Bram Stoker’s vampire novel Dracula (1897) is not about Ireland in any obvious sense, so why do we study it on an introductory course on Irish literature? Granted Stoker was an Irishman - born in Dublin - but only one of his works, The Snake’s Pass (1890), is set in Ireland.

After graduating from Trinity College, Dublin, and some years as a Clerk to the Petty Sessions, he hitched his star to the theatrical career of Henry Irving, a famous English actor, and moved to London where he lived for the remainder of his life, with occasional trips to America and one famous outing to Whitby where he conceived the plot of Dracula in 1895-96.

In looking at his vampire novel in an Irish context, however, we are consider if the predatory relationship between Count Dracula and his victims does not in some way relationship mirror the relationship between landlords and tenants (or peasants) in Ireland during the Land War of of extreme depredation

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Van Helsing’s many speeches are heavily charged with elements of a gender discourse which treats men and woman as complementary and opposite poles in society and nature, the one embodying strength and rationality (men) and the other intuition and sympathy (women). In this schema, each is heavily dependent on the other while the superiority of the first is dogmatically insistent.

In the same way the social roles of each are clearly demarcated and their sexual conduct effectively policed in corresponding ways Indeed, the reason for Lucy Westenra’s death at the hands - or, rather, fangs? - of Dracula is arguably her transgression in the sense that she flirts openly with several of the men who form the team that track down Dracula in the end.

That team is comprised of a middleclass Englishman (Harker), an English aristocracy (Goldalming), an American (Quincy Morris) and a Dutchman (Van Helsing), with Doctor Seward, a Scot, as a sort of associate member. In the main it is, then, an Anglo-American ‘union’ which reproduces the general features of the British Union (excepting the absent Irishman) and maps this onto a wider union that includes North America by virtue of the English language and a shared Protestant history.

In all of this, Van Helsing is the odd man out. In the first place, he is non-Anglophone, and speaks a very broken English (inferior, in fact, to Dracula’s). Secondly, he is a Catholic. This, in fact, is the source of his special powers as a vampire-hunter and in particular his access to the eucharist (or host) which is used to combat vampirism.

Some of the physical transactions of the novel are distinctly queasy: not only is the blood drawn by Dracula, or that of Dracula consumed by his victims the stuff of sexual hyperbole, but Stoker introduced the word “sperm” - meaning a drop of candle-wax - into the text at the point when the three young man jointly penetrate Lucy with a death-dealing stake in her crypt-cum-vampire’s lair. (Sorry about the other pun!)

Besides his ‘gender discourse’, however, Van Helsing has very specific theory of the origins of vampirism - or, at least, the defining characteristics of the vampire: Dracula is a ‘criminal type’. This he shares with Mina Murray. In essence, they argue that he shares with criminals the supposed incapacity to learn from their mistakes and hence the repeated ‘crime’ (or recidivism).

Now, this version of ‘degeneracy theory’, preached by several continental experts of the period but not accepted in Britain, where the criminal never came to be regarded as a definite ‘type’ charing characteristics different frm the rest of the population.

Bearing this in mind, it remains for us to decide why Bram Stoker invoked such a theory, and to consider how much it had to do with his memories of social violence in Ireland. One answer to this question is given in a published article by the coordinator of this module ...