Count Dracula
Vampire character created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897), and the most famous fictional vampire of them all. Count Dracula's name has become synonymous with vampires.
At some point in his work on the novel, Stoker named his vampire "Count Wampyr." But in 1892 his notes show the name Count Dracula. Stoker found the name in An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) by William Wilkinson, which he read while staying in Whitby, England. The 15th-century Wallachian voivode(prince) Vlad Tepes was known as "Dracula" for "son of the devil." Stoker liked the name of and its meaning, and so he lifted it for his vampire. He did not base the count on Vlad, except to describe Dracula as being descended from a line of fierce warrior noblemen. Nor did he base Dracula on Elizabeth Bathory, as some researchers have suggested.
Count Dracula is mysterious and unknowable. He spends little time onstage in the novel, adding to the aura of mystery around him. Unlike the modern vampires created by Anne Rice and other authors, Count Dracula does not concern himself with morality. He is a fiend and a monster. If he agonizes over issues about good and evil and the morality of his actions, the reader is not privy to it in Dracula. His first-person voice explaining his thoughts and motives is never heard. All that is known about Count Dracula comes through the perceptions and experiences of others. Dracula is told via the letters and diaries of the principal characters.
Apperance, Characteristics, and Powers
Stoker relied on other fiction models and his imagination for his description of Count Dracula. The limited folklore accounts of vampires that were available in English discussed primarily the conditions of disinterred corpses, going into detail about the ruddiness of complexions, flaccidity if limbs, growth of hair and nails, and so forth.
Count Dracula followed well-known fictional vampires such as Lord Ruthven, Carmilla and Varney the vampire, all of whom come from aristocratic stock and possess a sensual allure that draws others to them. Ruthven is rakishly seductive; Carmilla is beautiful and seductivel Varney manages to prey upon young women while being "hideous" in appearance. While the count's preying upon young women has sexual overtones, the figure of the count himself is unappealing. After his arrival in England, his countenance becomes more youthful, and his hair darkens--but he is still unattractive.
Stoker also was inspired by Transylvanian folklore he gleaned from the article, "Transylvania Superstitions" (1885) by Mme. Emily De Laszowski Gerard, which describes the evil nosferatu or vampire, as well as a secret devil's academy called the Scholomance, where apprentices learn all the demonic arts and magical skills.
The reader first encounters the count through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor's clerk who has been sent to the count's castle in
Transylvania to finalize a real estate purchase--Carfax Abbey in London. Harker's first glimpse of the count comes late at night upon his arrival at the castle:
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache,
and a clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere.
When the count grasps his hand, Harker notices he has an exceedingly strong grip, so strong it makes Harker wince. Dracula's flesh is so cold it seems more like the flesh of a dead man than a living one. After Harker arrives at the castle, is settled and he dines, he has his first opportunity to really study the count, and finds him to be "of a very marked physiognomy":
Harker also notices the Count's hands:
. . . they were rather coarse--broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the center of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.
The elements of this physique are wolfish; one of Stoker's sources was Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Werewolves (1865).
As his stay in the castle becomes more of an imprisonment, Harker observes other horrors about his host. He never eats food. He is about only during the hours of darkness. He casts no reflection in mirrors. He is drawn to blood. He has the ability to crawl lizardlike down the sheer face of the outer castle wall. He commands three women who attempt to vampirize Harker. He materializes in specks of swirling dust that glitter in the moonlight. He commands wolves.
Harker's greatest shock comes from when he finds the count lying in a box of earth down in the castle's chapel, and knows the horrible truth about him:
There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
Thoroughly revolted, Harker can barely bring himself to touch the count and search for a key that will enable him to escape the castle. As he does so, the count seems to make a mocking smile at him that nearly drives Harker mad. Harker is appalled at the thought that he is helping the count come to England, where undoubtedly he will attack others to satisfy his bloodlust. He is seized with an overwhelming desire to destroy Dracula, "to rid the world of such a monster." He grabs a shovel and lifts it high to strike at the "hateful face." But just as he does so, Dracula's head turns and his eyes, "with all their blaze of basilisk horror," paralyze Harker. The shovel turns in his hand, and all he succeeds in doing is making a deep gash in the count's forehead. As the lid to the box falls, the last glimpse Harker has is of "the bloated face, bloodstained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in nethermost hell."
