My first experience with Bram Stoker’s Dracula was in middle school, watching the 1992 Dracula film with my mom. Despite not being a fan of spooky movies, my mom likes Dracula, both the book and the media inspired by it. Considering I have, since my youth, been a total fan of the macabre and ghastly, I fell in love with the film and aspired to read the book, which I promptly found a copy of. Since then, I have read the physical copy twice, and listened to a full audiobook once. Once in a while, my mother and I will rewatch the 1992 film.
Dracula intrigues me for a number of reasons, one of which I share with my younger self. It had significant influence on the development of the general trope of the “vampire” and its popularity—shaped in Europe “by an intersection of Enlightenment misunderstandings and misinterpretations from the Romantic period” (Bohn 1). I possessed a deep interest in knowing why vampires might act, think, or exist the way they do in Dracula and other vampire media. The idea of the vampire as a form of violent, undead creature originated in Eastern Europe in Bulgaria. Lots of creatures actually predate the notion of the vampire in wider western culture, as it was an exclusively Slavic myth. Additionally, early vampires did not drink blood; the connection between vampires and the “vampire bat,” as well, are complex, and there is much debate on when, exactly, the separate fear surrounding bloodsucking bats and the myth of the vampire merged (Dodd 110-111).
And now that I’ve aged, I have a more detailed understanding of the progression of the vampire into wider western myth. Tales of vampires were often built from a number of inspirations, including the Slavic folk legends—however, other influences were misinterpretations, whether by pure mistake or more sinister cultural assumptions (Bohn 2-3). By this misinterpreted point, non-Slavic peoples considered the vampire to be basically this: an undead being that sucks the life out of others. It further transformed over the Romantic period into a “Slavophobe cliche” (Bohn 3), indicating a strong fear of ‘the other’—an unsurprising development after having always been somewhat intertwined with stereotyping. This history is especially prevalent in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, racial and ethnic stereotyping intertwining with its fantastical version of real-life.
Stereotyping, culturally fearful and ignorant origins are not uncommon for many of today’s popular spooky monsters. Also common is an intersectionality within this fear of ‘the other,’ in which ethnic and racial lenses intertwine with feminist and queer theory. This is what intrigues me most about the text and its related literature currently. I am now able to put a finger on the relationship between my complex feelings about women, ‘foreignness,’ and sexuality in Dracula, and marry it with my appreciation of its format.
The book is told through letters and journals, enabling a wide range of character perspectives and a few unique lenses from which to piece the story together. This stylistic choice is not only effective from a horror or gothic perspective, but also deeply laced with the intricacies of the ‘otherness’ I’ve been speaking of. The form of letters and journal accounts plainly mirrors early misinterpreted and stereotype-based western Enlightenment writings inspired by the original vampire myths. Additionally, whose writings have been curated and collected from the fictional world of Dracula raises important questions of who has been denied a personal point-of-view, or even of the included writers, whose points of view hold the most merit and importance. What is left out of letters or journals within the book, or how the more disturbing encounters with vampires are described, also points to questions of sex and sexuality. The stylistic chapter formatting of the book that first intrigued me is intricately woven with the origins of the western vampire that interest me and its strategic cultural usage, punctuated by consistent fears regarding gender and sexuality. In other words: my interest in deconstructing Dracula has only increased since my childhood, and the deeper I go, the more complicated (and therefore, perhaps, scary?) it gets.
Works Cited
Bohn, Thomas M. “Introduction: The Vampire as an Imperial Category.” The Vampire : Origins of a European Myth. Translated by Francis Ipgrave, Berghahn, 2019, https://doi.org/10.1515/9781789202939.
Dodd, Kevin. “Blood Suckers Most Cruel: The Vampire and the Bat In and Before Dracula.” Athens Journal of Humanities & Arts 6.2 (2019): 107-132.
Works Referenced
Popa, Ileana F. “Cultural Stereotypes: From Dracula’s Myth to Contemporary Diasporic Productions.” VCU Scholar’s Compass, 2006, scholarscompass.vcu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2344&context=etd.
Domínguez-Rué, Emma. “Sins of the Flesh: Anorexia, Eroticism and the Female Vampire in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Journal of Gender Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 2010, pp. 297–308, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2010.494346.