘the trees stood so close, and their locking branches, that it was quite gloomy within’; Hunter calls it ‘a regular Rosamund’s Bower!’ (Mystery: 111), and it does indeed evoke the fairy-tale wood of thorns. The imagery of impenetrability continues when they come to a low arched doorway in front of us through which it might be possible to drive with care. The doorway was closed by two gates; first a massive network of interlocking steel bars of seemingly foreign workmanship, and secondly great gates of oak fortified with steel bands and massive bosses of hammered iron. (Mystery: 111) There is also a smaller door through which actual entrance is made, ‘a well of immense depth situated in a deep dungeon’ (Mystery: 115), and a network of tunnels which turn out to honeycomb the building and its surroundings. Faced with this plethora of openings, Hunter attempts to resort to a suitably masculine symbol by buying Marjory a gun – only to find, on the first of many occasions when he is outbid by the masculinity of others, that he has been preempted by one her father had already had made for her (Mystery: 114). Instead, he finds himself on the receiving end of a lecture, as Marjory tells him: Anyhow, Archie, whatever we may settle about what we are to do, I am glad you came to consult me and to tell me frankly of

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your trouble. Do this always, my dear. It will be best for you, and best for me too, to feel that you trust me. (Mystery: 120) Then, as she tells him, they can be true comrades (Mystery: 120). Archie, however, suggests a rather surprising twist to that comradeship when he proposes a marriage, although only so that he can have easier access to guard her from the men who plan to kidnap her: We can be good comrades still, even if we have been to church together; and I will promise you faithfully that till your own time I won’t try to make love to you even when you’re my wife – of course any more than I do now. (Mystery: 124) To compound the unorthodox nature of the proposed union, Marjory is to make her way to Carlisle, where they are to be married, dressed as a footman – an idea which she greets with the frivolous exclamation ‘Oh that would be a lark!’ (Mystery: 125).8 After this has been successfully carried out, Hunter’s sexual and personal frustrations become alarmingly obvious as, on what should have been his wedding night, he digs in his cellars in quest for the entrance to the cave, an activity described in wildly suggestive terms: ‘[j]ust at the end of Whitsennan point there seemed to be a sort of bowl-like hollow, where the thin skin of earth lay deeper than elsewhere’ (Mystery: 128).9 Ironically, however, it is not entirely clear that the substitute activity is very much inferior to the real thing: Hunter notes that ‘I laboured furiously. What I wanted was work, active work which would tire my muscles and keep my thoughts from working into channels of gloom and distintegration’ (Mystery: 129). Though it is obviously sexual tension which powers this passage, its reference to ‘channels of gloom and distintegration’ may also serve to taint and denigrate the female. The pattern of sublimated sexuality transparently displaced onto other activities is continued when Marjory and Hunter explore the cave system together: When I took her down to the cellar and turned into the hole the reflector of the strong lamp, she held on to me with a little

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shiver. The opening did certainly look grim and awesome. The black rock was slimy with sea moisture, and the rays of the light were lost far below in the gloom. I told her what she would have to do in lowering me down, and explained the rude mechanism which I had constructed. (Mystery: 132) Even when he has penetrated the passage, Hunter is still nervous: ‘I went cautiously through the cave, feeling my way carefully with the long stick which I had brought with me.’ The fragility of his vicarious and prosthetic masculinity is thus clear, and is further evidenced when Marjory calls with apparent incongruity, ‘Take care there are no octopuses!’ and Hunter notes ‘It was a disconcerting addition to my anxieties’ (Mystery: 133). The octopus, both fluid and multiply phallic, is a suitable emblem for the text’s own gender anxieties at this point. As Hunter proceeds, the language multiplies in suggestiveness: ‘the rock walls bellied out’ (Mystery: 134), as though they were literally part of the anatomy, the cave is ‘quaint of outline’ (Mystery: 135), recalling the medieval and Renaissance ‘queynte’, which has become the modern ‘cunt’, and Further inland the cave shelved down on one side, following the line of the rock so that I passed through an angular space which, though wide in reality, seemed narrow by comparison with the wide and lofty chamber into which I had descended. A little beyond this again, the rock dipped, so that only a low tunnel, some four feet high, rose above the water. I went on, carefully feeling my way, and found that the cave ended in a point or narrow crevice. (Mystery: 133) His act of penetration complete, Hunter returns to the cellar and the waiting Marjory, noting, as if with post-coital deflation, that on his return, ‘[i]t may have been that my mind was so full of many things that I did not receive her caress with the same singleness of devotion as was my wont’ (Mystery: 136). Something of the same sense of jadedness also marks his next excursion, to reconnoitre the ruined chapel near Marjory’s castle, where he thinks he can detect a

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pathway: ‘there is something about a place which is even occasionally trodden which marks it from its surroundings virgin of footsteps’ (Mystery: 142). Though the relationship has not yet been consummated, the imagery of the frenetic displacement activity surrounding it is beginning to show signs of the gloss wearing off. The chapel and the other structures near the castle now begin to take on a significance almost equal to that of the cave network as a site of penetration. At first they resist this, and guard the secret of their hidden openings in a way which is described in language hilariously resonant to modern ears: ‘I had to take it that the erection was merely a monument or mark of some kind, whose original purpose was probably lost in time’ (Mystery: 142). Marjory, however, suggests the expedient of stretching threads across the tree trunks, so that Hunter can trace the location of the proper path from following which threads are broken (Mystery: 144–5) – one of two significant occasions when he needs to be shown the way by another man. When this promises success, he is rewarded by Marjory’s delight: Marjory was eager for news, but it thrilled me to see that her eagerness was not all from this cause; hour by hour I found myself growing in her affection … She gave her opinion that on the next morning I should be able to locate the entrance to the passage, if one there was. Marjory also promises to institute a search ‘at my end’ (Mystery: 145) for that elusive entrance. When, with ‘much labour’, Hunter finally locates the underground passage, its symbolism is abundantly clear: it forks, with one angle leading off to a reservoir (Mystery 148), mimicking unmistakably the relationship of the bladder to the genitalia. (Suggestions of the vagina and the birth canal also hover over the remark that ‘there were signs of much labour in the making of the passage’ [Mystery: 148]; the idea of the cave is often associated with labour in Stoker’s novels, as when Mr Trelawny in The Jewel of Seven Stars says ‘There is a secret place in this house, a cave, natural originally but finished by labour, underneath this house’ [Mystery: 171].) Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hunter finds the passage oppressive in a distinctively Gothic way: ‘there is a dread of being underground … burial alive in all its potential horrors are always at hand’ (Mystery: 149).

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After his successful solo exploration of both passages, Marjory and Hunter go down into the sea-cave together: Marjory’s delight at the sight of the huge red cave was unspeakable. When I lit one of the red lights the blinding glow filled the place, exposing every nook and corner, and throwing shadows of velvet blackness. The natural red of the granite suited the red light, the effect being intensely rich. Whilst the light lasted it was all like a dream of fairyland; and Marjory hung on to me in an ecstasy of delight. Then, when the light died down and the last sparks fell into the natural darkness, it seemed as if we and all around us were steeped in gloom. (Mystery: 165) This transparently orgasmic episode is rapidly deflated, though. First comes Hunter’s sustained reflection on the situation: I could not help feeling at times that all was going on for the best; that the very restraint of the opening of our married life was formative of influence for good on us both. If all young husbands and wives could but understand the true use of the old-fashioned honeymoon, the minute knowledge of character coming in moments of unconscious self-revelation, there might be more answers in the negative to the all-important nineteenth century philosophy query, ‘Is marriage a failure?’ (Mystery: 167) This brings us back very abruptly to the hard facts of the situation and the reality of non-consummation which the red glow so briefly hid. Moreover, the difficulties of penetration come once again to the fore, as they see in front of them a parodic version of the vagina dentata, ‘a great piled-up mess of huge, sharp-edged rocks, at the base of which were stones of all sizes, some round and some jagged’ (Mystery 169). And finally, their euphoria is even more effectively ended as they examine the treasure: ‘Rubies!’ cried Marjory who stood close to me, clapping her hands. ‘Oh! how lovely. Darling!’ she added kissing me, for her expression of delight had to find a vent on something.

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‘Next!’ I said as I bent to the iron chest to lift out another of the caskets. I drew back with a shudder; Marjory looking anxiously at my face divined the cause and cried in genuine alarm: ‘The tide! The tide is rising, and is shutting us in!’ (Mystery: 173) This passage well and truly pours cold water on things in more ways than one: not only does it cast doubt on the sincerity of Marjory’s affection, but its deliberate withholding of any physical cause for Hunter’s awareness of the rising tide effectively forces us to read in an emotional one. Further detailed examination of Hunter’s and Marjory’s unstable situation follows. After they have survived immersion up to their necks in the tide they discover that Mrs Jack was not at all alarmed about their prolonged absence ‘[b]ecause I knew you were with your husband; the safest place where a young woman can be’ (Mystery: 185). Not only do Mrs Jack’s innuendoes support the novel’s wider insinuation of an association between the cave visits and sexual activity, but they invite the young couple radically to reassess the present basis of their situation: she tells them that ‘when a woman takes a husband she gives up herself. It is right that she should’ (Mystery: 185). Hunter, unsurprisingly, ‘felt that every word she said was crystallised truth’ (Mystery: 186). Before he can put any of Mrs Jack’s advice into practice, though, he is pre-empted by another man who has the secret of the tunnel, and who incarnartes a disregard for the formalities of marriage – he is ‘base-born’ (Mystery: 214). The detective, seeing signs of ‘a violent struggle here at the doorway!’ and observing that ‘[i]t would be a hard job to carry or force along an unwilling captive through that narrow uneven passage’ (Mystery: 216), counsels Hunter not to rush: ‘[i]f you go too fast you may obliterate some sign which would give us a clue!’ (Mystery: 215). Hunter is forced to lag behind his abducted wife in a scenario where everyone’s language has now become overtly larded with sexual metaphor: the detective, learning that he had been fooled by Marjory’s footman disguise, remarks ‘it’s a pity we didn’t get on to her curves’ (Mystery: 223), the yacht which Donald McRae volunteers to help in the chase is called the sporran (Mystery: 241), and it is repeatedly said to be Marjory’s ‘honour’ that is at stake