Thus the inhuman monster, the unspeakable evil, is unleashed upon England, a symbol of the civilized world. When the count arrives in England, he leaps off his ship in the form of a wolf. After he ensconces himself and his vampire women in the abbey, he mesmerizes and takes over the unfortunate insane R. M. Renfield in Dr. John Seward's asylum, turning him into a mindless slave. He preys upon 19-year-old Lucy Westenra, coming to her bedroom in window in the form of a bat. He is a cunning predator, able to slip through cracks and under doorways as a mist , and make himself invisible to others. He can hypnotize others and send them telepathic commands. As he preys upon others, their blood rejuvenates him. His hair darkens, and his appearance becomes more youthful, but is still hard and sinister. He can be out in daylight, though sunlight weakens him, and he cannot shape-shift then. He casts no shadow. His red, demonic eyes haunt others.
About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire expert, delivers a long monologue on Dracula and the powers of vampires. Dracula's family was great and noble, he says, and in life the count was fearless and intelligent--a statesmen, soldier, and alchemist. But some members of the family served the devil, and Dracula himself attended the Scholomance and learned every dark art possible. Dracula "is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome: he flourished in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese [Malasyian region]; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day," Van Helsing says.
The count has all the powers of vampires, which Van Helsing calls the nosferatu:
Dracula shows no remorse for his horrifying predations. Like an animal, he must kill in order to survive. But to the cast of principal characters, he is an abomination that must be destroyed. Mina Harker, who is vamparized herself and is in danger of becoming like Lucy, is the sole character to express sympathy for Dracula as a lost soul.
In the end, Dracula meets a violent end. The others, now vampire hunters, pursue him as he goes back to his natural land in Transylvania. They catch up with a band of gypsies who are carrying his box of earth, just as dusk is approaching. Inside, the count is deathly pale and waxen-like, with his red eyes glaring open. As the sun sinks, a triumphant look comes over him. But Jonathan Harker slashes his throat with a knife, and his cohort Quincey Morris plunges a bowie knife into his heart. In the drawing of a breath, the count crumbles to dust and vanishes.
Romanticizing the Count
The job of romanticizing Dracula was left to Hamilton Dean, the son of a friend of Stoker's. Working with John L. Balderston, Deane adapted Dracula for the stage. They presented Count Dracula as a suave, sophisticated gentleman in evening dress, including a black opera cape. The cape became a standard part of the count's wardrobe in numerous portrayals that followed, and a staple of popular vampire lore. Deane simplified the novel, and in the end Dracula is staked, not stabbed.
Tod Browning's 1931 movie Dracula was adapted more from Deane's stage play than from the novel, and when the magnetic Bela Lugosi appeared as the sophisticated count, women the world over swooned for him. Lugosi's Hungarian accent and measured English also became incorporated into portrayals of the count. Draculas to come had to speak slowly and in a heavy foreign accent. Browning's Dracula is staked at the end, too.
The sophisticated image of Dracula was reinforced by other leading Draculas such as Christopher Lee, Louis Jourdan, and frank Langella, sweeping about in their grand capes. Lee especially revised the stiff image of Dracula established by Deane and Lugosi, portraying a high-action, violent, and crafty villain in the Hammer Films productions involving the count.
The only film of note to portray Dracula more as Stoker envisioned him was Nosferatu, made in 1922 as a silent film starring Max Schreck and remade in 1979 starring Klaus Kinski. Nosferatu features a monster even more horrid and repulsive than Count Dracula--an ugly, ratlike vampire with long, pointed nails and two front teeth that are long and sharp and are better suited for biting than canine teeth. The vampire Graf Orlock becomes the first vampire to die by sunlight, thereby creating another institution in popular lore. Orlock simply fades into nothingness when he is hit by sunlight. Film and fiction vampires since who are not staked are struck by sunlight and die dramatically, by bursting into flames and incinerating.
Over time, Dracula's apperance and demeanor have become a caricature: a white-faced, fanged, red-lipped man with a widow's peak, slicked-back black hair, and high-collared black cape. this cartoonish "Dracula" has been parodied in comedies and by characters such as "Count Duckula."
