[In the following essay, Leatherdale considers Dracula as a valuable piece of social and political commentary, maintaining that the novel mirrors “the ideological strains and tensions that afflicted the Britain of Stoker's middle years.”]

From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula is … a manic individualist; from his own point of view … he is the bearer of the promise of true union, union which transcends death. From the bourgeois point of view, Dracula stands for sexual perversion and sadism; but we also know that what his victims experience at the moment of consummation is joy, unhealthy perhaps but of a power unknown in conventional relationships. Dracula exists and exerts power through right immemorial; Van Helsing and his associates defeat him in the appropriate fashion, through hard work and diligent application, the weapons of a class which derives its existence from labour.

—David Punter, The Literature of Terror, p. 260

In this, a fifth and final perspective on Dracula, attention comes back ‘down to earth’. The concerns of this [essay] are not biblical or occult, but social and political. Dracula is a valuable period piece, mirroring the ideological strains and tensions that afflicted the Britain of Stoker's middle years. His attitudes towards the place of women in society have already been considered. In the following pages issues relating to, among others, social class, race, crime, Nazism, Marxism, and the Cold War will be explored, where they can usefully shed light on Dracula. In the process some understanding will be reached on how the Dracula myth has been manipulated for the purposes of twentieth-century propaganda.

Bram Stoker, as befits the age in which he lived and his own perceived place in the social hierarchy, was notably class conscious and socially prejudiced. The dramatis personae of Dracula are, with the exception of Renfield, all drawn from the well-to-do, the guardians of the Empire, and the book is shot through with social, class, racial, and sexual prejudices. The novel is unabashedly ‘conservative’, firstly, in that all those who die show qualities of rebelliousness or independence; secondly, in having the bourgeois characters at the conclusion revert back to the bliss of the opening without benefiting from any social, as opposed to spiritual, advancement in any form; and thirdly, in a more ideological sense. Stoker was writing an ostensibly non-political novel, yet he still manages to create a work which reinforces the prevailing establishment beliefs of the ruling classes. Jackson has remarked, with reference to Stoker's final fantasy novel The Lair of the White Worm: ‘the shadow on the edges of bourgeois culture is variously identified as black, mad, primitive, criminal, socially deprived, deviant, crippled, or (when sexually assertive) female’.¹ Likewise in Dracula, Stoker's conscious world is rigidly middle class, monogamous, and male dominated—under an all-seeing God. When Renfield is introduced to Morris, Godalming, and Van Helsing he at once recognizes their prized virtues as stemming from, respectively, ‘nationality, heredity, and the possession of natural gifts’ (D [Dracula] 18:292): in other words it helps to be of Anglo-Saxon stock, to possess unearned riches, and to have taken advantage of an élitist (British) education.

Let us glance at some of the peripheral characters in Dracula. The existence of maids and servants is of course axiomatic, although the novel is concerned with the adventures ‘above stairs’, not ‘below’. Stoker has little patience with those employed in domestic service: he denigrates the elaborate ritual of mourning rigidly observed by the ‘lower classes’ (D 12:179); he describes them as untrustworthy and lacking courage when it comes to finding suitable blood-donors (D 12:180); and includes among their number the obligatory thief—someone who could even stoop to stealing a crucifix from a corpse (D 13:200).

Stoker's real scorn, or rather contempt, is reserved for the ‘harijans’, the untouchables. He seems to flinch every time his demure ladies and gallant gentlemen are forced into social contact with the manual working classes. Their one redeeming feature is their uniform deference to their betters, but everywhere they are encountered they are shown to exhibit the same unspeakable characteristics: uncouthness, illiteracy, peculiar dialects riddled with expletives, excessive drinking, and preparedness to offer favours only for monetary or, better, liquid reward. (In this, their demands are merely parodies of Dracula's: ‘First, a little refreshment to reward my exertions’ (D 21:342). His blood is their liquor.) Harker, Stoker's principal alter ego, is of lower social standing than his acquaintances, and he is predictably the most disdainful of those of lower class than himself. He has ‘an interview with a surly gatekeeper and a surlier foreman, both of whom were appeased with coin of the realm’ (D 20:314), and when Harker does encounter a ‘good, reliable type of workman’ (D 20:311) it is only to underline his rarity and obsequiousness.