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(Mystery: 223). Everyone is accordingly much cheered by the message which they find from her in the manse: ‘Frightful threats to give me to the negro if any trouble, or letters to friends. Don’t fear, dear, shall die first. Have sure means’ (Mystery: 235). Hunter’s friend Adams exhorts him, ‘Cheer up! At the worst now it’s her death! For myself I feared at first there might be worse’, and Hunter remarks that ‘thinking it all over I don’t see what better he could have said to me’ (Mystery: 237). Faced with this threat of the negro, with whose voracious imagined sexuality he becomes increasingly obsessed (Mystery: 253), Hunter is reduced to trying openings again. When he finds the Yale lock of his house not responding, he batters it down with a scaffold pole, and then breaks open the cellar door (Mystery: 228–9); when he and his companions find the manse it, too, is bolted top and bottom. This time, though, they do not demolish the door, but apply to the housekeeper. Her brief appearance in the narrative foreshadows the far more significant re-entrance of Gormala MacNeil. Hunter comes across her at Dunbuy, a place formed ‘by the mother cliff’ (Mystery: 244), and the idea of motherhood crucially structures their encounter: [i]n that moment of the ecstasy of pain, something had spoken to the heart of the old woman beside me; for when I came back to myself they were different eyes which looked into mine. They were soft and full of pity. All the motherhood which ever had been, or might have been, in that lonely soul was full awake. (Mystery: 246) Even as motherhood seems to triumph, though, it undoes itself, for Gormala tells him that ‘[w]eel I ken that nane but a lassie can mak a strong man greet’ (Mystery: 246). Women may save men; presiding over life and death, they may be able to undo the troublesome openings which have caused men so many problems, as when Gormala’s departing soul grants Hunter a prefiguring dream in which doors and walls are made transparent; but even if they dry men’s tears, it is also only women who make them cry. This muted rehabilitation of Gormala is in keeping with the general tone of the ending. When Hunter sets out to swim to Marjory’s rescue, there is still in front of him ‘a great mass of jagged

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rocks, all stark and grim, blacker than their own blackness, with the water streaming between them, and great rifts yawning between’ (Mystery: 256). Arriving on the ship, he ‘came to the door, behind which I knew Marjory lay. It was locked and bolted, and the key was gone. I slid back the bolt, but the lock baffled me’ (Mystery: 258). Once again, he needs guidance from another man; he gets the key from the villain next door (Mystery: 259). They eventually escape to the deck, where rockets are let off to alert the rescue ship – but, suggestively, Hunter notes that ‘[t]he little rockets which I had brought had been sodden with water and were useless’ (Mystery: 262). Even when they are on shore, he has to break in his door again, and Marjory’s final promise – after she has been condignly punished for her dissidence by being brought to the brink of death – that ‘I shall never willingly leave my husband’s side again!’ (Mystery: 269) seems chaste and comradely rather than passionate. Reading this novel, one can well believe the stories of Stoker’s great-nephew about the sexual frustrations of the Stokers’ marriage; but while the narrative may enact such tensions, it can ultimately offer no cure for them, nor can it exorcise its spectre of the impenetrable cavern-network of the passionless and inscrutable mother-queen. The final reason why caves in Stoker’s fiction are so interesting is that they are often associated with rituals and the esoteric, and this is where the move to include not only literal caves, tunnels and hollow spaces with metaphorical meanings but ones which are wholly metaphorical, but nevertheless conceived of in the same terms as Stoker’s actual caves. The intersection of the psychic and esoteric resonances of the hollowed-out space of interiority is particularly suggestive in the last and strangest of all Stoker’s books, The Lair of the White Worm. This bizarre novel suffers from, among other things, a jolting and entirely unheralded switch of narrative perspective roughly a third of the way through; some odd solecisms and errors, such as ‘The woman who’s interference she had feared’ (WW: 149); and continuity glitches such as the fact that Michael Watford is mistakenly referred to as Lilla’s father rather than her grandfather (WW: 135). Above all, it entirely lacks the drive towards narrative symmetry which in The Mystery of the Sea, for example, sees Archie Hunter repeatedly having to be helped in his quest for Marjory by the direct or indirect acts of other men. In fact The Lair of the White Worm is so incoherent that one might be inclined to

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believe Daniel Farson’s suggestion that by this stage Stoker was suffering from tertiary syphilis (people at Deal, where Stoker seems to have spent some of his last year of life, are said to have recalled him walking with a stamping motion – the high-stepping gait characteristic of tertiary syphilis).10 It may also seem suggestive that Stoker praises Paracelsus because ‘he used mercury and opium for healing purposes at a time when they were condemned’ (FI: 78): though the titles of articles in The Lancet for this period make it clear that mercury was used for illnesses other than syphilis, including smallpox, tuberculous peritonitis and heart disease, this remained its principal use, and The Lancet published articles on the use of mercury in treatment for syphilis in 1885, 1886, 1890, 1891, 1893, 1901, 1907 and 1909. It is certainly notable that The Lair of the White Worm does register a definite interest in madness, with the musing that ‘Madness in its first stage – monomania – is a lack of proportion’ (WW: 145). The novel also deploys a number of motifs, such as the unexpected comings and goings of vast flocks of birds, whose significance is never explained anywhere in the story. It is true that birds are persistently used in a metaphorical sense: ‘Lilla is as gentle as a dove’; ‘Mimi is mild unless anything happens to upset Lilla. Then her eyes glow as do the eyes of a bird when her young are menaced’ (WW: 29); Adam says of Caswall and Lilla that ‘It was just like a hawk and a pigeon’ (WW: 31); Oolanga has a collection of birds of prey (WW: 44); Mercy Farm was originally a nunnery in honour of St Columba, and housed doves (WW 49); and after recovering from her bite Lady Arabella began to injure birds and small animals (WW: 51). Daniel Farson suggests that ‘This strange though powerful theme of birds is really irrelevant, and Stoker soon tired of it.’11 However, the bird motif can perhaps start to make sense if the novel is read in terms of a set of discourses which, even when they are not tied to the literal idea of the cave, focus on the interior, the hidden and the secret. Whatever else is mysterious, it is clear that something sexual is going on in The Lair of the White Worm, and, as in The Mystery of the Sea, the energies this generates provide a hidden logic which structures and powers some at least of the text’s seeming incoherences. Although Sir Nathaniel speculates on ‘A snake who could make himself comfortable in a quagmire a hundred feet deep’ (WW: 35),

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automatically gendering the snake male, it is in fact Lady Arabella who has been possessed by the White Worm, as Margaret in The Jewel of Seven Stars was by Tera, only this time in an explicitly sexual way whose cruelty also recalls that of Renfield in Dracula: she developed a terrible craving for cruelty, maiming and injuring birds and small animals – even killing them. This was put down to a nervous disturbance due to her age, and it was hoped that her marriage to Captain March would put this right. (WW: 51) The logic underlying this is clearly the old-fashioned idea of ‘greensickness’, the belief that young women were likely to be made physically ill by retaining their virginity overlong. Moreover, we are told that the door to Lady Arabella’s secret lair is ‘well hung’ (WW: 96) and ‘wonderfully hung’ (WW: 97), with a double entendre which the OED records as being available in English since 1611. Sexual innunendo is even more explicit in the reference to ‘that fathomless pit, whose entrance was flooded with spots of fresh blood’ (WW: 99), while Sir Nathaniel is confident that being feminine, she will probably over-reach herself. Now, Adam, it strikes me that, as we have to protect ourselves and others against feminine nature, our strong game will be to play our masculine against her feminine. Perhaps we had better sleep on it. She is a thing of the night; and the night may give us some ideas. (WW: 113) In fact, however, the true source of sexual energy is not so much heterosexual as homosocial, as when Adam ‘could see that Sir Nathaniel was watching him intently, and, he fancied, with approval’ (WW: 123); indeed, much of the narrative reads almost like the unfolding of a courtship between the two men, and certainly heterosexual relationships seem distinctly unattractive when we are told of the newly married Mimi that ‘The maid who waited on her had told her that Mr Salton had not yet returned home, so she felt free to enjoy the luxury of peace and quiet’ (WW: 142). When towards the close of the narrative we read of how vast quantities of white material shoot up into the air (WW: 155-6), then we might well feel justified in specu-

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lating about the nature of the emotions and attraction which have prompted it. (There is a hint of a similar homoerotic charge between an older and a younger man in The Snake’s Pass when the narrator, Arthur Severn, writes of his future father-in-law Phelim Joyce that ‘When Joyce came in from his bedroom, where he had been tidying himself, he looked so manly and handsome in his dark frieze coat with horn buttons, his wide unstarched shirt-collar, striped waistcoat, and cord breeches, with grey stockings, that I felt quite proud of him’ [SP: 164–5]). Similarly the rather lukewarm heterosexual romance of The Shoulder of Shasta is palpably less energised than the bonding between Reginald, Dick and Peter Blyth at the end (Shasta: 128). As well as the recurrent interest in displaced sexuality, there are also a number of other stock Stoker motifs at work in The Lair of the White Worm. In Snowbound, the press agent hired to puff the publicity-mad actor Wolseley Gartside credits him ‘with a hypnotic gift which was unique; which from the stage could rule audiences, and in the smoking-room or the boudoir could make man or woman his obedient slave’; he also alleges that he had been tried for wife-beating ‘in the police court of Abingchester, in the Peak of Derbyshire – that was well out of the way of public prints’ (Snowbound: 128). Both the hypnotic gift and the Peak District setting are extensively revisited in The Lair of the White Worm, as, too, are ideas and language found in The Jewel of Seven Stars when Sir Nathaniel muses: Who can tell us when the age of the monsters which flourished in slime came to an end? There must have been places and conditions which made for greater longevity, greater size, greater strength than was usual. Such over-lappings may have come down even to our earlier centuries. (WW: 33) The world of The Jewel of Seven Stars is evoked, too, when Sir Nathaniel speculates that ‘Generally, I would say that in the scheme of a First Cause anything is possible’ (WW: 48), and when a storm blows up at the close of the narrative, an idea found too in The Snake’s Pass where the priest interprets a storm as a sign of God’s anger after Murtagh Murdock has dispossessed Phelim Joyce. There are also echoes of Famous Impostors, in which Roger Tichborne, like