Symbolic Meanings of Count Dracula
Dracula can be read as a horror story about the primordial battle between good and evil or interpreted in terms of sexual repression, alienation, and the decline of Victorian England. Count Dracula has been analyzed extensively from perspectives of Victorian mores, Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology, and the feminist movement. He is seen as a symbol of humanity's greatest fears: fear of death, fear of the grave, fear of the dark, fear of the demonic, fear of all things--and people--strange and alien. He is the Outsider. He is the symbol of alienation itself, the sense of isolation and alienation that are part of industrialized society.
Most often the count is interpreted in terms of sexual desire. Dracula represents unleashed desire and eroticism, the consequences of wantonness, the lure of the forbidden.
Count Dracula has been played in films and portrayed in novels many times; artists search for new twists and nuances. His story line is changed. His countenance is more often alluring than repulsive. Vampire characters inspired by Count Dracula have acquired more soul and have more depth and dimension than the count. Rice's vampires, for example, put themselves through psychoanalysis on the page. Yet the glamorous vampire has not sounded the death knell of vampires or of the count. No matter how great the popularity of the other vampires, Count Dracula remains the definitive human bloodsucker. No other character has eclipsed him, not even Lestat De Lioncourt. There is always yet another talke that can be told of the most famous monster of all.
Vampire character created by Bram Stoker in his novel Dracula (1897), and the most famous fictional vampire of them all. Count Dracula's name has become synonymous with vampires.
At some point in his work on the novel, Stoker named his vampire "Count Wampyr." But in 1892 his notes show the name Count Dracula. Stoker found the name in An Account of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820) by William Wilkinson, which he read while staying in Whitby, England. The 15th-century Wallachian voivode(prince) Vlad Tepes was known as "Dracula" for "son of the devil." Stoker liked the name of and its meaning, and so he lifted it for his vampire. He did not base the count on Vlad, except to describe Dracula as being descended from a line of fierce warrior noblemen. Nor did he base Dracula on Elizabeth Bathory, as some researchers have suggested.
Count Dracula is mysterious and unknowable. He spends little time onstage in the novel, adding to the aura of mystery around him. Unlike the modern vampires created by Anne Rice and other authors, Count Dracula does not concern himself with morality. He is a fiend and a monster. If he agonizes over issues about good and evil and the morality of his actions, the reader is not privy to it in Dracula. His first-person voice explaining his thoughts and motives is never heard. All that is known about Count Dracula comes through the perceptions and experiences of others. Dracula is told via the letters and diaries of the principal characters.
Apperance, Characteristics, and Powers
Stoker relied on other fiction models and his imagination for his description of Count Dracula. The limited folklore accounts of vampires that were available in English discussed primarily the conditions of disinterred corpses, going into detail about the ruddiness of complexions, flaccidity if limbs, growth of hair and nails, and so forth.
Count Dracula followed well-known fictional vampires such as Lord Ruthven, Carmilla and Varney the vampire, all of whom come from aristocratic stock and possess a sensual allure that draws others to them. Ruthven is rakishly seductive; Carmilla is beautiful and seductivel Varney manages to prey upon young women while being "hideous" in appearance. While the count's preying upon young women has sexual overtones, the figure of the count himself is unappealing. After his arrival in England, his countenance becomes more youthful, and his hair darkens--but he is still unattractive.
Stoker also was inspired by Transylvanian folklore he gleaned from the article, "Transylvania Superstitions" (1885) by Mme. Emily De Laszowski Gerard, which describes the evil nosferatu or vampire, as well as a secret devil's academy called the Scholomance, where apprentices learn all the demonic arts and magical skills.
The reader first encounters the count through the eyes of Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor's clerk who has been sent to the count's castle in
Transylvania to finalize a real estate purchase--Carfax Abbey in London. Harker's first glimpse of the count comes late at night upon his arrival at the castle:
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache,
and a clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere.
When the count grasps his hand, Harker notices he has an exceedingly strong grip, so strong it makes Harker wince. Dracula's flesh is so cold it seems more like the flesh of a dead man than a living one. After Harker arrives at the castle, is settled and he dines, he has his first opportunity to really study the count, and finds him to be "of a very marked physiognomy":
His face was a strong--a very strong--aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily around the temples, but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, as far as I could see under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth: these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
Harker also notices the Count's hands:
. . . they were rather coarse--broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the center of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point.
