The Stake Reading Club kicks off Dracula in just over 1 week. Dracula is an old book, written in diary entries and letters, and, though exciting to read, can seem a little strange at first. We thought it would be helpful, before even reading the first page, to provide some context, history and thematic direction.

So we asked Dr. Alexis Easley, Professor of English and Director of Graduate Studies at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, to help us get started. Dr. Easley is a scholar of all things Victorian. In 2011, Dr. Easley wrote Literary Celebrity, Gender, and Victorian Authorship 1850-1914, and in 2012 she edited Terrifying Transformations: An Anthology of Victorian Werewolf Fiction.

That’s monsters, horror, gender, sexuality and Victorianism. Sounds like Dracula. I asked Dr. Easley what readers should know before doing a deep dive on Bram Stoker’s most famous novel. At The Stake Reading Club, we go all in. Below are her insights.

Today we see vampires everywhere, including Count Dracula. Dracula equals vampires. When the book was published in 1897, were Vampires popular? What was the cultural state of the Vampire at the end of the 19th century?

Yes, they were very popular! Vampires had of course been part of folklore for eons, but during the nineteenth-century, they were featured in a number of vampire fictions, including “The Vampyre” (1819), a short story by John Polidori, a contemporary of Mary Shelley’s; Varney the Vampire (1845-47), a sensational serial novel written by James Malcolm Rymer; and (3) “Carmilla” (1872), a novella by Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu. There are myriad other examples of vampire fiction of the nineteenth century, many of which are yet to be unearthed by scholars.

There were some wonderful vampire paintings produced during the late Victorian era, such as Edvard Munch’s The Vampire (1893-94) and Philip Burne-Jones’ The Vampire (1897).

While the Gothic novel was founded in the 18th century, it had a revival of popularity in the 1890s and then again in the late twentieth century. The gothic novel’s “fin de siècle” (literally: end of the century) pattern of resurgence seems to be associated with the rise of revolutionary feeling and consequent anxieties about social and technological change.

Symptomatic of this revolutionary spirit are the shifting meanings of the word “blood.” Early on in the nineteenth century, blood was associated with heredity, circulation, injury, and emotion. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was also associated with modernity: the idea of “circulation” in the mass media and other information technologies; the discourse on contagion, particularly sexually transmitted diseases associated with urban life; and medical advancements in technologies of blood transfusion. Of course, throughout the novel, it is also code for “sex,” which was a taboo subject in “respectable” fiction of the period. I recommend that your readers follow where the blood goes in Dracula-how it is transferred from one character to another, accumulating multiple meanings in the process.

When Dracula was published, the Victorian Era was fast-ending. Can you tell us a little about the moment Dracula appeared?

The Oscar Wilde trials (1895) certainly brought the idea of “deviant” sexuality into mainstream discourse, but Wilde and his followers had begun the revolution years before with their dandy costume, rejection of high-Victorian values, and worship of beauty.

Even though he was an admirer of Walt Whitman’s poetry, Stoker was always careful to associate himself with conventional bourgeois masculinity. In a letter to William Gladstone, he noted that Dracula was “necessarily full of horrors and terrors,” yet he insisted that there was “nothing base in the book”; rather, it was designed to “cleanse the mind by pity and terror.”

Regardless of such disclaimers, the novel was undeniably transgressive-emphasizing, as it did, women’s sexual dominance, male sexual submission, homoerotic desire (“This man belongs to me!”), and polygamy (“Why can’t they let a girl marry three men?”).

Today readers and writers-especially at The Stake-talk a lot about genre and genre interplay and elements. We talk about Dracula as a horror novel. But is there more going on with genre?