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successive Caswalls, was brought up abroad, away from his English heritage and the Tichborne claimant, Arthur Orton, came over from New South Wales as Adam Salton has done (FI: 206 and 214–5). The most famous Stoker novel, Dracula, is recalled when Adam ‘came upon the body of a child by the roadside. At first, I thought she was dead, and while examining her, I noticed on her neck some marks that looked like those of teeth … I glanced round, and to my surprise, I noticed something white moving among the trees’ (WW: 50); the child has in fact only fainted, as the child in Dracula which had been vamped by the white-clad Lucy had done. Stoker’s collection of children’s stories Under the Sunset is echoed when we are told of the kite that ‘That giant spot in high air was a plague of evil influence’ (WW: 62). Equally, after Adam asks Sir Nathaniel to propose to Mimi on his behalf even though he was ‘almost jealous of the privilege which his kind deed was about to bring him’ (WW: 115), the marriage is conducted in private again as in The Mystery of the Sea, while the interest in technological advance of The Lady of the Shroud is echoed when Sir Nathaniel correctly suggests that there may be a deposit of china clay in the vicinity (WW: 130) (this may also recall the foundations of the Wedgwood/Darwin family fortune, and so return to the evolution theme so often found in Stoker). Technology is also flagged when Adam uses his up-to-date knowledge of dynamite against the Worm (WW: 132), and when he brings from London a Kelvin sounding apparatus to test the depth of the hole (WW: 134). The Lady of the Shroud is also recalled in the very name of Adam, since much play is made in the earlier novel of the idea of descent from Milton. Even this sense of not always fully assimilated recapitulation, however, is insufficient to account for all of the novel’s many oddities. Some of these, though, may perhaps start to appear comprehensible if The Lair of the White Worm is viewed in the light of Masonic ritual, something which has recurrently been suggested as an important context for Stoker’s fiction (and certainly Miss Betty was well reviewed in The Freemasons’ Journal).12 There is no secure evidence of Stoker’s involvement with Masonry, and the records of the Grand Lodge of Ireland no longer exist for the relevant period;13 however, there is some circumstantial evidence. There have been recurrent insinuations of his membership of the Order of the Golden Dawn (Pamela Colman Smith, who illustrated The Lair of the White Worm and was herself

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interested in the figure of the snake-woman,14 was a member of the Order of the Golden Dawn and the illustrator of the now standard Tarot pack).15 Stoker was friendly with known Masons such as Conan Doyle (who is clearly recalled in The Lair of the White Worm’s emphasis on the caverns and legends of the Peak, which chime with Conan Doyle’s short story about a prehistoric monster lurking in the caves of Castleton), and there is clear evidence of his familiarity with the ideas of Freemasonry; indeed David Glover declares that ‘his books are full of mystery, deception, and concealment, often bringing into play a kind of Masonic narrative in which – as in Dracula – a group of men and women privately pledge themselves to fight against some terrible and overwhelming force.’16 In Famous Impostors, Stoker speaks favourably of Freemasonry when he declares of Cagliostro that Naturally such an impostor found in Freemasonry, which is a secret cult, a way of furthering his ends. With the aid of his wife, who all through their life together seems to have worked with him, he founded a new branch of freemasonry in which a good many rules of that wonderful organisation were set at defiance. As the purpose of the cult was to defraud, its net was enlarged by taking women into the body … In the ritual were some appalling ceremonies. (FI: 89) In Dracula, Dracula’s greeting, ‘Welcome to my house. Enter freely and of your own will!’ has Masonic overtones and ‘The wounds in the throat – recalling the Apprentice Mason’s pledge to uphold all secret mysteries on pain of “having my throat cut across” are one example of the book’s frequent allusions to Masonic practice.’17 The formulation on George Cannon’s tomb – ‘He was the only son of his mother, and she was a widow’ (D: 67) – is also reminiscent of the frequent terming of Masons as ‘sons of the widow’. In other Stoker works, too, there are apparent echoes of Masonic language, practices and interests. In the short story ‘The Dualitists’, for instance, one of the twins is named Zerubabbel; the Lyceum actor Edward Terry served as the First Zerubbabel (a principal officer) of a Royal Arch Chapter attached to the Savage Club Lodge.18 In The Shoulder of Shasta, Dick declares that ‘An Indian is real pizon when he gets off the square’ (Shasta: 60): being ‘on the square’ is synonymous

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with being a Mason. In The Lady of the Shroud, Rupert Sent Leger records in his journal that I knew not only from my Lady’s words, but from the teachings of my own senses and experiences, that some dreadful ordeal must take place before happiness of any kind could be won. And that ordeal, though method or detail was unknown to me, I was prepared to undertake. This was one of those occasions when a man must undertake, blindfold, ways that may lead to torture or death, or unknown terrors beyond. (Shroud: 125) This seems clearly reminiscent of the rituals of masonry. In the short story ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’, we are told of Eric Sanson and Abel Behenna that ‘They had now put the coping-stone on their Temple of Unity by falling in love with the same girl’ (DG: 82). (This in itself neatly encapsulates memories of the two of the most significant male-male friendships in Stoker’s life, since the situation mirrors that of himself and Oscar Wilde, both in love with Florence Balcombe, and Behenna was the maiden name of Irving’s mother.) If this is a Masonic image, it makes Eric’s betrayal of Abel in the seal cave all the more monstrous, while to view the girl in question, Sarah Trefusis, in the light of traditional Masonic marginalisation of women would make even more apparent how unworthy she is of either man. Finally, The Jewel of Seven Stars, with its Egyptian theme, is central to the concerns of Masonry, since, as noted in The Perfect Ceremonies of Craft Masonry as approved, sanctioned and confirmed by the United Grand Lodge of England on 5th June, 1816, ‘The usages and customs among Freemasons have ever borne a near affinity to those of the ancient Egyptians’.19 Most notably, both Stoker’s brother Thornley and Henry Irving were Masons;20 indeed Pick and Protherough declare of Irving that ‘Throughout his professional life he was a regular, and generous, supporter of Masonic charities and during his profitable London seasons he ran the Beefsteak Room backstage at the Lyceum as a neo-masonic pressure group.’21 Pick and Protherough further suggest that in the late 1880s senior Masons were to be burdened with a dreadful new responsibility, keeping secret what they knew (and suspected) about the ‘Jack the Ripper’ murders in East London.

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That onerous task … bore heavily in different ways upon both Irving and his business manager Stoker, and was the main cause of the coolness of their later relationship, and of the omissions and strange formality in Stoker’s later account of the actor’s life.22 This is, however, speculation. The Lair of the White Worm is a text that might well yield to the pressure of a Masonic reading. Its Peak District setting, for instance, might well be related to Solomon’s Temple, near Buxton, originally constructed in 1840 by Solomon Mycock, apparently to create work for the unemployed, and rebuilt in 1896. Although the name Solomon came from the builder, an interest in Solomon’s Temple was a crucial element of Masonry, and the name could not fail to atttract the attention of any Mason. As with so many other aspects of The Lair of the White Worm, it is not easy to pinpoint the exact location which Stoker envisaged for events. Richard Salton catches the train at Stafford (WW: 8), which seems to place us in Staffordshire rather than Derbyshire, but he tells Adam that ‘My old friend, Sir Nathaniel de Salis, who, like myself, is a freeholder near Castra Regis – his estate, Doom Tower, is over the border of Derbyshire, on the Peak’ (WW: 13); later we hear that ‘Doom Tower was a lofty structure, situated on an eminence high up in the Peak. The top commanded a wide prospect, ranging from the hills above the Ribble to the near side of the Brow, which marked the northern bound of ancient Mercia’ (WW: 116). The description of the scenery certainly seems to suggest a typical Derbyshire Edge: All along the ridge the rock cropped out, bare and bleak, but broken in rough natural castellation. The form of the ridge was a segment of a circle, with the higher points inland to the west. In the centre rose the Castle, on the highest point of all. Between the various rocky excrescences were groups of trees of various sizes and heights, amongst some of which were what, in the early morning light, looked like ruins. These – whatever they were – were of massive grey stone, probably limestone rudely cut – if indeed they were not shaped naturally. (WW: 18) A number of aspects of the novel suggest a specifically Buxton setting: St Ann’s Well, with its permanently bubbling water, seems