The elements of this physique are wolfish; one of Stoker's sources was Sabine Baring-Gould's The Book of Werewolves (1865).
As his stay in the castle becomes more of an imprisonment, Harker observes other horrors about his host. He never eats food. He is about only during the hours of darkness. He casts no reflection in mirrors. He is drawn to blood. He has the ability to crawl lizardlike down the sheer face of the outer castle wall. He commands three women who attempt to vampirize Harker. He materializes in specks of swirling dust that glitter in the moonlight. He commands wolves.
Harker's greatest shock comes from when he finds the count lying in a box of earth down in the castle's chapel, and knows the horrible truth about him:
There lay the Count, but looking as if his youth had been half renewed, for the white hair and moustache were changed to dark iron-grey; the cheeks fuller, and the white skin seemed ruby-red underneath; the mouth was redder than ever, for on the lips were gouts of fresh blood, which trickled from the corners of the mouth and ran over the chin and neck. Even the deep, burning eyes seemed set amongst swollen flesh, for the lids and pouches underneath were bloated. It seemed as if the whole awful creature were simply gorged with blood; he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion.
Thoroughly revolted, Harker can barely bring himself to touch the count and search for a key that will enable him to escape the castle. As he does so, the count seems to make a mocking smile at him that nearly drives Harker mad. Harker is appalled at the thought that he is helping the count come to England, where undoubtedly he will attack others to satisfy his bloodlust. He is seized with an overwhelming desire to destroy Dracula, "to rid the world of such a monster." He grabs a shovel and lifts it high to strike at the "hateful face." But just as he does so, Dracula's head turns and his eyes, "with all their blaze of basilisk horror," paralyze Harker. The shovel turns in his hand, and all he succeeds in doing is making a deep gash in the count's forehead. As the lid to the box falls, the last glimpse Harker has is of "the bloated face, bloodstained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in nethermost hell."
Thus the inhuman monster, the unspeakable evil, is unleashed upon England, a symbol of the civilized world. When the count arrives in England, he leaps off his ship in the form of a wolf. After he ensconces himself and his vampire women in the abbey, he mesmerizes and takes over the unfortunate insane R. M. Renfield in Dr. John Seward's asylum, turning him into a mindless slave. He preys upon 19-year-old Lucy Westenra, coming to her bedroom in window in the form of a bat. He is a cunning predator, able to slip through cracks and under doorways as a mist , and make himself invisible to others. He can hypnotize others and send them telepathic commands. As he preys upon others, their blood rejuvenates him. His hair darkens, and his appearance becomes more youthful, but is still hard and sinister. He can be out in daylight, though sunlight weakens him, and he cannot shape-shift then. He casts no shadow. His red, demonic eyes haunt others.
About two-thirds of the way through the novel, Professor Abraham Van Helsing, the vampire expert, delivers a long monologue on Dracula and the powers of vampires. Dracula's family was great and noble, he says, and in life the count was fearless and intelligent--a statesmen, soldier, and alchemist. But some members of the family served the devil, and Dracula himself attended the Scholomance and learned every dark art possible. Dracula "is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome: he flourished in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese [Malasyian region]; and in China, so far from us in all ways, there even is he, and the peoples fear him at this day," Van Helsing says.
The count has all the powers of vampires, which Van Helsing calls the nosferatu:
The nosferatu do not die like the bee when he sting once. He is only stronger; and being stronger, have yet more power to work evil. This vampire which is amongst us is of himself so strong in person as twenty men; he is of cunning more than mortal, for his cunning can be the growth of ages, he have still the aids of necromancy, which is, as his etymology imply, the divination of the dead, and all the dead that he can come nigh to are for him at command; he is bright, and more than brute: he is devil in callous, and the heart of him is not; he can, within limitations, appear at will when, and where, and in many of the forms that are to him; he can, within his range, direct the elements: the storm, the fog, the thunder; he can command all the meaner things: the rat, the owl, and the bat--the moth, and the fox, and the wolf; he can grow and become small; and he can at times vanish and come unknown.
