Bram Stoker: Commentary & Quotations

Commentary

The Spectator (31 July, 1897): ‘Mr Stoker has shown considerable ability in the use that he has made of all the available traditions of Vampirology, but we think his story would have been al the more effective if he had chosen an earlier period.’ (Rep. in Carol A. Senf, ed., The Critical Response to Bram Stoker, Greenwood 1993, p.7; quoted in Clare McCotter, MA Dip., 1997.)

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Peter Haining, The Dracula Scrapbook (London: Chancellor Press 1987), 158pp., ill. [filmography; no. bibl.]: Epigraph, Christopher Lee: ‘Dracula offers the illusion of immortality, the subconscious wish we all have for limitless life. He is a man of tremendous brain and physical strength, with a strange dark heroism. He is either a reincarnation or he who has never died. He is a superman image with erotic appeal for women who find him totally alluring. I many ways he is everything people would like to be - anti-hero or villain - and, like the much maligned Rasputin, he is part saint, part sinner. Men also find him irresistible because they cannot stop him.’; Haining prints a theatrical poster for Theatre Royal, Dublin, advertising ‘The Bride of the Isles, A Tale found on the popular legend of the Vampire’, by Lord Byron [but not so, of course], with verses from his description of the Vampire (‘Wicked souls are often permitted / To enter the dead form of other men / Assume their speech [...] / And thus roam the earth / But [...] must wed some fair and virtuous maiden/Who they do after kill, and from/Her veins drain eagerly the purple stream / Of life [...] To save them from from extermination.’ [10]; Narrates the discovery of the original typescript of Dracula in a barn in Pennsyvlvania, belonging to the descendents of ‘Quincey P. Morris’ in the novel; now in the hands of antiquarian dealing John McLoughlin (The Book Sail, Orange, California) since 1984. Original notes in Rosenbach Collection, Penn. [19ff]; cites Times obituary: ‘Few men have played the part of fidus Achates to a great personality with more gusto. Mr. Stoker must have found his new life thoroughly congenial. He shared Irving’s counsels in all his enterprises; went about with him in the closest relationships of confidential friend and right-hand man; assisted at the many brilliant entertainments which his chief gave during the heyday of The Lyceum in London; met and was cordially treated by people of all sorts and conditions; and knew thoroughly the ins and outs of the financial side of the riskiest of all professions. From 1878, the year in which Irving became lessee and manager of The Lyceum, to 1905, when he died, the takings exceeded two millions. When the crash came, Stoker remained loyally at his friend’s side, during years thich would have been fatal to less enduring spirits by the contrast which they afforded to the dazzling triumphs which preceded them. (22 April 1912.)

Peter Haining (The Dracula Scrapbook, 1987) - cont.: copies deleted material from typescript relating to destruction of Dracula’s home. ‘The castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sun and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light. As we looked there came a terrible convulsion of the earth so that we seemed to rock to and fro and fell to our knees. At the same moment, with a roar that seemed to shake the very heavens, the whole castle and the rock and even the hill on which it stood, seemed to rise into the air and scatter in fragments, while a mighty cloud of black and yellow smoke, volume on volume, in rolling grandeur, was shot upwards with inconceivable rapidity. Then there was a stillness in nature as the echoes of that thunderous report seemed to come as with the hollow boom of a thunder-clap - the long reverberating roll which seems as though the floors of heaven shook. Then, down in a mighty ruin falling whence they rose, came the fragments that had been tossed skyward in the cataclysm. / From where we stood it seemed as though the one fierce volcano burst had satisfied the need of nature and that the castle and the structure of the hill had sunk again into the void. We were so appalled with the suddenness and the grandeur that we forgot to think of ourselves.’ (Penultimate page of ‘Mina Harker’s Journal’; Haining, p.14; also cited in part in Belford, 1996, p.268, where the deleted material is said to have been 195 words); holds Dracula’s London house to have been 137 Picccadilly (adjac. to the Hard Rock Café) [29]; Cites contemporary newspaper stories of a blue (maneater) shark caught with a ine and hook at Cornwall; a report of ‘Professor Roche and his Pack of 15 Real Wild Russian Wolves’ at the Ryal Aquarium; a Scarlet Feaver epidemic; an advertisement for ‘Clarke’s World Famed Blood Mixture’; and a Times police court report dated 3 Oct. 1897 of one John Baines charged with assaulting one Annie Cummins, his partner, biting a piece out of her neck, the assault being witnessed by a Constable Harker [29-30]; Notes reference to the day 22 Sept. in the text, said there to be a Thursday, as the date on which Mina and Jonathan see Dracula walking along Picadilly; remarks conclusively that the date and day in question are only compatible with the calendar year 1887 [p.30; see discussion of the dating of the events of Dracula - infra]; locates the original information about ‘Voivoide’ and ‘Dracula’ in British Counsel William Wilkinson’s An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, &c. (1820), a copy of which is marked Cat. No. 0.1097 in the Whitby local library. [33]; Stoker’s planning notes indicate that the three sections of the book were to be Book I, London, Midsummer; Bk II, Tragedy, incl. Whitby - ‘argument uncanny things’, and ‘Whitby - the storm ship arrives’; Book III, Discovery. [37]; notes influence of Dame Emily de Laszowsa Gerard’s ‘Transylvanian Superstitions’, contr. to The Nineteenth Century (London, July 1885), in which Stoker’s work also occasionally appeared; gives accounts of Dracula prototypes Elisabeth Bathory (b.1560) and Vlad the Impaler, the 15th c. Prince of Wallachia.

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Andrew Parkin, ‘Shadows of Destruction: The Big House in Contemporary Irish Fiction’ in Michael Kenneally, ed., Cultural Contexts and Literary Idioms in Contemporary Irish Literature (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1988), pp.306-354, espec. pp.307-08: ‘The rhythms of the Count are that of an Irish speaker of English rather than a European one; they fit with the image of Dracula as a nobleman with a  “Gothic” castle, and a country house, as well as a London town house to which he periodically withdraws.’ (Cited in Colin Graham, ‘A Late Politics of Irish Gothic: Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud’, in Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, 1998.)

Christopher Craft, ‘“Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”, Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Elaine Showalter, Speaking of Gender (NY & London: Routledge 1989), pp.216-42: Vampirism both expresses and distorts an originally sexual energy [216]; ‘identity of fear and desire’ (Morelli); triple rhythm; generates the monster, houses the monster, nullifies the monster; A book whose fundamental anxiety [is] an equivocation about the relationship between desire and gender [...] repeats a pivotal anxiety of late Victorian culture [217] As the primary site of the erotic experience in Dracula, this mouth equivocates, giving the lie to the easy separation of the mascul[ine] and the feminine. Luring at first with an inviting orifice, a promise of red softness, but delivering instead a piercing bone, the vampire mouth fuses and confuses what Dracula’s civilised nemesis Van Helsing and his Crew of Light works so hard to separate - the gender-based categories of the penetrating and receptive, or, to use Van Helsing’s language, the complementary categories of ‘brave men’ and ‘good women’. [218]; the novel’s opening anxiety, its first articulation of the vampiric threat, derives from Dracula’s hovering interest in Jonathan Harker; the sexual threat that this novel first evokes, manipulates, sustains, but never finally represents is that Dracula will seduce, penetrate, drain another male. [...] [A]lways postponed and never directly enacted, this desire finds evasive fulfillment in an important series of heterosexual displacements. [218; quoted in part in Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker, 1996, with additional sentence: ‘Dracula’s desire to furse with a male, most explicitly evoked when Harker cuts himself shaving, subtly and dangerously suffused this text’, Belford, p.256]; an implicitly homoerotic desire achieves representation as a monstrous heterosexuality, as a demonic inversion of normal gender relations [219]; [suggests that the ‘final penetration’ of Harker by the vampire’s sisters takes place in the ‘dark interspace’ of Harker’s journal, 219]; Dracula specifies the process of substitution by which the ‘girls that you all love’ mediate and displace a more direct communion among the males. [220]; Only through women may men touch men [220]; desire’s excursive mobility [220]; Dracula represents a characteristic, if hyperbolic, instance of Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles [220;for longer extracts, see infra.]