For their part, the social superiors live according to a kind of cash nexus. ‘Money talks’ is the dominant unwritten philosophy. Harker is grateful that ‘Judge Moneybags will settle this case, I think!’ (D 25:397), referring to Godalming's generous funding of their Continental trek. Mina sighs at the thought of ‘the wonderful power of money! What can it do when it is properly applied; and what might it do when basely used’ (D 26:423). Actually, Mina is not too fussy how it is used. Bribery, for example, is frequently resorted to, and draws no admonition from Stoker. Returning to Transylvania Harker remarks: ‘Thank God! this is the country where bribery can do anything, and we are well supplied with money’ (D 25:397). Ethically, England and Transylvania are on a par: the mere mention of Lord Godalming's title wins him favours from cowering peasants/proletarians in the manner to which Count Dracula has long been accustomed. ‘My title will make it all right’, his Lordship announces whenever he wishes to break the law or breach confidences (D 26:412).

Paradoxically, what might be termed a ‘business ethic’ surfaces in several places in the novel. On his first arrival in Transylvania, Harker is not deterred by the premonitions of the locals: ‘there was business to be done, and I could allow nothing to interfere with it’ (D 1:13). Later, when Seward is acquainted with Harker for the first time, he comments upon his ‘quiet, business-like’ quality (D 17:269), which is obviously to be taken as complimentary. Again, when one of the solemn vows is taken to pursue the Count, come what may, Seward notes that the oath was made ‘as gravely, and in as business-like a way as any other transaction of life’ (D 18:285; author's italics). Bram Stoker the Lyceum businessman was evidently imbued with the business world's ethos, and he was equally favourably disposed to the propriety of inheritance. Harker inherits Mr Hawkins' legal practice, and Godalming, despite his existing wealth, comes to acquire the Westenra family estate. The unspoken lesson that Stoker teaches is that wealth, and its acquisition, are morally virtuous.

Clearly, too, the novel provides a social lesson. It is a celebration of the middle classes at the expense of the aristocracy. Count Dracula, of course, is a fiend incarnate, while Lord Godalming is a fringe character achieving little of note. Indeed, what he does achieve is to propose marriage to a commoner, Lucy Westenra, as if to reduce his class-laden threat to his bourgeois companions. Godalming has been labelled a ‘safe’, ‘tamed’, ‘bourgeois’ aristocrat.²

These archetypal representatives of respectable England implicitly know their place in society. It would have been as unthinkable for upper-middle-class Lucy to contemplate wedlock with, say, lower-middle-class Harker, as it would have been for school-ma'am Mina to be courted by Holmwood. Dracula proscribes socially vertical liaisons—the bedrock of much literary romance. Indeed, a firm and tacitly acknowledged social hierarchy pervades the book. Long after the Harkers are first introduced to the socially elevated Lucy Admiration Society, they persist—even in the privacy of their journals—in their expressions of respect, usually referring to their ‘betters’ deferentially as Dr Seward, Mr Morris, and Lord Godalming. Even more noteworthy, all the questers speak respectfully of their aristocratic foe as ‘the Count’, notwithstanding the utter loathing with which they regard him. (In this instance Stoker may be alluding to the tradition among occultists of never speaking of malign forces by name for fear of summoning them.)