Dracula shows no remorse for his horrifying predations. Like an animal, he must kill in order to survive. But to the cast of principal characters, he is an abomination that must be destroyed. Mina Harker, who is vamparized herself and is in danger of becoming like Lucy, is the sole character to express sympathy for Dracula as a lost soul.
In the end, Dracula meets a violent end. The others, now vampire hunters, pursue him as he goes back to his natural land in Transylvania. They catch up with a band of gypsies who are carrying his box of earth, just as dusk is approaching. Inside, the count is deathly pale and waxen-like, with his red eyes glaring open. As the sun sinks, a triumphant look comes over him. But Jonathan Harker slashes his throat with a knife, and his cohort Quincey Morris plunges a bowie knife into his heart. In the drawing of a breath, the count crumbles to dust and vanishes.
Romanticizing the Count
The job of romanticizing Dracula was left to Hamilton Dean, the son of a friend of Stoker's. Working with John L. Balderston, Deane adapted Dracula for the stage. They presented Count Dracula as a suave, sophisticated gentleman in evening dress, including a black opera cape. The cape became a standard part of the count's wardrobe in numerous portrayals that followed, and a staple of popular vampire lore. Deane simplified the novel, and in the end Dracula is staked, not stabbed.
Tod Browning's 1931 movie Dracula was adapted more from Deane's stage play than from the novel, and when the magnetic Bela Lugosi appeared as the sophisticated count, women the world over swooned for him. Lugosi's Hungarian accent and measured English also became incorporated into portrayals of the count. Draculas to come had to speak slowly and in a heavy foreign accent. Browning's Dracula is staked at the end, too.
The sophisticated image of Dracula was reinforced by other leading Draculas such as Christopher Lee, Louis Jourdan, and frank Langella, sweeping about in their grand capes. Lee especially revised the stiff image of Dracula established by Deane and Lugosi, portraying a high-action, violent, and crafty villain in the Hammer Films productions involving the count.
The only film of note to portray Dracula more as Stoker envisioned him was Nosferatu, made in 1922 as a silent film starring Max Schreck and remade in 1979 starring Klaus Kinski. Nosferatu features a monster even more horrid and repulsive than Count Dracula--an ugly, ratlike vampire with long, pointed nails and two front teeth that are long and sharp and are better suited for biting than canine teeth. The vampire Graf Orlock becomes the first vampire to die by sunlight, thereby creating another institution in popular lore. Orlock simply fades into nothingness when he is hit by sunlight. Film and fiction vampires since who are not staked are struck by sunlight and die dramatically, by bursting into flames and incinerating.
Over time, Dracula's apperance and demeanor have become a caricature: a white-faced, fanged, red-lipped man with a widow's peak, slicked-back black hair, and high-collared black cape. this cartoonish "Dracula" has been parodied in comedies and by characters such as "Count Duckula."
Symbolic Meanings of Count Dracula
Dracula can be read as a horror story about the primordial battle between good and evil or interpreted in terms of sexual repression, alienation, and the decline of Victorian England. Count Dracula has been analyzed extensively from perspectives of Victorian mores, Freudian psychology, Jungian psychology, and the feminist movement. He is seen as a symbol of humanity's greatest fears: fear of death, fear of the grave, fear of the dark, fear of the demonic, fear of all things--and people--strange and alien. He is the Outsider. He is the symbol of alienation itself, the sense of isolation and alienation that are part of industrialized society.
Most often the count is interpreted in terms of sexual desire. Dracula represents unleashed desire and eroticism, the consequences of wantonness, the lure of the forbidden.
Count Dracula has been played in films and portrayed in novels many times; artists search for new twists and nuances. His story line is changed. His countenance is more often alluring than repulsive. Vampire characters inspired by Count Dracula have acquired more soul and have more depth and dimension than the count. Rice's vampires, for example, put themselves through psychoanalysis on the page. Yet the glamorous vampire has not sounded the death knell of vampires or of the count. No matter how great the popularity of the other vampires, Count Dracula remains the definitive human bloodsucker. No other character has eclipsed him, not even Lestat De Lioncourt. There is always yet another talke that can be told of the most famous monster of all.