R. F. Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’ [1990], rep. in Jonathan Allison, ed., Yeats’s Political Identities (Michigan UP 1996): ‘[...] Dowden’s star student was the brilliant son of a professional Dublin Protestant family, Trinity Gold Medallist, Auditor of the College Philosophical Society, Double First and civil servant Bram Stoker. Stoker’s first book, long in use, was called Duties of Clerks of the Petty Sessions. Only an Irish Protestant could have graduated so easily from that to Dracula. The genesis of the latter masterpiece has recently been demonstrated, with the discovery of Stoker’s working notes, now deposited in Philadelphia. They represent seven years of Yeats-style research into folklore, myth, armchair anthropology, medieval history. and magic-particularly diabolism. Stoker had even found a treatise on the peasants of Transylvania which remarked [96] on their “many points of resemblance to our friend Paddy. He is grossly superstitious, as the number of crosses by the roadside and on every eminence testify; and, like his prototype, he lives in abject terror of his priest, of whose powers he has the most exalted ideas”’. (viz., Major E. Johnson, On the track of the Crescent, 1885, pp.250-51; Foster, op. cit., pp.98-99.)

W. J. McCormack, ‘Irish Gothic and After’ [ed. intro.], in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (Derry 1991), Vol. 2, 831-53: ‘the gothic novel endlessly exposed the violence and corruption that lay behind authority, ancient authority for the most part’; [and uses] ‘terror or horror, in which sexual and violent aspects of human experience were not infrequently linked’ (p.831); speaks of ‘the crucial role of written texts as all-too-frail vessels bearing some ineffable value.’ (p.832); ‘[Irish gothic] remarkably explicit in the way it demonstrates its attachment to history and politics.’ (p.833); It has to be said that while Irish gothic writing does not amount to a tradition, it is a distinctly protestant tradition’ (p.837); ‘a deadly earnestness pervades Dracula even in its most ludicrous moments.’ (p.842); ‘Despite his background, Stoker rarely refers in his fiction to Ireland or its surviving folk traditions. True, his first novel (The Snake’s Pass, London 1891), is set in County Mayo, abounds in sentimental violent incident, and even summons up legends of the French revolutionary invasion. True also that Dracula was eventually translated into Irish in 1933, perhaps to mark the accession of power of Eamon de Valera [...] Essentially, Stoker aligns himself with the London exile [...] as against the home-based revivalists.’ (The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, Vol. 2, p.845; cited in Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Myster of the Sea’, in Irish Studies Review, Aug. 1988, p.131.) ‘Dracula gives evidence of some anxieties about language, anxieties we now recognise as the starting point from which the revolutionary linguistics of Ferdinard de Saussure [845] set out. But the whole irrationale of the novel is directed towards a return to the securities of a language, domesticated and serviceable in the bourgeois world where even Van Helsing is fluently accommodated at last. Borrowing a phrase from American historiography, we can call Stoker’s relation to moderism “a pre-emptive counter-revolution”. Just as it is wrongheaded to read the passage by Larminie just quoted as a startling anticipation of James Joyce’s Dubliners, so it would be wront to recruit Stoker to any Anglo-Irish modernist canon.’ (pp.846-47; for relevant quotation, see under William Larminie, infra).

Joseph Spence, ‘“The Great Angelic Sin”: The Faust Legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2 (Autumn 1994), pp.47-58, espec. pp.51-54; In Dracula (1897), the victims have little pride and less volition [...] the schoolmistress Mina Murray (to give Mrs Harker her Irish maiden name) is middle-class. Lucy Westenra is not: she is an Anglo-Irish heiress (Westenra being the family name of the Rossmores). This explains why their fates differ: the ascendancy, represented by Lucy, dies, but the middle class, personified by Mina, escapes and, with the aid of a scientist, an English aristocrat and an American plutocrat, kills the vampire. / In this reading, Dracula is no materialistic Anglo-Irish landlord [ftn. ref. to Eagleton in Bullán, 1, 1, 1994], but a symbol of the twin forces of Catholic democracy and English liberal reformism: forces which both extinguished the influences of the Ascendancy and discouraged the Protestant middle class from thinking of itself as Irish. However, Catholic democracy and English reformism were themselves to fall victim to other forces: a resurgent aristocracy [...] Dracula was, therefore, on one level, an allegory of the dawning of Irish cosmopolitanism. There is evidence, however, that it had been projected as an allegory on the fate of the Anglo-Irish, for in “Dracula’s Guest”, which Stoker drafted as the opening chapter of the novel, the tomb of the vampire countess records that she “sought and found death in 1801”.’ (p.56.) Spence unfortunately repeats the rumour that Stoker died of syphilis (ftn. 35, p.58.)

Laura Sagolla Croley, ‘The rhetoric of reform in Stoker’s Dracula: depravity, decline, and the fin-de-siecle “residuum”’, in Criticism, 37 (Winter 1995) pp.85-108: The writer examines Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a response to the late-century threat of the lumpenproletariat. She argues that the count is associated and allied with the poorest of the poor - the vagrant and the supposedly shiftless, slum-dwelling underclass. She states that Stoker and 1890s commentators cast vampire and lumpen alike as representing - sometimes even causing - cultural decline, above all effected by a disregard of middle-class norms. Read in conjunction with works such as William Booth’s 1890 In Darkest England and The Way Out, she asserts [that] Stoker’s novel betrays a similar preoccupation with cultural collapse effected by the lumpenproletariat. To halt that collapse, she suggests, both Booth and Stoker prescribe for the lowest classes “the way out” of England - expulsion or, more politely, emigration. [OCLC First Search, May 1998.]

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Christopher Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition”: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’, in Brian Cosgrove, ed., Literature and the Supernatural (Dublin: Columba Press 1995), pp.95-118. Morash evokes a world in which the purity of the Celt, as identified by Stoker in a Historical Society inaugural lecture of 1872; quotes his inaugural address to the Hist. making reference to the Celtic race and Ireland as having gained ‘in all her suffering of centuries [...] this one advantage [...] Her people have remained the same whilst other peoples have slowly changed for the worse’; Stoker combines with the Celtic atavism of Arnold’s vision and a contemporary recognition that the conditions of life in Ireland defied the rational ‘law of nature’ espec. in relation to the extremity of conditions represented by the famine to suggest an intervention of the mysterious (i.e., irrational) as distinct from the uncanny, the interspace between them being the ‘fantastic’ (in Todorov’s distinction). On Dracula, considered as having a ‘giant’ form visible to some only, and therefore comparable to the ‘giant’ of cholera in an early story (“The Chain of Destiny”, 1875): ‘we are entering a textual space in which the distinction between the natural and the supernatural is no longer clear’. Further: ‘The fantastic came looking for Stoker, it would seem, rather than the other way around. In almost all of his texts there is a struggle to write into discourse that which threatens to elude representation; he is not courting epistemological ambivalence, it could be argued, but calling it up so that it may be entered into language and controlled.’ (p.106); Morash draws attention to remarks by Jennifer Wicke in which she comments with surprise that ‘Dracula experiences some of the poignant sense of estrangement of the colonial intellectual’ (Vampiric Typewriting, 1992), and adds: ‘if we re[late] Dracula to a content of Irish writing, by recalling that it was written by a member of the Irish intelligentsia who had worked for the British imperial administration, then both the paradoxical coexistence of atavism and modernity in the same figure, which Wicke notes, and the similarity of such a contradictory state [...] becomes less remarkable, indeed one is almost tempted to say that it appears “natural”.’ (p.108.)