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echoed in the frothing hole down which Lady Arabella disappears; Arbella Stuart, who visited Buxton to take the waters, may have suggested the name of Lady Arabella March; and the town’s Roman name was ‘Aquae Arnemetiae’, ‘the Spa of the Goddess of the Grove’, which is not unlike the name of Diana’s Grove. Though I have found no record of Stoker himself visiting Buxton, Ellen Terry in The Story of My Life records acting there, while ‘at the Ball Room, Buxton, on 8th August, 1863, “Mr. Henry Irving, of the Theatres Royal, Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Manchester,” had “the honour to announce” a dramatic reading of “The Lady of Lyons”’,23 and had also played Hamlet there.24 Given this, it may well seem significant that there are some striking similarities between The Lair of the White Worm and a very different, openly Masonic work, Mozart’s The Magic Flute. The suggestion that Mozart might have influenced Stoker is not a new one. In a Guardian article of 2003, John Hooper cites a La Repubblica article of the previous day by Alessandro Barrico as suggesting that Dracula bears striking similarities to Don Giovanni. Specifically, Barrico suggests that in both works the central character is largely absent, constituted principally through others’ descriptions of him; both claim three ‘victims’; ‘Each is faced by enemies who include two pairs of lovers and an elderly man’; both central characters have a quasi-parasitic relationship with servants (Renfield and Leporello); both texts are set largely at night; Don Giovanni wears a cloak while seducing Donna Anna, and she wakes up as if from a dream; and the Commendatore is ‘Un-Dead’.25 To this one might add the parallel between Dracula’s escapes from the Crew of Light and first Don Giovanni’s and then Leporello’s escapes when apparently cornered by the avengers, and the similarity between pleasant but ineffectual Don Ottavio and Harker on the one hand and demonic but dashing Dracula and Don Giovanni on the other, while the fact that Donna Elvira is fatally compromised while Donna Anna is saved is echoed in the respective fates of Lucy and Mina. (Sarah’s greedy and scheming mother in ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’ is also not unlike the Queen of the Night.) There is clear evidence of Stoker’s interest in music. He knew Sir Arthur Sullivan, who composed for Irving (PR I: 111) (and Florence Stoker in particular was very friendly with W. S. Gilbert). Liszt and Gounod both came to the Lyceum, and Stoker asked

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Gounod whom he thought the best composer, to which the answer was ‘Mendelssohn! … But there is only one Mozart!’26 The Stokers, too, seem to have been fond of Mozart, since they went to see The Marriage of Figaro on their first visit to Whitby (PR II: 150). In 1896 the composer and conductor Charles Villiers Stanford asked Irving if he could borrow Stoker to help with mounting an opera, and in 1882 Stanford had got Stoker a ticket for the first London production of Die Meistersinger.27 Indeed, Paul Murray suggests that ‘Dracula’s Guest’ was deleted from the finally published version because it was too obviously influenced by Wagner, ‘the German composer being a favourite of Stoker’s and an influence on Irving’s style of staging at the Lyceum’.28 The Stokers also attended Bayreuth,29 and in The Shoulder of Shasta Hollander, Paderewski, and Sarasate are named, showing Stoker’s awareness of the musical scene (Shasta 83), while in the early notes for Dracula Harker goes to see The Flying Dutchman in Munich before leaving for Vienna via Salzburg.30 Many of the points of similarity between The Lair of the White Worm and The Magic Flute centre on Edgar Caswall, who, like Monostatos in The Magic Flute, is villainous in every possible way, but is nevertheless in a position of power. Sir Nathaniel says to Adam of the Caswalls: Now, it will be well for you to bear in mind the prevailing characteristics of this race. These were well preserved and unchanging; one and all they are all the same: cold, selfish, dominant, reckless of consequences in pursuit of their own will … The pictures and effigies of them all show their adherence to the early Roman type. Their eyes were full; their hair, of raven blackness, grew thick and close and curly. Their figures were massive and typical of strength. (WW: 16) Caswall’s wicked black sidekick, Oolanga, used to be a witch-finder, the rôle made infamous by Rider Haggard’s monstrous Gagool. Adam declares, ‘I was told some of his deeds of cruelty, which are simply sickening. They made me long for an opportunity of sending him back to hell’ (WW: 43). The notable difference from Haggard, however, comes in the fact that Caswall was ‘a pupil and the fellow-worker of Mesmer’ (WW: 56) and has some of his instruments.

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Caswall’s techniques are certainly typical of Mesmeric duels, as described by Alison Winter in her study of the subject. Winter recounts a mesmeric duel at a respectable Victorian tea party in November 1844: The late-arriving guest, a lady of renowned intelligence and wit and wife of one of the greatest sages of her generation, could not let this pass uncontested. She challenged him to a mesmeric duel: could he prove his power over her? He took her hand in his and darted the other toward it as if flicking water from his fingers. A few uneventful moments passed. Suddenly she felt a current move from her hand into her body, an electric feeling such as she had once experienced when she touched a galvanic ball at a popular science demonstration. But even as the shock ran through her, she gave no outward sign of it. After a few more moments, the mesmerist relinquished her hand in disgust, unaware of the effect he had had. For her, the power of self-control she had exercised was the decisive phenomenon in the mesmeric experiment, In a letter to her uncle, she concluded that her power over herself proved her ‘moral and intellectual superiority’ over her ill-spoken, bestial, and impudent rival.31 The events that Winter describes are strikingly similar to those in Stoker’s novel when Mimi ‘stepped forward towards Caswall, and with a bold sweep of her arm seemed to drive some strange force towards him. Again and again was the gesture repeated, the man falling back from her at each movement’ (WW: 60). It might, too, be worthy of note that a number of those on whom the pioneering mesmerist John Elliotson experimented were Irish immigrants,32 something which might have attracted the attention of the Irish Stoker, and that Elizabeth O’Key, the famous early mesmeric subject, seems to have been an Irvingite,33 that is a follower of the Scottish preacher Edward Irving, whom Henry Irving admired (his parents were devout Methodists) and who had been an influence on his choice of stage name34 (and there was in any case a strong association between mesmerism and theatre).35 Moreover, George du Maurier, the author of the classic study of mesmerism, Trilby, who was a friend of Irving (PR I: 323), drew a Punch cartoon of the

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Stokers called ‘A Filial Reproof’, and Barbara Belford suggests Trilby as an influence on Dracula.36 It is Mesmer who provides the link between The Lair of the White Worm and The Magic Flute. The Mozarts were friendly with the Mesmer family and it was hearing Mesmer play the glass harmonica that introduced Mozart to the instrument.37 Indeed, as Eric Blom notes, Mesmer commissioned Bastien et Bastienne, an opera which prefigures The Magic Flute and its twin-named Papageno and Papagena and Tamino and Pamina. Blom observes that this ‘choice [is] not without a touch of humour, seeing that its subject is the performance of a pretended feat of magic by the mere application of common sense and knowledge of human nature. Was Mesmer indulging in a little joke at his own risk?’.38 Finally, in Cosí Fan Tutte Despina, when disguised as a doctor, names Dr Mesmer as her professor. Stoker himself discussed Mesmer at length in Famous Impostors, declaring that ‘Although Frederic-Antoine Mesmer made an astonishing discovery which, having been tested and employed in therapeutics for a century, is accepted as a contribution to science, he is included in the list of impostors because, however sound his theory was, he used it in the manner or surrounded with the atmosphere of imposture’ (FI: 95), and referring to Mesmer as founding ‘a sort of Freemasonry, under a Grand Master and Chiefs of the Order’ (FI: 102). Irving was independently interested in Mesmerism and other similar phenomena: In 1864, the Davenport Brothers became the first successful stage mediums. Sailing from America to England in 1865, they convinced audiences of their supernatural powers … In a moment of what has been termed extreme stupidity, their agent offered one hundred pounds to any person who could duplicate their feats … on the afternoon of February 25th, 1865, Irving appeared in the Library Hall of the Manchester Athenaeum to perform a display of ‘preternatural philosophy’ before 500 invited guests.39 Finally, Paul Murray notes that Dr William Stoker, who appears to have been related to Bram Stoker, ‘was professionally involved with a Dr William Stokes,

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another doctor who was a scion of a distinguished Irish family. In 1849–50, Stokes read a paper on mesmerism to the College of Physicians in Dublin in which he highlighted the similarity of certain features of mesmerism to the epidemics of nervous diseases prevalent in Europe in the Middle Ages.40 There are, then, clear links between Stoker and Mozart, and I think Stoker’s text, like Mozart’s, is grounded in a theory of secret power and knowledge, so that its meanings need to be excavated from beneath its rather puzzling surface. There are a number of similarities between The Lair of the White Worm and The Magic Flute. In The Lair of the White Worm, as we have seen, vast quantities of birds unexpectedly start arriving (WW: 60–1), for reasons that are never explained. Already familiar from Stoker’s Under the Sunset, the bird motif also seems to recall Mozart’s Papageno, not least since as Nicholas Till points out, ‘Die Zauberflöte is littered with Rosicrucian and esoteric Christian symbolism. The title engraving for the first libretto of the opera, printed by Mozart’s lodge brother Ignaz Alberti in 1791, shows a Hermes column and an ibis – the sacred bird of Hermes or Mercury: the symbols of Hermeticism’.41 It is also at the point when the birds are introduced that the narrative suddenly lurches from Adam’s point of view to Caswall’s, something which may recall the analogously vertiginous transition in The Magic Flute, involving a complete reversal of polarities in the way we are invited to view Sarastro and the Queen of the Night, which is so unprepared for that it used to be maintained (and still sometimes is) that, disturbed by the success of Joachim Perinet’s and Wenzel Müller’s Singspiel ‘Kaspar der Fagottist,’ which superficially tells the same tale, Schikaneder and Mozart hastily decided to reverse the values and have an evil Queen and a good High Priest who ‘rescued’ her daughter.42 In addition to this, The Magic Flute features the averted rape by a black man of a white woman, prefiguring Oolanga’s passion for Lady Arabella (and Oolanga is a character so extraneous to the logic of the narrative that he might well seem to exist solely for the effect of importing a black man into the story); a character called Pamina,

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whose name might be seen as similar to both Mimi’s and that of Dracula’s Mina; and three mysterious women, again a motif found in Dracula. There are also other similarities. Both The Lair of the White Worm and The Magic Flute feature prominently the idea of having to rid the land of a snake; both contain a sinister woman (and it is notable that both the Queen of the Night and Lady Arabella are widows, who have found their circumstances much diminished by the deaths of their husbands). Both are set partly in a mysterious castle (those of Edgar Caswall and Sarastro respectively) in which trials take place, and in both, bad women eventually sink down to hell, Lady Arabella in the case of The Lair of the White Worm and the Three Ladies in The Magic Flute. There is a typically Stokerian twist here in the pointed inversion of the plot of Dracula, in which it is the man who is punished and forced into hell, something which is of a piece with the fact that both The Lair of the White Worm and The Magic Flute are rabidly misogynist. Sarastro sings that Ein Mann muss eure Herze leiten, Denn ohne ihn pflegt jedes Weib Aus ihrem Wirkungskreis zu schreiten (A man must guide your hearts, For without him all women tend To step outside their own sphere of activity.) And the Two Speakers opine that Bewahret euch vor Weibertücken, Dies ist des Bundes erste Pflicht (Beware of womanly wiles; That is the brotherhood’s first duty)43 Although it will always remain a radically incoherent text, then, The Lair of the White Worm may in some respects yield to the pressure of a Masonically oriented reading. Freemasonry might well have appealed to Stoker because it was overarching, offering a bridge between Protestants and Catholics in the way that Alison Milbank sees Stoker himself as trying to do in Dracula.44 (It might also be worth noting that for much of his career