Yet the novel is not totally static in its hierarchical structure. There is one instance of upward social mobility—Jonathan Harker, and with him his wife. They are ‘special’ in many ways, not just in their shared capacity to survive the attentions of Dracula. Originally a provincial solicitor's clerk, Jonathan Harker graduates as a fully-fledged west-country solicitor at the commencement of the novel. In time he becomes a partner (‘Hawkins & Harker’) before inheriting his mentor's legal practice. He also sires the child supposed to represent the light of the twentieth century. Harker, in other words, comes to possess a fortune beyond his dreams, a wife who is his fairy princess, and a child of the future—pure fairy tale.

What is curious is that in the expression of his class prejudices Stoker is seen to have been unconsciously influenced by the pseudosciences of his time, which themselves contributed greatly to the reinforcement of social divisions. In particular, Dracula reveals an indebtedness to the ‘science’ of physiognomy, which blossomed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Given its respectability by a Swiss clergyman, John Casper Lavater, and later modified by Charles Darwin and many others, physiognomics held that the true character of an individual could be deduced by the structure of the head and body, as well as from facial expressions and physical gestures. Regarded with disdain nowadays, its practitioners once insisted that the shape and angles of the forehead and the nose, together with the size and contours of the eyes and mouth, constituted reliable guides to the bearer's strength of character. Lavater had noted that a pale face was an indication of a natural inclination towards sexual pleasures,³ and Dracula fully complies. As late as 1873 a Dr Joseph Simms, in a quack work entitled Nature's Revelations of Character, propagated a clear distinction between the ‘straight’ and the ‘curly’. Those persons with curly hair, and preferably with rounded features to match, were dismissed as thoughtless and careless, and to be avoided at all costs; whereas those blessed with straight hair and straight features were naturally endowed with ‘straight’ minds.

In Dracula, Van Helsing obviously approves of physiognomy (as does Stoker), for the professor comments favourably on Harker's casual deduction of personality from physical features (D 14:226). Perhaps Stoker had read Simms, for Dracula has ‘curly hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion’, and virtually all that is said of the flaccid aristocrat Godalming's appearance is that he is ‘curly-haired’. Similarly, the Count's forehead is ‘domed’ (i.e. rounded), while the professor's is ‘almost straight, then sloping backwards’. Dracula's nose is hooked and curved, ‘aquiline’, whereas Van Helsing's is ‘rather straight’. The Dutchman also has a ‘square chin’ to match, and his big, wide apart eyes are those, according to Simms, of the turtle dove: they signify the morally chaste.

Further instances of Victorian pseudo-science emerge when Van Helsing gives vent to his ‘philosophy of crime’ (D 25:405-6). Criminals, apparently, are all of a type. They are at one and the same time necessarily insane, childish, and incapable of breaking the habits of a lifetime: ‘in all countries and at all times’ criminals stick to the one form of crime with which they are most familiar. ‘The Count is a criminal and of criminal type’, pronounces Mina, and Stoker draws upon the theories of contemporary doctors and criminologists to develop his argument. Max Nordau's controversial book Degeneration (1893) had set out to demonstrate the close correlation between genius and moral degeneracy,⁴ and Cesare Lombroso, often considered to be the father of modern criminology, was in no doubt about the relevance of physiognomy as regards criminal tendencies. According to Lombroso, those individuals best described as ‘born criminals’ are physiologically related to their primordial ancestors. Among the personality traits Lombroso attributes in his Criminal Man to those of a law-breaking predisposition are sensuality, laziness, impulsiveness, and vanity. Needless to say, these also refer to Dracula; but when it comes to the visible hallmarks of the criminal there can be no doubt about the association. If Stoker had read Simms, he had certainly assimilated Lombroso:

HARKER:
[The Count's] face was … aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils.
LOMBROSO:
[The criminal's] nose … is often aquiline like the beak of a bird of prey.
HARKER:
His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose.
LOMBROSO:
The eyebrows were bushy and tend to meet across the nose.
HARKER:
his ears were pale and at the tops extremely pointed.
LOMBROSO:
with a protuberance on the upper part of the posterior margin … a relic of the pointed ear.(5)