Christopher Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition” [...]’, 1995): Morash builds on Seamus Deane’s reading of Dracula in ‘Land and Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric’, in History Ireland, 2, 1 (Spring 1994, quoting Deane’s representation of Dracula as an absentee landlord and remarks that Dracula is charismatic, enquiring further whether he is Parnell. He quotes [Stoker’s] comments about the lack of scientific studies of bogs in The Snake’s Pass, and juxtaposes it with Sir Robert Kane’s account of same, concluding that Stoker ‘takes a subject which was adequately explained by the laws of nature and juxtaposes it with supernatural explanations. In so doing he enters the soil of Ireland into the uncertain realm of the literary fantastic.’ (p.111). Morash quotes Stoker in 1872: ‘the very same individuality and self-assertion and passionate feeling which prompt to rebellion and keep alive the smouldering fires of disaffection become shrewdness, and enterprise, and purpose in commercial prosperity.’ (Hist. Address; Morash, p.108.) Also quotes Deane’s remarks on the possible identification of Dracula with Parnell [‘a stereotype current in the nineteenth century’] and suggests: ‘while Deane does not develop this idea, it could be taken a step further [...]’ (109); quotes from “White Fair”: ‘The days of Donnybrook Fair [...] Fenianism and landlordism [...] rapidly passing’ [… &c.; see under Quotations, infra.], and remarks: but the past is certainly not dead. Instead, the deeply disturbing recognition that “Fenianism and landlords” could exist at the same time as the typewriter, the telegraph, and the railway generates a series of texts at whose core is an anxiety that the ‘natural’ progress of civilisation is riddled with an unnatural survival of the past in the present.’ (p.109.) Further: ‘Stoker continually writes the fear that atavism is not something which decreases proportionately as modernity increases, but that the two nourish each other. Moreover, his attempts to disperse such a fear by entering it into writing only serve to perpetuate it.’ (p.109.)

Christopher Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition” [...]’, 1995), further: Morash remarks, in connection with the Plan of Campaign, that ‘we need to pause and resist the temptation to set up Stoker as the favourite straw-man of Irish literary history, the Ascendancy apologist with a bad conscience.’ (idem.); ‘When Black Murdock proposes marriage to Phelim Joyce’s daughter, Nora, in a move which would unite their divided lands, the novel erupts into violence, unable to permit a resolution of these two conflicting images of the new Irish rural middle class, either on the level of narrative or on the level of the real. Faced with the impossibility of logical narrative closure, at the novel’s end it is the actual soil of the bog which becomes the sign of ambivalence, as Black Murdock’s digging into the bog causes it to become “demoralised”. Once a heavy rain begins to flood down on the unstable earth, the whole bog begins to move, and in a final cataclysmic motion, the attempt with which the novel began to enter the bog into language collapses as the bog begins to slide down the hill. [quotes:] “No language could describe the awful sensation of that melting away of the solid earth - the most dreadful nightmare would be almost a pleasant memory compared with it”. As it passes out of language, the bog loses its form: “all things on its surface seemed to melt away and disappear, as though swallowed up” (Stoker, pp.228-29). This moment of dissolution is both the end and the apotheosis of the nineteenth-century liberal dream of a modern, progressive Ireland, as the soil - the focus of the most intense Irish political struggles in the 1880s - disappears into a shapeless, nameless mass.’ (p.113); notes that when the bog slips away, leaving a tabula rasa to be built on by the Englishman Arthur, Dick and he find an Ogham inscription, ‘one of the oldest and least known of writings’, upon which Morash comments: ‘In this curiously Lacanian moment, what began as a textual attempt to enter the bog into writing, and thereby decipher its secret, finds that language already exists in the heart of the bog; although this language resembles “old telegraph signs” it is the language of the distant past, and it is unreadable.’ (p.114); comments that a historical reading confers semantic stability on the text but does not exhaust its meaning; compares it with Dracula, which is also susceptible to Marxist and psychoanalytical readings; draws on Homi Bhabha (The Location of Culture, 1994), in order to conclude that ‘Stoker’s writing has a place in that liminal space of the literary fantastic which may well be the characteristic structural form of colonial writing.’ (p.115; END.) Note, Morash quotes The Nation [i.e., Charles Gavan Duffy]: ‘Ireland is the fatigue ground of English imagination, and a full-bellied, dyspeptic people must have some daily providence of terror, that they may “sup full of horrors” and bless their stars for living east of the channel. Every people in every age have had their country monsters [...] Mrs Ann Radcliffe being dead, […] it is now our part to furnish England with monsters, thugs and devils great and small’. (“Priest-hunting”, Nation 1848; Morash, p.99.)

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Barbara Belford, Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula (NY: Knopf 1996), xv, 381pp.; ‘He was many things but naïve was not one of them [...] He was fully aware of the subtexts in his horror tale (p.xiii); Note that Belford specifically identifies the passage in which a ‘sperm’ of wax from the candle falls upon Lucy’s coffin, and comments that Stoker ‘chose to mask the erotic as the supernatural’; and further, that ‘by eliminating the author’s voice he distanced himself from the unspeakable’ (p.xiii); calls Dracula ‘the only novel he took within himself’ (p.xiv); errs. Incl. Werbaugh St for Werburgh St.; remarks that ‘Thomas Carlyle’s “On Heroes, Hero-Worship” (1841) impressed his generation (p.39); Stoker consulted Francis Kildale Robinson’s A Glossary of Words Used in the Neighbourhood of Whitby for Swales’s dialect [in Dracula]’; William Wilkinson, author of An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (Whitby Library call No. 0.1097), by representative of English Levant Co., contains the text: “Dracula in the Wallachian language means Devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning”; Florence deemed “one of the three most beautiful women in London” (p.228)’; Belford writes, ‘Stoker wove this iconoclastic character [the New Woman], an important shift into the literary portrayal of women, into Dracula - stopping short, however, of giving her authentic independence. Was Stoker for or against the New Woman. Contemporary feminists debate the question. If Lucy’s death ended the noel there would be a strong case for calling Dracula an anti-feminist novel. But the second half introduces the complex and charming Mina Murray Harker, who survives Dracula’s vamping and is largely responsible for his entrapment and destruction.’ (p.236); Belford indicates that ‘the one constant - the pivotal dramatic point - through the working notes is Jonathan Harker’s dream of passive seduction. “Young man goes out sees girls [...] one tries to kiss him not on lips but throat; Old Count interferes - Rage and fury diabolical - This man belongs to me - I want him - a prisoner for a time [...”] (p.256) [For longer extracts, see Archives, infra.]

Elizabeth Signorotti, ‘Repossessing the body: transgressive desire in “Carmilla” and Dracula’, in Criticism, 38 (Fall 1996) pp.607-32: The writer discusses the representation of women in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s vampire tale Carmilla and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She argues that in contrast to Stoker’s work, the female characters in Le Fanu’s novel are allowed to usurp male authority and to bestow themselves on whom they please, completely excluding the male participation in the exchange of women. She contends that in Stoker’s more famous text, which was a response to Carmilla, male control over the exchange of women is reinstated. She maintains that Dracula attempts to repossess the female body for the purposes of male pleasure and exchange and to rectify the reckless unleashing of female desire that occurs in Carmilla.’ [OCLC First Search, May 1998.]

Terry Eagleton (1), Introduction to Oscar Wilde: Plays, Prose Writings, and Poems [Everyman] (London: Dent, 1991): ‘Dorian Gray does indeed represent in Freud’s terms, the “return of the repressed” - a ghastly, uncannily powerful exposure of the dangers of the hedonistic creed, which in the heartless Dorian now takes the form of driving a young girl to suicide. [...] But Dorian Gray , guilt-ridden and tormented though it may be, is in no simple sense Wilde’s “recantation”. For one thing, its sumptuous, hothouse style colludes with the very aestheticism the book officially questions.' (p.xviii.)