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Irving also played notably sympathetic Shylocks, in a further minimisation of religious difference.)45 Although a Protestant himself, Stoker was not above poking fun at his religion and its connotations, as in The Snake’s Pass where the comical Andy Sullivan thinks ‘a philosopher’ might be a new sort of Protestant – ‘I thought maybe they can believe even less nor the ould wans’ [SP: 183]) – and Stoker clearly distances himself from the prejudice with which Aunt Janet in The Lady of the Shroud recounts that in her vision of Rupert’s wedding she saw ‘the heathen candles that stood on the table wi’ the Book’ (Shroud: 89). Freemasonry was also socially respectable – the Prince of Wales, who dined at the Beefsteak Club and of whom Stoker speaks admiringly in The Lady of the Shroud, was Grand Master of the United Grand Lodge of England during the period from 1874 to 1901, and other prominent Masons known to Stoker included President McKinley and Oscar Wilde – and many of its rituals certainly seem to be echoed in Stoker’s works, not least that in which the initiate is invited to view his worst enemy in a mirror. Perhaps most important of all, though, are the resonances of the Masonic motto of V.I.T.R.I.O.L – Visitez l’intérieur de la terre. For Stoker too, this is the fundamental meaning of the cave: it is in the inner landscape of the earth that the inner contours of the mind can be seen at their sharpest and clearest. Freemasonry, like the use of the cave motif, thus affords Stoker a way of probing the truths of the human spirit, and offers a valuable hermeneutic for reading his work.

Conclusion

Bram Stoker died on 20 April 1912. He could not count his life a financial success: he had to beg funds from the Royal Literary Fund in 1911, and Florence was to spend the rest of her life struggling against infringements of the copyright of Dracula in order to preserve what meagre royalties she obtained from it. The Lyceum no longer existed, and when I visited the present building in the summer of 2004 the doorman had never heard of Bram Stoker (and only barely of Henry Irving). Indeed, the principal physical monument to Stoker’s long years of residence in England is the rather dubious ‘Dracula Experience’ in Whitby, and an interactive panel in the Abbey’s new visitor centre at which one can question ‘Stoker’ on video. At least the Whitby Abbey display is wellinformed, which is more than one can say for the various Dracula tours to Transylvania, a place which Stoker never visited. Nor are Stoker’s books remembered in the ways he would probably have wished. If people have heard of him at all, they have almost certainly done so as a horror writer. Stoker’s interests are, however, far more diverse than this. Throughout his oeuvre, he returns regularly to the idea of settlements and union, both personal – in the form of the marriages which so often conclude his narratives – and political. Alan Johnson notes that The concept of internationalism, a harmony between nations, is suggested at the end of The Shoulder of Shasta by the harmony achieved by Reginald, Esse, and Dick. Like the idea of a scheme of nature, the concept of internationalism has a root in Stoker’s 149

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own past experience and, as it is dramatized in The Shoulder of Shasta, it sheds interesting light on the ending of Dracula, with its final tableau of the Dutch Dr Van Helsing, the English Seward, Holmwood, and Jonathan and Mina Harker, and their son Quincey, who has been named after the deceased American, Quincey Morris.1 Stoker was also interested in transcending the politicised divide between Protestantism and Catholicism which was proving so destructive to Ireland, and he would have found in Freemasonry an organisation that rose above religious schism. For all this stress on union, however, what really energises the best of his fiction is that this drive to union is held so strongly in tension with a darkly Gothic obsession with the double which, a century after his death, has lost none of its power to disturb.

Notes Introduction: Stoker’s Book 1

2

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Like so much else in Stoker’s life, even this figure is not easy to calculate: does one, for instance, include his first published work, The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland? Stoker’s own application to the Royal Literary Fund, sent in February 1911 before he had begun work on The Lair of the White Worm, said he had written 15 books (David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996], p. 6). Most critical works refer to 18 books. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 81. Jeffrey Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 143–71, p. 150, also remarks on similarities between Jewel and Dracula. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, pp. 155 and 167. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, pp. 34–5. Cannon Schmitt, ‘Mother Dracula: Orientalism, Degeneration, and Anglo-Irish National Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle’, Bucknell Review 38.1 (1994), pp. 25–43, pp. 27 and 30. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 205. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, pp. 219 and 221. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 43. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 42. Belford, Bram Stoker, introduction, p. x. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 5. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 1. Michael Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, Journal X 2.1 (1997), pp. 66–111, p. 69. Jennifer L. Fleissner, ‘Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 22.3 (2000), pp. 417–55, p. 417. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 3. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 21. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 147. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 211. 151

152 Notes

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45

46

Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 22. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 5. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. xiii. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. xiv. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 7. Bram Stoker, Dracula: or the Undead. A play in prologue and five acts, ed. Sylvia Starshine (Nottingham: Pumpkin Books, 1997), introduction, p. xii. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 265. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 4. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 152. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 161. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 143. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 15. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 93. Bram Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, in Dracula, ed. Glennis Byron (Ontario: Broadview Press, 1998), p. 434. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, pp. 146–7. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 165. Elinor Glyn, Three Weeks [1907] (London: Gerald Duckworth, 1974), p. 237. Alison Case, ‘Tasting the Original Apple: Gender and the Struggle for Narrative Authority in Dracula’, Narrative 1.3 (1993), pp. 223–43, p. 224. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 74. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 112. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 167. See William Hughes, ‘“To build together a new nation”: Colonising Europe in Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud’, Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003), pp. 32–46, p. 42. Lucy Jago, The Northern Lights (London: Penguin, 2002), p. 68. Jago, The Northern Lights, pp. 90–1. John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA 103.2 (1988), pp. 139–49, p. 139. On Stoker’s general interest in physiognomy, including his own, see Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 16. Similarly, in The Mystery of the Sea, Don Bernardino is ‘high-bred looking’ (Mystery 155), Marjory has ‘resolution in her mouth and nostrils’ (Mystery 252), and appearance proves a reliable guide to the character of ‘a huge coal-black negro, hideous, and of repulsive aspect’ (Mystery 253). Gary Day, ‘The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire’, in Rereading Victorian Fiction, edited by Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 81–95, pp. 84 and 85.

Notes 153

47 48 49 50

51 52

53 54

55 56 57

58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, pp. 93 and 100–1. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 146. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 230. Andrew Prescott, ‘Brother Irving: Sir Henry Irving and Freemasonry’, First Knight. Online: http://www.theirvingsociety.org.uk/brother_irving.htm Fleissner, ‘Dictation Anxiety’, p. 434. William Hughes, ‘The Madness of King Laugh: Hysteria, Popular Medicine and Masculinity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Medical Fictions, ed. Nickianne Moody and Julia Hallam (Liverpool: Liverpool John Moores Press, 1998), pp. 226–35. See, for instance, Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon & London, 2005), pp. 98–9. Katharine Cockin notes that ‘Stoker’s biographers … state unequivocally that Ellen Terry’s daughter took part. However, the play programme ambiguously omits first names and 1896 appears to be the year that Craig took up Edith as her stage name in place of Ailsa to differentiate herself from another actor of the same name’ (Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947): Dramatic Lives [London: Cassell, 1998], p. 48). Cockin, Edith Craig (1869–1947), pp. 55 and 60. Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 2 vols, vol. II, p. 348. See Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (London: The Fireside Press, 1962), p. 63. Suggestively, Terry herself blamed the sins of Macbeth (a character whom Stoker’s most recent biographer sees as significantly influencing his conception of Dracula) on his mother (Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 209). On Stoker’s friendship with Labouchere, see Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire’, p. 76. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, pp. 14 and 19. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 38. Day, ‘The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire’, pp. 90 and 91. Case, ‘Tasting the Original Apple’, p. 223. Fleissner, ‘Dictation Anxiety’, p. 417. Rebecca A. Pope, ‘Writing and Biting in Dracula’, Literature, Interpretation, Theory 1 (1990), pp. 199–216, p. 199. For a discussion of Stoker’s references to Milton, see Lisa Hopkins, Giants of the Past (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004).

Chapter 1 1 2

Early life in Stoker’s fiction

Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 15. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 13.