It was a popular Victorian view that each society is afflicted by the criminals it deserves. This would imply that as Dracula is the worst possible criminal, England in the 1890s was the worst possible society. This equation of vampirism with criminality serves to indicate where in Stoker's mind virtue and purity reside—in those whose lives have been sorely touched by Dracula. Leaving physiognomy aside, what Stoker seems not to appreciate is that the bulk of criminal activity is performed not by Dracula but by his opponents. Senf expresses this succinctly:

Even if Dracula is responsible for all the Evil of which he is accused, he is tried, convicted, and sentenced by men (including two lawyers) who give him no opportunity to explain his actions and who repeatedly violate the laws which they profess to be defending: they avoid an inquest into Lucy's death, break into her tomb and desecrate her body, break into Dracula's houses, frequently resort to bribery and coercion to avoid legal involvement, and openly admit that they are responsible for the deaths of five alleged vampires.⁶

Further, by happy coincidence, the disposing of Dracula and his three consorts will be accompanied by their rapid dissolution into dust. As Van Helsing cannily explains (D 25:398), there is no need to fear prosecution, for without a corpse there is no crime.

None of the foregoing invites a hint of moral questioning in the mind of Bram Stoker. His heroes have stooped to imitate Dracula, and have become primitive, violent, and irrational. They play the game he plays, never stopping to reflect upon the probity of their actions. In short, the ethical standards that Stoker assumes to be laudable are, upon closer examination, far from comforting.

Stoker's attitudes to race are similarly ambivalent, and there is more than a hint of racial prejudice in Dracula. Even the sweeter-than-sweet Lucy is not immune from it. When she relates to Mina the ‘anguish’ of having had three proposals of marriage she recalls Othello and sympathizes with Desdemona having been regaled by tales of adventure poured in her ear—‘even by a black man’ (D 5:74). Gypsies are shown as despicable hirelings of the Count, taking Harker's gold and then betraying him (D 4:56); and the one Jewish figure encountered is pure stereotype, down to requisite ‘sheep's’ nose and a reluctance to impart information except through ‘a little bargaining’ (D 26:415). And of course, to Stoker, no country can be truly civilized if its trains fail to run on time, as Transylvania's notably fail to do.

More fundamental to the racial structure of the novel is the composition of its three major foreign imports, none of whom are allowed to speak standard English, which immediately makes them objects of suspicion. The Count, of course, is so malign as totally to deny him the honour of being British. (In fact, in none of Stoker's fiction is the villain a true Briton.) Furthermore, Dracula smells!—and racism over the centuries has frequently harped on the distinctive and offensive smells supposedly emitted by ‘foreigners’.

The introduction of a Dutchman and an American seems on the face of it to possess less racial significance; yet Morris' inferiority is persistently demonstrated. Firstly, he is rejected by Lucy in favour of a true-blooded Englishman; secondly, although the provider of raw, frontier courage (which is itself slightly un-British), the American is dispensed with—cancelled out with the Count—at the climax. Perhaps, too, a trace of nationalism can be detected here: the evil Transylvanian and the vulgar Texan are expunged so that, having made full use of Morris, the superior English are no longer compromised by the presence of someone who typifies America's growing power and potential rivalry with Britain.

In the case of Van Helsing, Stoker may have felt uncomfortable about making an English hero a Catholic, in the same way that a native villain would reflect badly on Britain. The effect of this, by revolving the central conflict of the novel around a Continental vampire pitted against a Continental vampire-sleuth, is to emphasize the foreign, alien quality of this demonic invasion of Britain. Once Van Helsing's knowledge has been utilized and his enlightening functions exhausted, he is despatched to the margins of the action, allowing the Anglo-Saxon race the glory of the final scenes.