Terry Eagleton (2), ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, in Mary Massoud, ed., Literary Relations: Ireland, Egypt and the Far East (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1996), pp.135-46: ‘One might add in parentheses here that there is no more palpable Gothic allegory of the decline of the Anglo-Irish gentry than Bram Stoker’s own celebrated novel, written at the time of the Land Acts which stripped the landlords of their power. Like them, Dracula is literally running out of land; by the end of the novel he is being hotly pursued around Europe, furnished only with the crates of Transylvanian soil he needs to bed down in for the night. His material base, like that of his author’s, is rapidly dwindling, and once deprived of his earth he will die. The Anglo-Irish landlords will similarly wither, or at least shift to Bournemouth, when their earth is removed from them, though that will demand rather more than a sprig of garlic and rather less than a stake through the heart. Dracula is a great Anglophile, given to pouring over maps of the metropolis and pathetically setting up home in - of all places - Purfleet. He is much preoccupied with legal documents, and when he is slashed with a knife it is coins, not blood, which cascade out of him. Dracula lives in a material world, and is therefore of necessity a material ghoul.’ (pp.140-41; prev. as ‘Form and Ideology in the Anglo-Irish Novel’, Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1994, pp.17-26; this passage, p.22.)

Terry Eagleton (3), Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995), ‘Three years after the appearance of The Real Charlotte, the Dublin civil servant Bram Stoker was to pen another allegory of the collapse of the gentry. Chris Baldick describes Melmoth as an ‘absentee villain’; but Dracula is an absentee landlord, deserting his Transylvanian castle to buy up property in London. Like many an Ascendancy aristocrat he is a devout Anglophile, given to poring over maps of the metropolis; and this gory-toothed vampire plans, a touch bathetically, to settle in Purfleet, as a number of the Anglo-Irish gentry were to migrate from the wilds of Connaught to the watering holes of the English south coast. Living in a material world, Dracula is a material ghoul, much preoccupied with leases and title deeds, and has summoned the narrator Jonathan Harker to his Gothic fastness less to bite him in the neck than to discuss his legal affairs. When he is slashed with a knife, it is banknotes and gold coins rather than blood which cascade from his breast. But Dracula, like the Ascendancy, is running out of land: by the end of the novel he is being hotly pursued around Europe, furnished only with the crates of Transylvanian soil he needs to bed down in for the night. His material base is rapidly dwindling, and without this soil he will die. The Ascendancy, too, will evaporate once their earth is removed from them, though to wrench it from them will demand rather more than a sprig of garlic and rather less than a stake through the heart. Like Melmoth, the vampire is both victim and predator: it is hard not to feel pity for this hunted, homeless monstrosity, but the primordial crime must be cut off at source if the deadly chain of contamination is not to perpetuate itself. Those who inherit his curse, like the innocent young Lucy Westernra, are not themselves to [215] blame: the Anglo-Irish ruling class are simply doing a dificult job in extremely trying trying cimunnstances, and it is not their fault if their lineage is tainted to it root. There is an unspeakable foulness at the very heart of civility; but if this frightful paradox is not to shatter the mind it must be rationalised by the image of the divided self, the vampiric victim who is sweetly unaware in waking life of the unspeakable horror he or she perpetrates at night. Only thus can one take the full measure of this blood-soaked history, in which sustenance for some is death and debility for others, while exculpating its individual agents.’ (pp.215-16.)

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Seamus Deane, A Short History of Irish Literature (London: Hutchinson 1986), treats Dracula under the heading of Big House novels, calling it the ‘most hysterical and popular development’ of the ruined house genre of which Le Fanu was the great Victorian master. He paraphrases: The living dead of the aristocratic vampire’s tribe are victims of an historical crime from which the very bourgeois living - like Mina Harkness [recte Harker], the heroine - must be released by a joint Anglo-American assault, fortified by ‘the wonderful power of money’. He comments, This was the power which the Anglo-Irish landowners and the middle classes sadly lacked ... caught in a historical crisis from which there was no escape. (p.205.) Notes, Joseph Spence quotes Deane’s characterisation of Dracula’s victims as ‘very bourgeois’ in ‘“The Great Angelic Sin”: The Faust legend in Irish Literature, 1820-1900’, in Bullán: An Irish Studies Journal, 1, 2, Autumn 1994, p.55.)

Seamus Deane, ‘Land and Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric’, in History Ireland, 2, 1 (Spring 1994): ‘[Dracula] is dependent in his London residence on the maintenance of a supply of soil in which he might coffin himself before the dawn comes’ ([p.33]); ‘Dracula’s dwindling soil and his vampiric appetites consort well enough with the image of the Irish landlord current in the nineteenth century’ (idem.) [The foregoing quoted in Christopher Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition”: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’, in Brian Cosgrove, ed., Literature and the Supernatural, Dublin: Columba Press 1995, pp.95-118 [infra], and reprinted substantially as ‘Landlord and Soil: Dracula’ [chap. sect.] in Strange Country, OUP 1997, pp.89-94 [infra].)

Seamus Deane, ‘Landlord and Soil: Dracula’ [chap. sect. in Strange Country (OUP 1997), pp.89-94: ‘Gothic fiction is devoted to the question of ownership, wills, testaments, hauntings of places formerly owned, and, in its most commercially successful manifestation, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), tells the story of an absentee landlord who is dependent in his London residence on the maintenance of a supply of soil in which he might coffin himself before the dawn comes. With him, too, there is a crucial distinction between land, which he buys in England, and his soil, which he brings with him in what is a literal version of the coffin-ship - that resonant image from Famine times - that is wrecked on the Yorkshire coast, at Whitby. This peculiar version of [89] the native soil is an inversion or perversion of the nationalist version propagated by Lalor. For, in this instance, it is the native material that is imported into the ‘foreign’ legal system of English property relations. In addition, it is a contaminated cargo; Dracula’s soil is also his filth, his contaminant. Attached to the soil by day, ‘racy of the soil’ in a perverse rendering of the epigraph of the Nation newspaper, he moves, like an O’Grady version of the Celtic hero, between dusk and dawn. But, landlord that he is, with all his enslaved victims, his Celtic twilight is endangered by the approach of a nationalist dawn, a Home Rule sun rising behind the old Irish Parliament. Dracula’s dwindling soil and his vampiric appetites consort well enough with the image of the Irish landlord current in the nineteenth century. Running out of soil, this peculiar version of the absentee landlord in London will flee the light of day and be consigned to the only territory left to him, that of legend. Like O’Grady’s and Yeats’s Anglo-Irish, he will be expelled from history to enter the never-never land of myth, demonised more effectively but also more clandestinely than by a Lalor, Mitchel, or Davitt. O’Grady’s later sponsorship of a policy of internal immigration, from Dublin to the Midlands, from sedentary trades to the physical labour of the soil, is an extension of his lament for the loss of landlordism and an attempt to replace it with a mystical version of nationalist pastoral that has itself a history stretching from AE (George Russell) through Darrell Figgis to de Valera.” (Para. 1; &c.) [See also remarks in The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 1991, in References, infra.]

Bibliographical note: the above first printed as Seamus Deane, ‘Land and Soil: A Territorial Rhetoric’, in History Ireland, 2, 1 (Spring 1994), pp.31-34. [See review by Terry Eagleton, under Deane, q.v.] Note prefatory material: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.’ O’Grady would have agreed. Spectral presences were attempting to take possession of traditional land. The most famous of these was the landlord himself.’ (Strange Country, p.89.)

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Luke Gibbons, ‘“Some Hysterical Hatred”: History, Hysteria and the Literary Revival’, in Irish University Review (Spring/Summer 1997), pp.7-23, espec. pp.13ff: ‘The consequences of this geological model of the past are tellingly evoked by Bram Stoker in his remarkable first novel, The Snake’s Pass, set in the wilds of the west of Ireland in the late nineteenth century. [Plot summary ensues, with quotation, as infra]; cites comments by the geologist Dick Sutherland employed by Black Murdock to survey the land, who in turn cites Archbishop William King and Edmund Spenser on the Irish bogs in speaking with his friend Arthur, the narrator; Gibbons comments, ‘The bog, in fact, stands for those aspects of the Irish past which will not go away, but whose threats to the social order are actively reproduced by the forces of modernisation which consigned the poorest of the peasantry to these outlying areas.’ [p.14; Further quotes Chris Morash, ‘thought his fiction and journalism written after the first two Home Rule bills [Stoker continually expresses] the fear that atavism is not something which decreases in proportionately as modernity increases, but that the two nourish each other’ (Morash, ‘Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition’, 1995 [as above], pp.109-10); This dysfunctional form of modernisation, which reactivates rather than repudiates the past, was bound up with the anomalies of the landlord system, a caste which, while aspiring to anachronistic pretensions of aristocracy, yet presided over the unrestrained commercialisation of the Irish economy.’ (Gibbons, p.14.)