The reference to catharsis (“pity and terror”) in Stoker’s letter to Gladstone (cited above) is a good reminder that Stoker’s work must be understood within a theatrical context. Stoker was a theatrical manager by trade (Lyceum Theatre, 1878-1902). He worked closely with Henry Irving and Ellen Terry, two the most celebrated actors of the age. There are references to drama throughout in the novel (e.g., in chapter 3, see the quote from Hamlet, which had been staged at the Lyceum in 1874). Dracula also has a strong sense of theatrical staging. For example, the scene of Harker’s arrival at Dracula’s castle, chapter 2, is rich with theatrical effects:

Just as I had come to this conclusion I heard a heavy step approaching behind the great door, and saw through the chinks the gleam of a coming light. Then there was the sound of rattling chains and the clanking of massive bolts drawn back. A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. He held in his hand an antique silver lamp, in which the flame burned without chimney or globe of any kind, throwing long quivering shadows as it flickered in the draught of the open door. The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation:—
“Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own will!”

The use of lighting and sound effects is spectacular; it is easy to imagine how such a scene might be realized on the stage. Indeed, Dracula was produced at the Lyceum in 1897 before the publication of the novel. After Stoker’s death, it was adapted as a 1922 silent film, Nosferatu (leading to a copyright dispute with Stoker’s estate)-as well as hundreds of other stage and screen adaptations. (Indeed, a search for “Dracula” in imdb.com yields 200 hits.)

Other horror stories had appeared within a few years, both fictional (Jekyll and Hyde, for instance) and real (Jack the Ripper). Why do you think there was an appetite-creatively and among the public-for stories about “monsters”?

The social purity movements of the 1870s led by Josephine Butler exposed the sexual double standard, which held men and women to different codes of sexual behavior. While a man was expected to engage in sexual indiscretions-sometimes living a double life as respectable patriarch but also as a debauchee of East End slums-a woman was expected to remain sexually virtuous throughout life. Discussions of the sexual double standard were initially focused on the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869), which incarcerated prostitutes diagnosed with venereal disease but allowed infected men to remain free.

The idea of the sexually promiscuous man as a “monster” at large in the city soon infused literary and popular discourse. Sarah Grand’s novel The Heavenly Twins (1893), for example, addressed the issue by depicting a married woman whose debauched husband infects her with syphilis.

This idea of masculine duality/monstrosity not only informed Jekyll and Hyde and newspaper coverage of the Ripper murders but also Wilde’s A Picture of Dorian Gray-and of course, Dracula. Jonathan Harker’s sexual experiences while abroad remain a carefully guarded secret through much of the novel:

When the chaplain and the sisters had left me alone with my husband—oh, Lucy, it is the first time I have written the words ‘my husband’—left me alone with my husband, I took the book from under his pillow, and wrapped it up in white paper, and tied it with a little bit of pale blue ribbon which was round my neck, and sealed it over the knot with sealing-wax, and for my seal I used my wedding ring. Then I kissed it and showed it to my husband, and told him that I would keep it so, and then it would be an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other; that I would never open it unless it were for his own dear sake or for the sake of some stern duty. (Chapter 9)

This willful suppression of Jonathan’s sexual history of course further enables the vampire’s exploits.

What did these monsters represent in England/Ireland/Europe at the end of the century?

The imperialist context is important here. By the 1890s, the British Empire was at its zenith, and hundreds of thousands of Britons were living in the colonies. There were fears that these colonists would “go native,” bringing foreign ideas, diseases, and cultural practices back to Britain. This sense of xenophobia was also expressed in the fear of “reverse colonization,” the idea that foreigners would infiltrate British society and destroy it from within. Dracula mimics British manners and works within the British legal system (through Harker and co.) colonizing Britain by purchasing property and “infecting” (raping) British women, thereby populating the nation with monsters.

Stoker’s Anglo-Irish background is also interesting to consider. As a child and young adult, Stoker must have been conscious of the conflicts produced by the British colonization of Ireland-feelings that must have been complicated by his own Protestantism. Once he emigrated to London, he must have felt like a cultural outsider as an Irishman but also like a cultural insider as a major player in the London theatrical world.

This is perhaps suggested in Jonathan’s sense of cultural displacement (and consequent shifting status as both colonized and colonizer).