154 Notes

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8 9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22

23

Carol A. Senf, ‘The Lady of the Shroud: Stoker’s Successor to Dracula’, Essays in Arts and Sciences 19 (1990), pp. 82–96, p. 91. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 296. See Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 69. See Roger Luckhurst, ed., Late Victorian Gothic Tales (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), introduction, p. xxvii. Sandra M. Gilbert, ‘Rider Haggard’s Heart of Darkness’, in Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, ed. Lyn Pykett (London: Longman Addison Wesley, 1996), pp. 39–46, p. 44. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker, p. 37. Talia Schaffer, ‘“A Wilde Desire Took Me”: The Homoerotic History of Dracula’, ELH 61 (1994), pp. 381–425. It may also have been pertinent for Stoker’s attitudes that Irving was rejected by both his mother and his wife, because of his choice of profession (see Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World [London: Hambledon and London, 2005], p. 151). Andrew Smith, ‘Love, Freud, and the Female Gothic: Bram Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars’, Gothic Studies 6.1 (2004), pp. 80–9, p. 81. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 89. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 111. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 61. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 227-8. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 152. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), p. 43. Carol A. Senf, ‘“Dracula”: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman’, Victorian Studies 26.1 (1982), pp. 33–49, p. 41. Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1978), p. 20. On the importance of questions of knowledge in the novel, see also Alison Case, ‘Tasting the Original Apple: Gender and the Struggle for Narrative Authority in Dracula’, Narrative (1993), pp. 223–43. Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula (London: Constable, 1997), p. 171. J. Sheridan Le Fanu, ‘Carmilla’ [1871], reprinted in Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories, ed. Pam Keesey (Pittsburgh: Cleis, 1993), pp. 36 and 54. Alexandra Warwick discusses the importance of mother-figures in the novella (‘Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s’, in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 202–20, p. 206. Raymond McNally takes the feminisation of Dracula still further by arguing that Stoker based part of the character on the infamous

Notes 155

24

25

26 27

28 29

30

31

Elisabeth Bathory (Dracula Was a Woman [New York: McGraw-Hill, 1983]). Some of the cruelties which he describes as perpetrated by her do have analogues in Stoker, such as the branding of the image of a coin into flesh, which may be thought to resemble the effect of the host on Mina, and the use of a cage resembling the Iron Maiden (McNally, pp. 46–7). The Bathory story also features a cross-dressing woman called ‘Stefan’ (p. 50), and McNally further links vampirism and mothering by figuring the vampire’s victims, on whom he depends for his nourishment, as surrogate mothers to him (p. 96). See also Marie Mulvey Roberts, ‘Dracula and the Doctors: Bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo and the New Woman’, in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 78–95, for the argument that Dracula is a type of the menstruating woman (p. 80). For the original name of the ship, see Joseph S. Bierman, ‘A Crucial Stage in the Writing of Dracula’, in Bram Stoker, ed. Hughes and Smith, pp. 151-–71, pp. 154–5. For comment on this passage, see for instance Anne Cranny-Francis, ‘Sexual Politics and Political Repression in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan Doyle, ed. Clive Bloom, Brian Docherty, Jane Gibb and Keith Shand (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), pp. 64–79, p. 66. Alan P. Johnson, ‘“Dual Life”: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 27 (1984), pp. 20–39, pp. 27–31. Johnson, ‘“Dual Life”’, p. 30; see also George Stade, ‘Dracula’s Women, and Why Men Love to Hate them’, in The Psychology of Men: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives, ed. Gerald I. Fogel, Frederick M. Lane and Robert S. Liebert (New York: Basic Books, 1986), pp. 25–48. Johnson, ‘“Dual Life”’, p. 31. Christopher Craft, ‘“Kiss Me With Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Representations 8 (Fall,1984), pp. 107–33. On Dracula himself as parodic mother, see also Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, pp. 70–1. It may seem suggestive that the wafer which scars Mina’s forehead after she has been tainted by this episode recurs in Famous Impostors, as the sign of the writer Croly, who would stick a wafer on his forehead to show that he was thinking (FI 115), especially since Mina is the transcriber of the group. The passage occurs in Stoker’s account of the Wandering Jew, who is himself described in ways reminiscent of Dracula, since he carries a dreadful disease wherever he goes and spreads it amongst those he encounters (FI 116). Another of the impostors treated in this book rejoices in the resonant name of ‘Mother Damnable’. Quoted in Sally Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers: Ideologies of Bourgeois Motherhood in the Mid-Victorian Era’, in Rewriting the Victorians: Theory, History and the Politics of Gender, ed. Linda M. Shires (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 31–51, p. 42.

156 Notes

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36 37 38

39 40 41

42 43

44 45 46

47

Haining and Tremayne, The Un-Dead, p. 172. Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers’, p. 43. Jill L. Matus, Unstable Bodies: Victorian Representations of Sexuality and Maternity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), p. 160. Craft, ‘“Kiss Me With Those Red Lips”’, p. 181. See also R. J. Dingley, ‘Count Dracula and the Martians’, in The Victorian Fantasists: Essays on Culture, Society and Belief in the Mythopoeic Fiction of the Victorian Age, edited by Kath Filmer (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 13–24, pp. 21–2. See Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers’, p. 42. Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman’, p. 38; she bases this on Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 214. Matthew C. Brennan, ‘Repression, Knowledge, and Saving Souls: The Role of the “New Woman” in Stoker’s Dracula and Murnau’s Nosferatu’, Studies in the Humanities 19:1 (June, 1992), pp. 1–10, p. 4. Senf, ‘Dracula’, p. 35. Grant Allen, The Woman Who Did (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 59, 140, and 131. Nicholas Daly, ‘Irish Roots: Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass and the Imaginary Spaces of Empire’, Literature and History 4.2 (1995), pp. 42–70, p. 52. Warwick, ‘Vampires and the Empire’, p. 215. See Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers’, pp. 37–8; Matus also offers some dramatic accounts of the effect of maternal emotion on milk, and subsequently on the infant (Unstable Bodies, p. 161). Shuttleworth, ‘Demonic Mothers’, p. 41. William Shakespeare, King Lear, edited by Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), V.III.171–2. Jeffrey L. Spear, ‘Gender and Sexual Dis-Ease in Dracula’, in Virginal Sexuality and Textuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Lloyd Davis (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), pp. 179–92, p. 189. Phyllis Roth, ‘Suddenly Sexual Women in Stoker’s Dracula’, Literature and Psychology 27 (1977), pp. 113–21, p. 123.

Chapter 2 1

2 3 4 5

At the theatre

Jeffrey Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 143–71, p. 144. On Stoker’s career as a clerk, see W. N. Osborough, ‘The Dublin Castle Career (1866–78) of Bram Stoker’, Gothic Studies 1.2 (1999), pp. 222–40. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 178. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 153. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 106.

Notes 157

6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13

14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 48. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 218. Richard Marsh, The Beetle, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004), introduction, p. 11. All further quotations from The Beetle will be taken from this edition and subsequent references will be given in the text. Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, p. 145. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 106. Stephanie Moss, ‘Bram Stoker and the London Stage’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), pp. 124–32, p. 128. John Pick and Robert Protherough, ‘The Ripper and the Lyceum: The Significance of Irving’s Freemasonry’. Online: http://www.theirvingsociety.org.uk/ripper_and_the_lyceum.htm Accessed 9.11.04 This anecdote is often retold, but see, for instance, Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 80. John Allen Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula’, PMLA 103.2 (1988), pp. 139–49, p. 141. On Irving’s career as Hamlet, see Alan Hughes, Henry Irving, Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 27 ff. Philip Holden, ‘Castle, Coffin, Stomach: Dracula and the Banality of the Occult’, Victorian Literature and Culture 21.2 (2001), pp. 469–85, p. 476. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins (London: Methuen, 1982), IV.v.156–7. Michael Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, Journal X 2.1 (1997), p. 76. Virginia Mason Vaughan, Othello: A Contextual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 154. For a more substantial discussion of this, see Lisa Hopkins, Giants of the Past (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2004). Vaughan, Othello, p. 156. Charles Hiatt, Ellen Terry and her Impersonations: An Appreciation (London: George Bell & Sons, 1908), p. 10. Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 70. Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 44. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 270. Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, pp. 66–111, p. 68. Stevenson, ‘A Vampire in the Mirror’, p. 147. Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 88, 89, 96, 98, and 117. Alan P. Johnson, ‘“Dual Life”: The Status of Women in Stoker’s Dracula’, Tennessee Studies in Literature 27 (1984), pp. 20–39, p. 21. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), p. 95.

158 Notes

29 30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38

39

40 41

Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 102. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 101. William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1972), III.iv.21. All further quotations from the play will be taken from this edition and reference will be given in the text. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 209, 202, and 295. Hiatt, Ellen Terry and her Impersonations, pp. 176–7. See also Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 134–5. Bram Stoker, Dracula: or the Undead. A play in prologue and five acts, ed. Sylvia Starshine (Nottingham: Pumpkin Books, 1997), p. xxxiv. Starshine, introduction to Dracula: or the Undead, pp. xii–xiii. For a survey of adaptations of Dracula, see Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, pp. 166–7. Geoffrey Kendal with Clare Colvin, The Shakespeare Wallah [1986] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), pp. 48–9. Jonathan Bignell, ‘A Taste of the Gothic: Film and Television Versions of Dracula’, in The Classic Novel from Page to Screen, ed. Robert Giddings and Erica Sheen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 114–30, p. 117. Kenneth Jurkiewicz, ‘Francis Coppola’s Secret Gardens: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Auteur as Decadent Visionary’, in Visions of the Fantastic, ed. Allienne R. Becker (London: Greenwood Press, 1996), pp. 167–72, p. 170. Kim Newman, ‘Coppola’s Dracula’, in The Mammoth Book of Dracula, ed. Stephen Jones (London: Robinson, 1997), pp. 109–55, p. 109. See Lisa Hopkins, Screening the Gothic (Texas: University of Texas Press, 2005).

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

London with its teeming millions

Andrew Smith, ‘Demonising the Americans: Bram Stoker’s Postcolonial Gothic’, Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003), pp. 20–31, p. 22 See, for instance, L. Perry Curtis, jr., Apes and Angels: The Irishmen in Victorian Caricature (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1971). Joseph Valente, Dracula’s Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), pp. 68 and 75. Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Fiend of the Cooperage’, in Great Tales (Sydney: The Book Company, 1996), p. 265. Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), p. 62. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 36. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 12. Most notably in Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracula and Vampires (London: Robson Books, 1995).