Nicholas Daly, ‘Incorporated Bodies: Dracula and the Rise of Professionalism’, in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 5, 39 (Summer 1997), pp. 181-203: The writer offers an account of how Bram Stoker’s Dracula uses anxiety to produce as both necessary and natural a particular form of professional, male, homosocial combination: the team of experts. He also advocates a reconsideration of the fin de siecle as a period of crisis. He argues that despite the rhetoric of crisis, Britain was far from collapse and that in fact the British empire grew dramatically during this period. He shows that Britain’s expansion depended on the existence of a new class of experts and that it is in the formation of this professional class that the adventure romances played their cultural part. [OCLC First Search, May 1998]. Daly writes, ‘the test mirrors extratextual anxieties; the vampire is the figure in the text for those anxieties; criticism decodes the figure to reveal its real referent.’ (p.184; quoted in Richard Haslam, review of revised version printed in William & Andrew Smith, eds., Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic, Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998 [as iinfra].

Richard Haslam, review of William Hughes & Andrew Smith, eds., Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1998), in Irish Studies Review (Aug. 1999), comments on Mulvey-Roberts’s treatment of her theme (‘bad Blood, Menstrual Taboo, and the New Woman’), remarking that her use of the words ‘allegorised’, ‘mirror’ and ‘anxieties’ all illustrate a point made by Daly [supra], who notes that critiques of Dracula in the last two decades have been dominated by an ‘anxiety theory’ of interpretation, working through a reading practice that is ‘allegorical’ Haslam adds: ‘It would be more accurate to describe the reading practice as allegorising - that is to say, it performs an allegoresis, in which the text is read as if it were an allegory, despite the fact that it may bear little resemblance to what is generically accepted as allegory. Most of the essays in the collection under review engage in allegoresis. I do not say this disparagingly; rather, I wish to high-light a usually unregarded but extremely widespread hermeneutic procedure. As Daly concedes, he too allegorises the novel, even as he seeks to replace the reflectionist model with a performative one (pp. 185-186). If an allegoresis acknowledges the rhetorical stratagems by which it slides from text to context, it may still retain some epistemological validity; if it is pursued reductively, so that text is collapsed into context (as in the treatment of Dracula in Terry Eagleton’s Heathcliff and the Great Hunger [1995] or Seamus Deane’s Strange Country [1997]), it can become egregious. / Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic criticism are especially reductive types of allegoresis. [.. &c.].’ (Haslam, p.271.)

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Ludmilla Kostova, ‘(En)gendering a European Periphery: Images of the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction’, in The European English Messenger [journal of ESSE] (Autumn 1997), 52-58: ‘The nineteenth-century Western imagination emphasised the problematic quality of Eastern European and Balkan (self-)identification by expanding and embellishing the myth of the vampire, a monster disrupting all of the oppositions listed above, reversing the finality of death, and unsettling conventional 1gender distinctions. Vampiric transgression and its correction assume paramount importance in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the indisputably canonical text of Late Victorian (and of later) vampire fiction. In it the vampiric Lord Dracula travels out of backward Transylvania and penetrates the modern capitalist world of late Victorian Britain. He is intent on colonizing the West and on eventually establishing a world empire of “Un-Dead” monsters. What makes Dracula a particularly dangerous figure is that he is not merely an uncultivated barbarian but, as Stephen Arata has pointed out, “an incipient ‘Occidentalist’ scholar”. [See Stephen Arata, ‘The Occidential Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’, in Victorian Studies, 33, 1990, p.634.) As Orientalism’s non-Western other, Occidentalism comprises attitudes varying from a total demonization of the West to an idealization and a desire to be adopted by it. The Count is a pragmatic Occidentalist: he believes in studying, emulating, and using the West’s achievements. This is why he prefaces his vampiric possession of his British victims with an intellectual vamping of their culture. / Once in London, the Count easily blends with the native crowd. Anticipating the mind-boggling expertise of twentieth-century fictional spies, he easily passes for a denizen of the metropolis. His effective infiltration of British culutre is a major manifestation of his barbaric vigour which contrasts with the lassitude and enervation of at least one of his British opponents, most notably Jonathan Harker, the father of the only child that gets born in the novel. To an age obsessed with “race”, eugenic and “dysgenic” tend’encies, and the fall of empires to the extent the late Victorian period was this could appear very disconcerting. [Cont.]

Ludmilla Kostova, ‘(En)gendering a European Periphery: Images of the Balkans in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction’ ((1997) - cont. ‘The conjunction in the text of Transylvanian vigour and British lassitude could be linked with Stoker’s own marginal position with respect to British imperial culture. His allegiances were painfully split between the idea of British supremacy and the Irish national cause. His fantasy of a powerful and disruptive intruder from one of Europe’s peripheries could very well be compensatory in character. Characteristically, the Count’s vampirism is not represented only in terms of barbaric vigour but also as a pathological aberration combining and condensing practically all traits the Victorian public mind conceived as “monstrous”. As a carrier of vampiric infection, Dracula is identified with anti-Semitic fantasies of the Jew, the syphilitic prostitute, the deviant of criminological discourse, the sexual degenerate (his sexuality is non-phallic, but penetration is nevertheless part of it), and the decadent aristocrat of earlier Gothic fiction. In the context of the novel, there is no apparent contradiction between the vigorous and the diseased aspects of the Count’s “personality”. By fusing them together the narrative produces him as an unnatural Supermonster that has no right to exist and must be annihilated. The Supermonster is eventually destroyed by a group of brave Westerners headed by Dr. Van Helsing, an open-minded Dutch savant, who is not deterred by rational scepticism when he is faced with the threat of vampirism, and proceeds to combat it by combining nineteenth-century medical and scientific knowledge with vampirological lore drawn from ancient religious beliefs and popular practices. Some of these can be traced back to the Count’s native Transylvania. Apparently, Dracula can be beaten with weapons that, like him, originate in the periphery. As everyone since the publication of Stoker’s Dracula seems to know, the vampire’s opponents must eventually puncture his heart with some kind of a sharp object such as a stake or a knife. They must thus subject the monster to what Christopher Craft has ironically called “corrective penetration” (see Christopher Craft, “Kiss Me with Those Red Lips”: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Representations, Vol. 8, Fall 1984, p.230). The sexual implication of such an act is obvious. However, it also has a special relevance to the periphery which has engendered “the king vampire” and which he, in a manner, represents. Corrective penetration is an attempt to resolve the category crisis produced by vampirism and by Dracula’s incursion into Britain by fixing the monster’s and, by implication, the periphery’s, gender as feminine. It is a way of restoring and perpetuating the dominant ideological format of masculine centre and feminine periphery.’ (pp.55-56.)