We still love monster stories today. Do you think the reasons have changed for audiences today?

The experience of monster fiction today is mediated by film, which is able to employ technical effects emphasizing the spectacular nature of monstrosity. It is rather difficult to read Dracula today without thoughts of Bela Lugosi’s and Gary Oldman’s performances (and stage makeup).

Every time there is a new film or stage adaptation, the novel undergoes a revival, finding new readers and producing new mediated understandings of the novel.

Another explanation for the enduring resonance of Dracula is the villain’s animal-human hybridity. He has the intelligence of a human but the appetites and amorality of a beast. Ever since the publication of Darwin’s epic The Origin of Species (1859), there has been ongoing fascination with the “animal within,” which is accompanied by anxieties about the fear of biological/moral degeneration and atavism. The obsession with serial killers (“animals”) in the twenty-first century is no doubt an extension of our ongoing fascination with vampires.

Why did Bram Stoker write Dracula?

Even though Stoker was a theatrical manager by profession, he always saw himself as an author (publishing his first story, “The Chain of Destiny” in 1875). Following Gothic convention, Dracula, like Franskenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, was supposedly inspired by a disturbing dream. Stoker also was inspired by the Gothic scenery of Whitby (Yorkshire, UK), which he describes with amazing accuracy in chapters 6-8 of the novel. (He visited Whitby on holiday in August 1890.) Here is a wonderful recent story that adds to the ongoing Gothic resonances of this setting: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-20970716.

Dracula is written in letters and diary entries. Why do you think Stoker wrote his novel in that form?

The epistolary novel has a long history in British literature (e.g., Richardson’s Pamela, 1740). However, Wilkie’s Collins’s The Woman in White (1860) and the Moonstone (1868) made the idea of multiple narrators (and the novel as an edited compilation) wildly popular. The sense of mystery and suspense is enhanced when there is no omniscient narrator who definitively knows the truth and therefore can produce a comforting moral viewpoint. Readers are instead given the responsibility of judging truth and inferring meaning.

With Dracula comes interesting cultural issues in our time. Can you tell us a little about how sexuality and gender are represented in Dracula, and how that looked in 1897?

In 1894, the term “New Woman” was coined to refer to those women who desired independence, education, and a public role in Victorian society. In Dracula, Mina distances herself from the stereotype, saying (for example), “I believe we should have shocked the ‘New Woman’ with our appetites” (chapter 8). But in many ways she embodies the New Woman. She thinks independently, is closely associated with new technology (e.g., typewriter) and plays a crucial role in tracking down Dracula. Her exclusion from the men’s deliberations mid-way through the narrative clearly undermines the aims of the investigation. Once she is included as an equal co-investigator, she proves instrumental in tracking Dracula and is the chief compiler of the narrative itself.

There are definitely moments of what I would call “masculine hysteria” in the novel, particularly with Jonathan (Ch. 9) & Van Helsing (Ch. 13), which certainly stands in contrast to the stalwart Victorian masculine ideal. This sense of emasculation is not only caused by the rise of women’s power but also the specter of the “foreigner from abroad” and his sexual exploits.

Was Dracula popular? Well accepted by the public? Critical and literary community?

Dracula was popular during its time (although it was nearly eclipsed by a Gothic novel most readers today have never heard of, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle). On the whole, it wasn’t taken very seriously. Stoker’s Personal Reminiscences of Henry Irving (1906) was much more acclaimed during the early twentieth century.

Dracula nevertheless stayed in print (revived from time to time by film adaptations). However, it wasn’t until the rise of gender and cultural studies in the 1980s and ‘90s that it became a critical obsession among scholars. (A search for “Dracula” in the MLA Bibliography yields 836 hits, 95% of which were published after 1980.)

What else should know about Bram Stoker?

Can we ever really know the dead authors we love? As Foucault points out, the author is more of a “function” than a “person”-a set of imagined characteristics that help readers make sense of a text or an oeuvre.

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