Notes 159

9 10 11

12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31

32

Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 25. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 52. Cannon Schmitt, ‘Mother Dracula: Orientalism, Degeneration, and Anglo-Irish National Subjectivity at the Fin de Siècle’, Bucknell Review 38.1 (1994), pp. 25–43, pp. 34 and 37. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, pp. 51–2. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, pp. 58–9, 66 and 56. Michael Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire: Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, Journal X 2.1 (1997), pp. 66–111, pp. 67, 68 and 84. Gary Day, ‘The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire’, in Rereading Victorian Fiction, ed Alice Jenkins and Juliet John (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 81–95, p. 92. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 242. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 5. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 33. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 38. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 250. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 194. Valente, Dracula’s Crypt, p. 38. Daniel Farson cites Noel’s daughter as saying that he disliked Irving for monopolising his father, and always avoided the name for that reason (Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 215). Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 79. See W. N. Osborough, ‘The Dublin Castle Career (1866-78) of Bram Stoker’, Gothic Studies 1.2 (1999), pp. 222–40, p. 231. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, pp. 14, 48, and 148. David Glover, ‘“Our enemy is not merely spiritual”: Degeneration and Modernity in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Victorian Literature and Culture 22 (1994), pp. 249–65, p. 251. On the legal and procedural derelictions and improprieties of the vampire hunters, see also Valdez Moses, ‘The Irish Vampire’, p. 96. Day, ‘The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire’, pp. 84 and 90. Michael Kline, ‘The Vampire as Pathogen: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, Philological Papers 42/3 (1997/8), pp. 36–44, p. 39. Christopher Frayling, Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), p. 306. Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm: Bram Stoker’s Commentary on Victorian Science’, Gothic Studies 2:2 (August, 2000), p. 223. It is not possible to say when exactly the book appeared. Dracula is usually said to have been published on 30 May 1897, but the precise date is uncertain, and the best that can be said is that it was at the end of May.

160 Notes

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46 47 48 49 50

See Bram Stoker, Dracula: or the Undead. A play in prologue and five acts, ed. Sylvia Starshine (Nottingham: Pumpkin Books, 1997), p. xxxvi. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, pp. 151 and 165. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 272 and 268. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 141. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 235. Bram Stoker, The Shoulder of Shasta [1895], ed. Alan Johnson (Westcliffon-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2000), introduction, p. 16. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 274–5. Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 363–4. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 308. Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 71. Stoker, Dracula, ed. Auerbach and Skal, pp. 364, 365 and 366. Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals, pp. 108–9. See: http://www.obitcentral.com/obitsearch/obits/tn/tn-hamblen16.htm Accessed 30.9.05. Gill Davies, ‘London in Dracula; Dracula in London’, London Journal 29 (March, 2004). Online: http://homepages.gold.ac.uk/london-journal/ march2004/davies.html, p. 4 Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 13. Senf, ‘Dracula and The Lair of the White Worm’, p. 218. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 178. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 160. Gary Day, ‘The State of Dracula: Bureaucracy and the Vampire’, p. 92.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

On holiday

Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), pp. 69 and 220. Jean Lorrain, ‘Magic Lantern’, in Late Victorian Gothic Tales, ed. Roger Luckhurst (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 171–6, p. 174. Andrew Smith, ‘Demonising the Americans: Bram Stoker’s Postcolonial Gothic’, Gothic Studies 5.2 (2003), pp. 20–31, pp. 21, 24, and 26–7. Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker (London: Michael Joseph, 1975), p. 89. See Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 233. David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 13. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 28. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 15 and 195–6. Colin Waters, Whitby and the Dracula Connection (Whitby: Whitby Press, n.d.), p. 1. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 204.

Notes 161

11 12 13 14

15 16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

24 25

26 27

28 29 30

Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 221–2. Tim Radford, ‘Found in Hull, Mummy of all Monsters’, The Guardian 27 December 2002, p. 9. Laurence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and his World (London: Macmillan, 1951), p. 278. Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea: Ireland and the Spanish-Cuban-American War’, Irish Studies Review 6.2 (1998), pp. 131–8, p. 131. Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea’, p. 133. Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea’, p. 131. Howard G. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do: The Genesis of Mark Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant”’, Studies in American Humor 2.3 (January 1976), pp. 182–95, p. 185. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do’, p. 183. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do’, p. 184. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do’, p. 187. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do’, p. 188. Baetzhold, ‘Of Detectives and their Derring-Do’, p. 188. Stoker’s friendship with Twain is well documented, but see particularly Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 282–3; Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 135; and Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (London: William Heinemann, 1906), vol. 2, p. 166. The novel was handed in to the publishers in May 1897, but even then Stoker continued to work on and rewrite it. For a full discussion of the novel and of the real-life events which it represents, see Ruth Harris, Lourdes: Body and Spirit in the Secular Age (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 199l), pp. 331–42. Lourdes is also recommended as the possible provider of a cure in H. G. Wells’s 1895 story ‘Pollock and the Porroh Man’ (H.G. Wells: The Red Room and Other Stories, ed. John Hammond [London: Phoenix, 1998], p.168). Gérard Genette, Paratexts. Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 410. The cure of Justin Bouhohorts is described by Lasserre (Henri Lasserre, Our Lady of Lourdes, trans. Rev. F. Ignatius Sisk [London: Burns & Oates, n.d.], p. 134. All my quotations from Lasserre will be taken from this translation; however, as Stephanie Moss notes, ‘[t]hat Stoker was able to read French is indicated by the inclusion in his list of sources of L. F. Alfred Maury’s text on the supernatural that was only available in French’ (Stephanie Moss, ‘Bram Stoker and the Society for Psychical Research’, in Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, ed. Elizabeth Miller [Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 1998], pp. 82–92, p. 84). Félix Regnault, ‘De l’hypnotisme dans la genèse des miracles’, Revue de l’hypnotisme 8 (1894), pp. 270–7, pp. 270 and 271. Moss, ‘Bram Stoker and the Society for Psychical Research’. Harris, Lourdes, p. 175.

162 Notes

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32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45

46 47 48

Alison Milbank, ‘“Powers Old and New”: Stoker’s Alliances with AngloIrish Gothic’, in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, pp.12–28, p. 22. See Harris, Lourdes, p. 84. Harris, Lourdes, p. 180. Lasserre, Our Lady of Lourdes, Preface, p. xiv. Our Lady of Lourdes, p. 58. Pericles Lewis, ‘Dracula and the Epistemology of the Victorian Gothic Novel’, in Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow, ed. Elizabeth Miller (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 1998), pp. 71–81, p. 72. Harris, Lourdes, pp. 269, 276–7, 279 and 321. Lasserre, Our Lady of Lourdes, p. 1. Emile Zola, Lourdes (Paris: Bibliothèque-Charpentier, 1894), p. 350. All further quotations from the novel will be taken from this edition and references will be given in the text. Translations are my own. Lasserre, Our Lady of Lourdes, pp. 51 and 163. Lasserre, Our Lady of Lourdes, p. 48. Zola, Lourdes, p. 588. Zola, Lourdes, pp. 85 and 406. Zola, Lourdes, p. 598. For discussion of Dracula in terms of menstruation, see Marie MulveyRoberts, ‘Dracula and the Doctors: Bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo and the New Woman’, in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, ed. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now palgrave Macmillan, 1998), pp. 78–95. Zola, Lourdes p. 332. Zola, Lourdes, p. 107. Harris, Lourdes, p. 18.

Chapter 5 1 2 3

4 5

6

The cave

David Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 105. Bram Stoker, The Mystery of the Sea [1902] (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), introduction, p. xiii. On the Stoker hero, see, for instance, Jeffrey Richards, ‘Gender, Race and Sexuality in Bram Stoker’s Other Novels’, in Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature, ed. Christopher Parker (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 142–71, pp. 146–7. Ann Radcliffe, The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne [1789] (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1994), p. 1. In Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, Stoker noted this and that her portrait was in the Examination Hall, ‘in the gallery of which there is a fine old organ said to have been taken from one of the galleons of the Armada wrecked on the Irish coast’. (Bram Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving [London: William Heinemann, 1906], vol. 1, p. 43.) See Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 90.

Notes 163

7 8

9

10

11 12 13

14

15

16 17 18

19

20

For a rather different reading of the novel’s interest in hollow spaces, see Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 105. On the subversiveness of Marjory’s cross-dressing, see Catherine Spooner, Fashioning Gothic Bodies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), p. 107. For a general discussion of readings of Stoker’s work in terms of sexual frustration, see, for instance, Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne, The Un-Dead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and Dracula (London: Constable, 1997), pp. 182–3. Paul Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula: A Life of Bram Stoker (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), p. 267. Barbara Belford, however, is sceptical of the syphilis theory (Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996], pp. 320–1, and Stoker’s sister-in-law attributed what she saw as his ‘dotty’ behaviour to Bright’s Disease (Daniel Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula: A Biography of Bram Stoker [London: Michael Joseph, 1975], p. 232). Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 220. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 220. John Pick and Robert Protherough write that ‘Stoker was introduced to Freemasonry in Dublin, but his Masonic interests seem to have declined when he took up his post at the Lyceum. The Library of Freemasonry in London, after extensive searches, has been unable to uncover any evidence of Stoker taking an active part in London’s Masonic life’ (John Pick and Robert Protherough, ‘The Ripper and the Lyceum: The Significance of Irving’s Freemasonry’. Online: http://www.theirvingsociety.org.uk/ripper_and_the_lyceum.htmAccessed 9.11.04). See Katharine Cockin, Edith Craig (1869-1947): Dramatic Lives (London: Cassell, 1998), pp. 45–6, on Pamela Colman-Smith’s and Edith Craig’s interest in the figure of the Egyptian snake goddess. They may have jointly devised the costume of the snake-woman Nicandra, and Pamela Colman Smith sometimes depicted both herself and Edith Craig with tails. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 266. On the suggestion of links between Dracula and the Tarot, see Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula, pp. 213–15; on Stoker’s friendships with members of the Golden Dawn, see p. 213. Daniel Farson suggests that Stoker was a member of the splinter group ‘Alpha et Omega’, run by the author J. W. Brodie-Innes (Farson, The Man Who Wrote Dracula, p. 207). Glover, Vampires, Mummies, and Liberals, p. 4. Pick and Protherough, ‘The Ripper and the Lyceum’. Andrew Prescott, ‘Brother Irving: Sir Henry Irving and Freemasonry’, First Knight. Online: http://www.theirvingsociety.org.uk/brother_irving.htm The Perfect Ceremonies of Craft Masonry as approved, sanctioned and confirmed by the United Grand Lodge of England on 5th June, 1816 (London: A. Lewis, 1913), p. 81. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 174, notes Thornley Stoker’s membership; Irving’s is well established.