Michael Valdez Moses, ‘Dracula, Parnell, and the Troubled Dreams of Nationhood’, in Journal X: A Journal in culture and Criticism, Vol., 2, No. 1 (Autumn 1997), pp.66-11. Moses writes: ‘By reading Stoker’s gothic romance in the context of Parnell’s turbulant political career, with particular emphasis on the revlutionary struggles of the Irish leader for land reform and Home Rule, I aim to suggest how Dracula functions as an overdetermined figure onto who are cathected many of the most formidable poltical and social issues of nineteenth-century Ireland.’ (p.69.) ‘If the ultimate horror of Dracula’s campaign against the English nation is not the deaths of a handful of middle-class Londoners but rather the creation of a “new order of beings” who might come into existence at the very heart of the British imperium, then Parnell’s greatest threat was not the violent murder of British subjects but the prospect that he might bring into existence a whole new people, a nation of free Irish citizens under his leadership.’ [83]; ‘Stoker’s theoretical commitment to Home Rule and his backing of Irish nationalism was qualified by his disapproval of violent Fenianism and many of Parnell’s tactics, and it was surely in tension with his enthusiasm for the glory of the British empire.’ (p.82; ftn. 28 cites Stoker’s endorsement of Henry Morton Stanley’s idea of beneficent colonialism, in Stoker Personal Reminiscences, 1, p.366.) ‘Dracula’s vampirism [...] may be viewed as a distorted image of Ascendancy Protestantism as it appears to a Catholic peasantry who regard the religious beliefs of the ruling class as a corruption of their own true and originary form of Christianity [...] it proves to be powers, offices, rituals of the Catholic church that play a critical role in the ultimate destruction of vampire and the uncrowned king alike. [referring to the role of the Church in the fate of Parnell’ (p.92.) ‘Dracula’s vampirism in fact functions as a symbolic hinge between the most purified versions of Anglo-Protestantism and the most orthodox forms of Irish Catholicism.’ (p.93.) ‘Dracula seems eager to adapt the modern ways of his adversarise to his own ends. (p.103.) ‘As both supporter of Home Rule and champion of the British Empire, Stoker no doubt responded to the appeal and the threat of emergent nationalism. [...] Just as vampirism is infectious, so too the contagion of anti-imperial nationalism, once it claims even a single untreated victim, threatens to spread to the far corners of the realm, until the vampiric kingdom of darkness suipplants the whole of the British Empire. As it turned out, Stoker’s fear that anti-imperial nationalism, once established in countries such as Ireland, would metastasize proved well-founded.’ (p.103.) [For longer extracts, see Archives, infra.]

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David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (Durham & London: Duke UP 1996), on The Lady of the Shroud: ‘At a new peak of imperialist enthusiasm, yet at a moment when the question of British imperialism in Ireland had temporarily stalled, Stoker imagines the most impossible of utopias, a benevolent colonialism of near-equals in which two marginalised peoples come together to create a new world.’ ( p.57; cited in Colin Graham, A Late Politics of Irish Gothic: Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud’, in That Other World: The Supernatural and the Fantastic in Irish Literature, Transactions of the Princess Grace Irish Library Conference, Whitsun 1998).

Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea: Ireland and the Spanish-Cuban-American War’, in Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 2 (August 1988), pp.131-38, ending:: The Mystery of the Sea returns to the issues which concern Ireland that are overtly referred to in The Snake’s Pass; issues which are more distantly referred to in The Lady of the Shroud’s more oblique version of Irish politics. That The Mystery of the Sea follows a similarly oblique line is testimony to Stoker’s abiding fascination with providing some form of reconciliation between apparent opposites. The narrator observes this in nature, an observation which captures this side-stepping of national othering, this sense of unification with the emergence of a new dawn: ‘in the moment after sunset, when the earth is lit not by the narrow disc of the sun but by the glory of the wide heavens above, twin shadows merge into one, so in the twilight two natures which are akin come closer to the identity of one’ (The Mystery of the Sea, Sutton 1997 p. 62; Smith, p.137.)]

Maurice Hindle, ed., Bram Stoker, Dracula (Penguin 1993), 520pp. Hindle adopts a Freudian stance and speaks of ‘the return of the repressed in relation to ‘the guises of nature, crime, madness, and death [which] textually fix the unfixableness of unconscious desires and experiences’ - i.e., an ‘(unconscious) fictional revenge [for the] homo-erotic impulses that Stoker’s “adored Master” [Henry Irving] stirred in him’. (q.p.).

Books Ireland (Nov. 1992), review and summary: Powers of Dracula: Dracula, characters, Count Dracula; Jonathan Harker (English solicitor); Lucy Westenra; Professor Van Helsing; Mina Harker; psychiatrist Dr Seward; Arthur Holmwood, fiancé of the dead Lucy; Quincy Morris; Harker attending Count Dracula in Transylvania accidentally discovers his secret in forbidden part of the castle, and flees with his sanity to England; in London a Russia ship with a dying crew arrives; a wolf escaped from London zoo is at large in the streets; Lucy Westenra shows a strange wasting sickness; Helsing arrives, and the intrepid group he forms succeeds in driving Dracula from England but must follow him to Transylvania to save the soul of Mina, who has been marked as unclean by a splash of holy water following his bite; Lucy Westenra receives numerous transfusions from her husband Arthur, but also Seward and Morris. The Count’s appearance in the rooms of Lucy and Mina is a highlight, the air being ‘full of specks, floating and circling in the draught from the window ... the lights burn blue and dim’ (Lucy). ‘the thin streak of white mist that crept with almost imperceptible slowness across the grass towards the house ... growing thicker and with the white energy of boiling water pouring in through the joining of the door, a figure growing into reality through the whirling mist’ (Lucy).

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Patrick Maume, ‘In the Fenians’ Wake: The Crises of Fin-de-siècle Ireland in the Sentimental Rhetoric of Canon Sheehan and William O’Brien M.P.’, in Bullan: Journal of Irish Studies, 4, 1 (Autumn 1998) pp.59-80, writes, ‘The landlord, Lord Drumshaughlin, lives in seedy debauchery in London while his agent, Hans Harman, squeezes the tenants, embezzles the rents, and plots with a local gombeenman to get the estate. (Critics interested in the Irish antecedents of Dracula should note the vampiric subtext associated with Harman. He is always preternaturally cheerful and vigorous while those around him - the tenants, his invalid wife and spinster sisters - are drained of life; his teeth are ‘as sharp-looking as fixed bayonets, as well as equally shining’; he excels at ensnaring vulnerable people and making them his creatures’ (p.63.)

Robert Smart & Michael Hutcheson, ‘Suspect  Grounds: Temporal and Spatial Paradoxes in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Postcolonial Reading’, in Postcolonial Text, 3, 3 (2007): ‘[...] This subversive tale is hidden in cultural memory and becomes the third argument in this interpretive triangulation: it is about the Great Hunger or Famine of 1845-51, which had remained unmentioned in public discourse for over forty years by the time Stoker published his masterpiece. At the core of this strategy of rereading is our claim that the Gothic, as practiced by Stoker, requires a spatial as well as a temporal mode for understanding the story. Moreover, reading a novel like Dracula as a postcolonial text requires us to understand how these two modes are often, perhaps always opposed: the colonial enterprise works temporally, arranging things to show how colonization brings improvement, while the postcolonial enterprise works spatially, raising to the surface of discourse all the negated histories buried by imperial narratives. Thus, within the narrative of Dracula we discover a map of misreading of Irish history and memory, something that the novel ultimately tries, unsuccessfully, to correct. As David Punter explained in his The Literature of Terror, “Gothic has been, over the last 200 years, a mode of history and a mode of memory” (188). In this case, we argue, it is a “negated” cultural history which is limned by Stoker’s narrative in spatial terms which contradict and subvert the temporal layers of the story. [1] Therein is created the postcoloniality of the novel. ’ [Cont.]

Robert Smart & Michael Hutcheson, ‘[...] Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Postcolonial Reading’, in Postcolonial Text, 3, 3 (2007) - cont.: ‘Stoker had no physical sense for the geography or the ethnography of Transylvania, the land he chose as the setting for the story. As Alison Milbank has observed, “the milieu in Dracula has significance...in relation to its reference to Ireland” (20). Notwithstanding what David Glover has called Stoker’s “troubled relationship to the Irish question” (13), it was quite common for English publishers of Irish Gothic writers like Sheridan LeFanu and Stoker to insist that settings not be in Ireland, but in less problematic and neutral places like Stygia in LeFanu’s “Carmilla” and Transylvania for Dracula (McCormack 238). Changing the setting, [13] however, does not change the terrain or what happens there: it merely calls Ireland by some other name. Transylvania, we can legitimately argue, really is Ireland. Because Ireland had been associated with cannibalism and blood drinking for centuries before this point (in works by Fynes Moryson and Edmund Spenser, for example), the geographic slide from Ireland to Transylvania would have made a certain kind of sense to English readers. / The spatial nature of this story, the Gothic story, is directly connected to the oft-noted subversiveness of Gothic literature in general, and in the political and cultural/historical spheres, of Irish Gothic in particular. The Irish Gothic, as W.J. McCormack has noted, “is remarkably explicit in the way it demonstrates its attachment to history and to politics” (McCormack, ‘Irish Gothic’, in Field Day Anthology, Vol. 1, p.833). Killeen sums up the subversive elements of Gothic by noting that while “Gothic literature itself often seeks narrative closure and a re-inscribing of these cultural distinctions [between good and evil, man and beast, men and women, animate and inanimate], the very act of challenging them in narrative leaves the arbitrariness of the divisions exposed and so in permanent disarray” (Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century, 2005, p.16).’ (pp.13-14.)[Cont.][ top ]