Throughout, the hard core of Englishness is represented as true grit. Even the insane Renfield is permitted to die a martyr's death in the cause of saving Mina. Returning for a moment to the Victorian ‘wasteland’ analogy, all the foreign imports in the novel serve collectively to provide that dynamic element of which insular England stands in need if domestic tranquillity is to be restored.⁷ Once that objective has been attained, the foreign intruders can be struck out. Two of them meet their end, while the third is an old man whose time was the nineteenth century, not the twentieth.

The English axis around which the novel pivots is reinforced by the manner of its telling. None of the three foreigners is allowed to keep a diary or supply other written records, save for the odd memorandum of Van Helsing and brief inconsequential letters by Morris. The reader is never made privy to Dracula's thoughts, and is left with his tantalizing statement: ‘There is reason that all things are as they are, and did you see with my eyes and know with my knowledge, you would perhaps better understand’ (D 2:32). Without access to his point of view the Count is never described ‘objectively’, but always through the impressionable eyes of those he encounters. The same is true of Van Helsing and Morris. This gives rise to a peculiarity in the novel's structure. To give an example: what is told by someone to Harker may be passed on to his wife, who might take Van Helsing into her confidence, before he in turn entrusts Seward to summarize the information on his phonograph. The evidence by then is fifth-hand. It follows that the selective epistolary framework of the novel is bound to refract the testimony of those unable to present their case in their own words. As a result, there is a virtual exclusivity of the English point of view in the provision of primary documentation.

To be more precise, there is a virtual exclusivity of the middle-class English point of view, with which Stoker was most able to identify. The bulk of the testimony in Dracula is reserved for Harker, Mina, and Seward—solicitor, teacher, and doctor. Stoker can handle the unfamiliar lady of leisure, Lucy, because she is one-dimensional and killed off early. Lord Godalming is effectively neutered. He is allowed to say nothing of importance: as with the three aliens, the reader derives impressions of his Lordship only through the impressions of others. But the case of Renfield is especially curious, for Stoker allows his lunatic the luxury of keeping his own little notebook (D 6:88). (The Count, it seems, has the knack of making everyone with whom he has any dealings take up their pencils.) Stoker never allows Seward to divulge the contents of Renfield's scribblings. Irritatingly, Seward will tell only of masses of figures, added up in batches ‘as if he were “focusing” some account, as the auditors put it’. What figures? What account? From that moment Renfield's ‘diary’ is forgotten and does not feature in the accumulating pile of written evidence that awaits posterity.

Dracula has also been described as reflecting a concern with ‘alienation’, a sociological term that refers to a pathological condition of man in modern industrial society. There is dispute as to what produces alienation, but in its Marxist version it is said to occur as a result of capitalist exploitation and the division of labour, leading to a loss of identity between the worker and what he produces. He feels dehumanized, becomes isolated, withdrawn, purposeless, and may end up ‘alienated’ not only from his work, but also from his fellow men. This can result in total estrangement from the society in which he lives, and detachment from its prevailing moral values.

This concept can be borrowed and applied in a more general sense to the Count, who is alienated from almost everything around him. As a vampire he casts no reflection: metaphysically he has no identity. He is a pure inversion of man, and as such constitutes the complete alienation of mankind. He is, furthermore, a source of epidemic alienation, reminiscent of the social effects of the early dehumanizing period of industrialization, despoiling the lives and identities of his victims.⁸ Yet when Dracula confides to Harker that he longs to walk the streets of mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, and to share its life, change and death, he seems to be alluding to more than just the urge to prey on new victims. In human terms, the Count is supremely lonely. He has no more armies to command, no children to rear; he can no longer ‘love’, and his castle is surrounded by a wasteland devoid of vitality. His loneliness is in vivid contrast to the excessive, almost cloying, friendship and family sentiment expressed by his pursuers, all of whom would willingly sacrifice themselves (Morris fulfilling his offer) for each other. More than one critic has speculated whether Dracula's quest to England might embrace a forlorn hope that he might be defeated and laid to rest in perpetuity. How else, it is asked, could such a formidable warrior and campaigner allow himself to be outmanoeuvred by such opponents?