164 Notes

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45

Pick and Protherough, ‘The Ripper and the Lyceum’. Pick and Protherough, ‘The Ripper and the Lyceum’. Austin Brereton, The Life of Henry Irving (London: Longmans, Green, 1908), 2 vols, vol. 1, p. 50. Jeffrey Richards, Sir Henry Irving: A Victorian Actor and his World (London: Hambledon and London, 2005), pp. 122 and 365. John Hooper, ‘Brothers under the skin: Did Dracula don Giovanni’s cloak?’, The Guardian, Monday 7 July 2003, p. 12. (Also available online at http://www.cesnur.org/2003/dracula_09.htm Accessed 19.10.04.) Stoker, Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, vol. 2, p. 150. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, pp. 94–5. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 170. Belford, Bram Stoker, p. 220. Christopher Frayling, ‘The Genesis of Dracula’, in Vampyres: Lord Byron to Count Dracula (London: Faber & Faber, 1991), pp. 295–347, p. 314. Alison Winter, Mesmerized in Victorian Britain (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 1. Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 60–1. Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 84–5. See article on Irving in the Encyclopaedia Britannica: online, http:// search.eb.com/shakespeare/micro/294/97.html Last accessed 15.9.04. Winter, Mesmerized, pp. 86–7. Belford, Bram Stoker, pp. 227–8. Michael Levey, The Life and Death of Mozart [1971] (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988), p. 92. Eric Blom, Mozart [1935] (London: J. M. Dent, 1974), p. 40. Stephanie Moss, ‘Bram Stoker and the London Stage’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 10 (1999), pp. 124–32, p. 124. Murray, From the Shadow of Dracula, p. 26. Nicholas Till, Mozart and the Enlightenment: Truth, Virtue and Beauty in Mozart’s Operas (London: Faber & Faber, 1992), p. 298. Peter Branscombe, ‘Creative Tensions, Recreated Sources: “Die Zauberflöte”’, in the Philips Complete Mozart Edition, conducted by Sir Colin Davis [1984] (1991), p. 36. Both texts and translations come from Branscombe, ‘Creative Tensions, Recreated Sources’, pp. 178 and 196. See Alison Milbank, ‘“Powers Old and New”: Stoker’s Alliances with Anglo-Irish Gothic’, in Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, edited by William Hughes and Andrew Smith (Basingstoke: Macmillan – now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), pp. 12–28. See Richards, Sir Henry Irving, pp. 438–9.

Conclusion 1 Bram Stoker, The Shoulder of Shasta [1895], edited by Alan Johnson (Westcliff-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2000), introduction, p. 19.

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Index Baetzhold, Howard, 98 Beetle, The (Richard Marsh), 52–6 Beeton, Isabella, 34, 36 Belford, Barbara, 4, 6–7, 23, 48, 56–7, 60, 64, 75, 82, 94, 145 Bernhardt, Sarah, 48, 94 Bignell, Jonathan, 66 Brennan, Matthew, 36 Burton, Richard, 89

Haining, Peter, 24, 31, 48 Holden, Philip, 57 Hughes, William, 17 Irving, Henry, 4, 9, 14, 17–18, 20, 47–8, 51, 56–62, 65–6, 73, 75, 79–80, 87, 94, 107–8, 140, 142–5, 148–9 Johnson, Alan P., 32–3, 63, 149 Jurkiewicz, Kenneth, 66–7

Caine, Hall, 17, 24, 51, 82, 94 Carmilla (J. Sheridan le Fanu), 6, 32 Case, Alison, 11, 19 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 107–8, 114 Colman Smith, Pamela, 138–9 Conan Doyle, Arthur, 51, 70, 139 Craft, Christopher, 33, 45 Cunningham, Gail, 30

Kline, Michael, 78 Lankester, Ray, 79 Lewis, Pericles, 112 Lourdes, 107–18 Matus, Jill L., 34–5 Mesmer, Frédéric-Antoine, 143–5 Milbank, Alison, 110–11, 147 Moretti, Franco, 63 Moses, Michael Valdez, 5, 58, 62, 72 Moss, Stephanie, 56, 110 Murray, Paul, 5, 25, 27–8, 48, 74, 94, 143, 145 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus: Don Giovanni, 142 Magic Flute, The, 145–7

Damala, Jacques, 48 Darwinism, 14, 58, 65, 79–80, 93, 118, 138 Day, Gary, 15, 19, 72, 77, 90 Deane, Hamilton, 66 Edward VII, 13, 148 Elizabeth I, 124–5 Farson, Daniel, 2, 5–6, 8, 23, 27, 35, 93, 134–5 Fleissner, Jennifer L., 5, 17, 19 Ford Coppola, Francis, 66–7 Freud, Sigmund, 110, 113

Newman, Kim, 67 Pick, John, 56, 140–1 Pope, Rebecca A., 19 Protherough, Robert, 56, 140–1

Gilbert, Sandra M., 24–5 Gilbert, W. S., 73, 87, 142 Glover, David, 2, 5, 7–8, 12, 16, 18, 25–6, 70–1, 74, 76, 83, 86, 93–4, 121, 139

Richards, Jeffrey, 2, 5, 8–10, 12, 16, 47, 56 Richards, Thomas, 75 Roth, Phyllis, 45

171

172 Index

Schaffer, Talia, 25 Schmitt, Cannon, 2, 71 Senf, Carol A., 23, 29, 37, 81, 87, 119 Shakespeare, William, 10, 19–20, 51, 54–65, 72–3, 103, 124, 126–7 Shaw, George Bernard, 65, 73–4 Shuttleworth, Sally, 34 Smith, Andrew, 25, 69–70, 93, 96–7 Spear, Jeffrey, 45 Stevenson, John Allen, 13, 57, 62 Stewart, A. T., 95, 98–101 Stoker, Abraham (Snr), 47, 92 Stoker, Ann, 35 Stoker, Bram: ‘Coming of Abel Behenna, The’, 140–2 ‘Crooken Sands’, 85 Dracula, 1–8, 11–13, 15, 18–21, 25, 27, 29–37, 42, 45, 50–4, 56–8, 60–7, 71–2, 75–85, 87–95, 100–1, 105–18, 121, 126, 136, 138–9, 142, 147, 149–50 ‘Dracula’s Guest’, 7, 84, 143 ‘Dream of Red Hands, A’, 39 ‘Dualitists, The’, 27–9, 139 Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions, The, 75–6 Famous Impostors, 1, 16–17, 69, 72, 82, 124–5, 137–9, 145 ‘Gipsy Prophecy, The’, 29 ‘Glimpse of America, A’, 75 ‘Greater Love’, 24 Jewel of Seven Stars, The, 1–3, 6, 11, 14–15, 19–21, 24–7, 59, 67, 77–8, 90, 93–5, 107, 121, 124–5, 127, 130, 136–7, 140 Lady Athlyne, 2, 9, 13, 16, 18–19, 21, 37–8, 59, 70–1, 75–6, 80, 82, 84, 87, 92–4, 101, 123, 126 Lady of the Shroud, The, 1–3, 9–13, 25, 32, 61, 74, 81–2, 85–92, 97, 101, 111, 121–2, 124, 126, 138, 140, 148

Lair of the White Worm, The, 2–3, 6, 10–11, 13, 37, 53, 57, 60, 67, 81, 86, 90, 94, 108, 122, 134–47 Man, The, 2, 5, 9, 11, 16–18, 36, 38–9, 48, 51, 84, 86, 101, 124 ‘Man From Shorrox, The’, 12 Midnight Tales, 48 Miss Betty, 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 16–17, 38, 50, 66, 76, 138 Mystery of the Sea, The, 1, 6, 11–12, 21, 54, 90–1, 93, 95–106, 119, 121–35, 138 Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving, 1, 47, 49, 73, 83, 87, 92 Primrose Path, The, 1, 27, 60–1, 92 ‘Red Stockade, The’, 48 ‘Secret of the Growing Gold, The’, 3, 25, 29 Shoulder of Shasta, The, 1, 3, 12, 14, 21, 26–7, 52, 60, 80, 83, 85, 87, 93, 101, 137, 139, 143, 149–50 Snake’s Pass, 2, 6, 24, 37–8, 40, 69–71, 82, 86–90, 97, 101, 122, 137, 148 Snowbound, 7, 16, 48–51, 59, 80, 82, 94, 137 ‘Squaw, The’, 39–44, 48, 93, 122 Under the Sunset, 3, 82, 138, 146 Watter’s Mou’, The, 21, 56, 63, 85, 93 Stoker, Charlotte, 4, 11–12, 20, 23, 25, 75 Stoker, Florence, 4–5, 7, 20, 24, 27, 35, 74–5, 87, 91–2, 94, 107, 140, 142, 149 Stoker, George, 74, 79 Stoker, Noel, 27, 74–5, 94 Stoker, Thornley, 75, 79, 89, 140 Sullivan, Sir Arthur, 142 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 2, 24, 51, 73 Terry, Ellen, 18, 56, 58, 73–4, 82, 142

Index 173

Three Weeks (Elinor Glyn), 10–11, 85 Tremayne, Peter, 31 Twain, Mark, 51, 98–100 Valente, Joseph, 6, 12, 18–19, 28, 62–4, 71–2, 75 Victoria, Queen, 8–9 Wagner, Richard, 108, 143 Ward, Geneviève, 92, 107 Warwick, Alexandra, 37 Weininger, Otto, 16

Whitman, Walt, 4, 6 Wightman, Bruce, 49 Wilde, Oscar, 4, 18, 20, 24–5, 79, 83, 92, 122, 140, 148 Wilde, Sir William, 20, 24–5 Wilhelm, Kaiser, 85 Winter, Alison, 144 Wolfreys, Julian, 52 Woman Who Did, The (Grant Allen), 36 Zola, Emile, 107–8, 111–19