Robert Smart & Michael Hutcheson (‘Bram Stoker’s Dracula [...]’ (2007) - cont.: ‘In this observation we can discern Killeen’s rejection of “arbitrary” divisions (like the histories inscribed in Dracula) and his embrace of the “permanent disarray” created in those historical paradigms by the powerful intrusion of memory within the narrative. For Killeen, the most powerful memory is of the 1641 rebellion, which through Sir John Temple’s The Irish Rebellion inscribed sectarian violence permanently into English writing about history and cultural identity in eighteenth-century Ireland: “If violence did not always manifest itself in bodies and bloodshed its rhetorical power in the texts of the period ensured that it was never far from the surface” (12). The 1641 rebellion and the constructed memory of Catholic cruelty and perfidy in the century after lie at the base of much Anglo-Irish writing up to the 1801 Act of Union: “A version of Irish Catholicism as the monstrous stranger will be strongly implicated in this mental infrastructure, a version so powerful as to shape Anglican history itself throughout the eighteenth century” (9). Thus, every discussion of just how “long” Ireland’s eighteenth century really was reveals the fundamental problem with this sort of positivist historiography. It is all, ultimately, beside the point, so long as the key memory at the heart of those constructions is not addressed, in this case the terrors that lie at the center of constructed memory about the 1641 rebellion. This memory requires a spatial, not chronological history since its parameters are embedded within cultural memory and cannot be parsed arbitrarily into decades or centuries. [...]’ (pp.13-14; [See full-text copy - as attached.]

Further: Smart & Hutcheson earlier remark: ‘Jarlath Killeen in Gothic Ireland [... &c.;] examines the limitations of historiographical practice concerning Ireland’s “long” eighteenth century. Arguments about the “real” beginning of this critical period in Irish history belie the inadequacies of chronological (“issues of history”) interpretation of a century which is permeated by memory, in this case, Anglo-Irish memory (real or constructed) of the 1641 rebellion. Referring to what he calls the “internal geography” (13) of the Anglican mind - a pointed reference to the spatial, not chronological nature of the problem - Killeen argues persuasively that the “Irish Gothic is the means by which late eighteenth-century Irish Anglicanism expresses itself” (13). Then, in a powerful methodological prescription for any cultural interpretation of Ireland’s eighteenth century, Killeen claims that the Gothic “is itself the best methodology to examine an elite which has too often been squeezed into monolithic interpretations, whether those interpretations see Ireland in colonial or ancien régime terms” (13). / Like Stoker in Dracula, Killeen rejects the episteme of modern historiography because it insists on “monolithic interpretations” of periodization and makes it impossible to address the function of memory in the construction of culture. Dracula slips by the best strategies of the vampire hunters because none of the historical paradigms proffered in the [12] story can catch him.’ (pp.12-13.) See also footnote to the term episteme: ‘This is Michel Foucault’s term, which Killeen has adapted in this context to mean “the basic language in and through which Irish Anglicans understood the world in which they lived”.’ (Killeen, op. cit., 9; here p.12, n.)

Note: The essay is prefixed with an epigraph from Killeen, viz., - ‘Gothic, in truth, may not belong to the dispossessed but to the paranoid possessors, the out-of-control controllers, the descending Ascendancy. ... Thus, a “colonial” history, Protestantism, and the fear of marginalization - rather than marginalization itself - are central features of the Irish Gothic Tradition.’ (Jarlath Killeen, Gothic Ireland: Horror and the Irish Anglican Imagination in the Long Eighteenth Century, Four Courts Press, 2005; but cf. epigraph above incoporating the first part of this quotation and not the latter - as supra.)

John Sutherland, ‘O’Dracula? Whatever Bram Stoker’s creation was, he wasn’t Irish’, in The Irish Times (18 Nov. 2017): ‘There are biographical explanations for the happening of Dracula. Little Bram was bedridden with a mysterious ailment for the first seven years of his life. Put another way, he was longer than most children sucking at the mother’s breast. Thereafter he grew strong, shining at Trinity College Dublin, in the debating hall, in the classroom and on the sports field. Photographs confirm the grown Bram to have been strikingly handsome, the epitome of the manly “red Irishman”. From childhood he had been stage-struck. Henry Irving’s touring company played Dublin regularly in the mid-1870s. Stoker, a confirmed Irvingite, wrote an admiring review of the actor’s Hamlet, in 1878. It was well received. The young civil servant (as he then was) received a summons to Irving’s suite at the Shelbourne Hotel, where the two men talked until daybreak.The next evening Stoker was informed that the great man had a “special gift” for him. It turned out to be a recitation of Thomas Hood’s melodramatic poem The Dream of Eugene Aram. At the end of his performance Irving tore off his necktie and collapsed in a swoon. “The recitation was different, both in kind and degree, from anything I ever heard,” Stoker recalled. His own response he described as hysterical. One doesn’t need queer theory to elaborate. / Irving impulsively appointed Stoker his “stage manager” (his Renfield, as unkind commentators jest). Bram’s father was horrified. Was there, commentators have wondered, seduction of some kind? Stoker was a confessed Whitmanite. On American theatrical tours he made a point of throwing himself at the feet of the great poet. Whitman’s “inversion” was an open secret. / Stoker was, of course, married to the wispily beautiful Florence Balcombe. He had won her from Oscar Wilde. Bram had the better gnashers. Oscar’s set Florence reportedly found off-puttingly “curly”.’ (Available online; accessed 25.11.2017.)

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Quotations

“The Squaw”: ‘[...] Nurnberg at the time was not so much exploited as it has been since then. Irving had not been playing Faust, and the [28] very name of the old town was hardly known to the great bulk of the travelling public. My wife and I being in the second week of our honeymoon, naturally wanted someone else to join our party, so that when the cheery stranger, Elias P. Hutcheson, hailing from Isthmian City, Bleeding Gulch, Maple Tree County, Neb., turned up at the station at Frankfort, and casually remarked that he was going on to see the most all-fired old Methuselah of a town in Yurrup, and that he guessed that so much travelling alone was enough to send an intelligent, active citizen into the melancholy ward of a daft house, we took the pretty broad hint and suggested that we should join forces.’ (Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories, London: Routledge & Sons 1914, p.45; quoted in Patrick Rafroidi, ‘The Irish Short Story in English: The Birth of a New Tradition’, in Terence Brown & Rafroidi, eds., The Irish Short Story, Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe 1979, pp.28-29 - identifying it as ‘the second sentence of Stoker’s ‘terrible story “The Squaw”’, and offering it as an example of Irish stories in which ‘the mode of presentation implies a narrator [who] seeks to give more authority to his true story’ (ibid., p.28).

The Snake’s Pass (1890), ‘“A gombeen man, is it? Well, I’ll tell ye”, said an old, shrewd-looking man at the other side of the hearth. “He’s a man that linds you a few shillings or a few pounds whin ye want it bad, and thin niver laves ye till he has tuk all he’ve got—yer land an’ yer shanty an’ yer holding an’ yer money an’ yer craps; an’ he would take the blood out of yer body if he could sell it or use it anyhow!”’ (q.p.) Further, ‘[Doyle’s] farm is almost an ideal one for this part of the world; it has good soil, water, shelter, trees, everything that makes a farm pretty and comfortable, as well as being good for farming purposes; and he has to change it for a piece of land which is irregular in shape as the other is compact; without shelter, and partly taken up with this very bog and the utter waste and chaos which, when it shifted in former times, it left behind.’ (The Snake Pass [1890], Brandon Press 1990, p. 53; quote in Luke Gibbons, “Some Hysterical Hatred”: History, Hysteria and the Literary Revival’, in Irish University Review, Spring/Summer 1997, pp.13.) Further, ‘[T]his leather strap attached to the handles of the chest each had around his shoulder, and so, willy-nilly, they were dragged to their doom. Never mind! they were brave fellows all the same, and faithful ones - they never let go the handles - look! their dead hands clasp them still. France should be proud of such sons! It would make a noble coat of arms, this treasure chest sent by freemen to aid others - and with two such supporters!’ (ibid., p.239; Gibbons, op. cit., p.15 [dated as conject. 1890]); [Phelim Joyce, on the use of the money:] ‘Take it I will, an gladly; but not for myself. The money was sent for Irelan’s good - to help them that wanted help, an’ plase God! I’ll see it doesn’t go astray now!’ (p.240.)

Dracula (1897) - Jonathan Harker’s Journal [Chap. III]: ‘This was evidently the portion of the castle occupied by the ladies in bygone days, for the furniture had more air of comfort than any I had seen. The windows were curtainless, and the yellow moonlight, flooding in through the diamond panes, enabled one to see even colours, whilst it softened the wealth of dust which lay over all and disguised in some measure the ravages of time and the moth. My lamp seemed to be of little effect in the brilliant moonlight, but I was glad to have it with me, for there was a dread loneliness in the place which chilled my heart and made my nerves tremble. Still, it was better than living alone in the rooms which I had come to hate from the presence of the Count, and after trying a little to school my nerves, I found a soft quietude come over me. Here I am, sitting at a little oak table where in old times possibly some fair lady sat to pen, with much thought and many blushes, her ill-spelt love-letter, and writing in my diary in shorthand all that has happened since I closed it last. It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance. And yet, unless my senses deceive me, the old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill.’

Dracula (1897) - Van Helsing’s silver bullet: ‘All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions. These do not at the first appear much, when the matter is one of life and death - nay, of more than either life or death. Yet must we be satisfied; in the first place because we have to be no other means is at our control - and secondly, because, after all, these things - tradition and superstition - are everything. Does not the belief in vampires rest for others - though not, alas! for us - on them? A year ago which of us would have received such a possibility, in the midst of our scientific, sceptical, matter-of-fact nineteenth century? [..] Take it, then, that the vampire, and the belief in his limitations and his cure, rest for the moment on the same base. For, let me tell you, he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over [285] France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day. He have follow the wake of the berserker Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar. So far, then, we have all we may act upon; and let me tell you that very much of the beliefs are justified by what we have seen in our own so unhappy experience. The vampire live on, and cannot die by mere passing of the time; he can flourish when that he can fatten on the blood of the living. Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seemed as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty. But he cannot flourish without this diet; he eat not as others. Even friend Jonathan, who lived with him for weeks, did never see him to eat, never! He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect, as again Jonathan observe. He has the strength of many in his hand - witness again - Jonathan when he shut the door against the wolfs, and when he help him from the diligence too. He can transform himself to wolf, as we gather from the ship arrival in Whitby, when he tear open the dog; he can be as bat, as Madam Mina saw him on the window at Whitby, and as friend John saw him fly from this so near house, and as my friend Quincy saw him at the window of Miss Lucy. He can come in mist which he create - that noble ship’s captain proved him of this; but, from what we know, the distance he can make this mist is limited, and it can only be round himself. He come on moon light rays as elemental dust - as again Jonathan saw those sister in the castle of Dracula. He become so small - we ourselves saw Miss Lucy, ere she was at peace, slip through a hair-breadth space at the tomb door. He can, when once he find his way, come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound or even fused up with fire - solder you call it. He can see in the dark - no small power this, in a world which is one half shut from the light. Ah, but hear me through. He can do all these things, yet he is not free. Nay, he is even more prisoner than the slave of the galley, than the madman in his cell. He cannot go where he lists; he who is not of nature has yet to obey some of nature’s laws - why we know not. He may not enter anywhere at the first, sunless there be someone of the household who bid him to come; though afterwards he can come as he please. His power a ceases, as does that of all evil things, at the coming of the day. Only at certain times can he have limited freedom. If he be not at the place whither he is bound, he can only change himself at noon or at exact sunrise or sunset. These things are we; told, and in this record of ours we have proof by inference. Thus, whereas he can do as he will within his limit, when he have his earth-home, his coffin-home, his hell-home, the place - unhallowed, as we saw when he went to the grave of the suicide at Whitby; still at other time he can only change when the time come. It is said, too, that he can only pass running water at the slack or the flood of the tide. Then there are things which so afflict him that he has no power, as the garlic that we know of, and as for things sacred, as this symbol, my crucifix, that was amongst us even now when we resolve, to them he is nothing, but in their presence he take his place far off and silent with respect. There are others, too, which I shall tell you of, lest in our seeking we may need them. The branch of wild rose on his coffin keep him that he move not from it; a sacred bullet fired into the coffin kill him so that he be true dead; and as for the stake through him, we know already of its peace; or the cut-off head that giveth rest. We have seen it with our eyes. [287] There had been from the loins of this very one great men and good women and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. [288]; [...] so much data we must proceed to lay our campaign [288] (For extended quotations, see infra; for full text, see Irish Classics Library via index or as attached].)

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Donnybrook Fair: ‘The days of Donnybrook Fair and all it meant, the days of the stage Irishman and the stagey Irish play, of Fenianism and landlordism are rapidly passing away, if they have not even now [come] to an end [to be replaced by] a strenuous, industrious spirit, spreading its revivifying influence so rapidly over the old country as to be worth more than historical bitterness and sentimental joys’; (‘The Great White Fair in Dublin: How there has arisen on the site of the old Donnybrook Fair a great exhibition as typical of the new Ireland as the former festival was of the Ireland of the past’, in The World’s Work: An Illustrated Magazine of Efficiency and Progress, Vol. 9 (1907), p.570-1; quoted in William Hughes, ‘“For Ireland’s Good”, The Reconstruction of Rural Ireland in Bram Stoker’s The Snake’s Pass’, in Irish Studies Review, Autumn 1995, pp.17-21; p.21; also [in part] in Chris Morash, ‘“Ever Under Some Unnatural Condition”: Bram Stoker and the Colonial Fantastic’, in Brian Cosgrove, ed., Literature and the Supernatural, Blackrock: Columbia Press 1995), pp.95-118, p.109.)

Grand Old Man [letter to W. E. H. Gladstone]: ‘I deem it a high privilege to be able to address you in the first person and to be able to put before you a book of my own, though it be only an atom in the intellectual Kingdom where you have so long held sway. [...] It is a story of a vampire [-] the old medieval vampire but recrudescent today [...] the book is necessarily full of horrors and terrors but I trust that these are calculated to cleanse the mind by pity & terror. At any rate there is nothing base in the book, and though superstition is fought in it with the weapons of superstition, I hope it is not irreverent.’ (Quoted in Belford, Bram Stoker, 1996, p.274-75.)

‘The Censorship of Fiction’, The Nineeteeth Century & After, [1906]), ‘A close analysis will show that the only emotions which in the long run harm are those arising from sex impulses and when we have realised this we have put a finger on the actual point of danger.’ (Quoted in Belford, op. cit., 1996, p.312.)

Simply killing!: ‘Never before did I understand the pleasure of killing a man. Since then, it makes me shudder when I think of how so potent a passion, or so keen a pleasure, can rest latent in the heart of a righteous man. It may have been that between the man and myself was all the antagonism that came from race, and fear, and wrongdoing; but the act of his killing was to me a joy unspeakable. It will rest with me as a wild pleasure till I die.’ (The Mystery of the Sea, 1902; rep. edn. Sutton 1997, p. 260; quoted in Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker’s The Mystery of the Sea: Ireland and the Spanish-Cuban-American War’, in Irish Studies Review, Vol. 6, No. 2, Aug. 1988, pp.131-38; p.137.)

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