Renfield, through his incarceration in his small cell and his occasional stints in a ‘strait waistcoat’, provides an echo of his patron's alienation.⁹ But what would have induced Stoker to incorporate such themes into his novel? Very likely, as with other aspects previously noted, he made unconscious use of autobiography. Perhaps Stoker's development from bed-ridden child to athletics champion is reflected in the Count's progress from tomb to master vampire. Again, Stoker spent the first thirty years of his life in Dublin, remote from the hub of British artistic and cultural life. Along with having his early literary and cultural ambitions frustrated, Stoker also had to contend with the ‘alienation’ of being a minority Protestant in a Catholic land. Most important of all, Dracula was not alone in coming to teeming London to better himself: Bram Stoker had done exactly the same thing when uprooting from Dublin in 1878. The sense of alienation to be experienced in a vast impersonal city (and having to learn how to mix with Irving's elevated circle), was something which Stoker had lived through and understood intimately. And in organizing Irving's many tours with the Lyceum, and the endless crates of stage equipment involved, Stoker must have gained an insight into the problems involved in organizing the fifty boxes of earth which Dracula must transport by land and by sea.

Stoker, it should be remembered, was no political innocent. His inaugural address to the Trinity Historical Society had been a blueprint for a league of nations of the time. He was a committed supporter of Irish Home Rule and of Gladstonian Liberalism. His fiction, by and large, steers clear of overt political comment, but there is one notable exception. One of his later novels, The Lady of the Shroud (1909), opens as another, apparent, vampire yarn. By the climax, the supernatural element has been transformed into pure political allegory relating to the Balkan crisis. Even without any ‘actual’ vampires, The Lady of the Shroud still manages to resemble Dracula in its south-east European setting and in its evocation of Turkish menaces, past or present. In the sense that the Austro-Hungarian Empire (of which Transylvania was a part in the 1890s) was a likely British adversary in any future European war, the Anglo-Dutch-American alliance of Dracula hunters lined up against representatives of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires comes close to providing a dress rehearsal for the First World War.¹⁰

The Dracula myth has been hailed over the years as providing justification for, or illumination of, all manner of political beliefs. In this, Count Dracula has merely emulated Vlad Dracula, who, within a century of his death, had his impaling exploits seized upon by Ivan the Terrible in Russia. Vlad had shown himself to be a ‘hero’ of the Orthodox faith and a model of the harsh, autocratic ruler. As such he was taken to justify Ivan's supposed divine right to tyranny and sadism.¹¹

Recent Marxist critics have alighted on Dracula as illustrating what they see as the inherent contradictions in capitalism. Through Marxist spectacles the Count presents a distorted extension of feudal droit de seigneur, which, irrespective of his own peasant-like links with the soil, is founded on a life-style of constant exploitation: he starves the populace and feeds upon them. As long ago as 1741 the word ‘vampire’ was used in English, metaphorically, to refer to a tyrant who ‘sucks’ the life from the people.¹² Karl Marx himself was familiar with the vampire metaphor: ‘Capital is dead labour that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’. He went on to remark that ‘the prolongation of the working day quenches only in a slight degree the vampire thirst for the living blood of labour’.¹³

Seen in this light, the ‘vampire’ presents a metaphor for capital. Dracula is the archetypal capitalist exploiter, for whom the objective, according to classical Marxist theory, is the total ‘possession’ of every aspect of his victims' lives. He is not interested in any arrangement by ‘contract’: he demands his slave labour for eternity. Like the vampire, in other words, the capitalist's driving force is seen to be insatiable and unlimited. Like the vampire, too, the capitalist is unable to break the cycle of exploitation followed by yet more exploitation. Neither is propelled so much by the desire for blood/wealth as by the curse of blood/wealth. The capitalist is enmeshed in the drive for ‘accumulation’, and is unable to withdraw from the stark choice confronting him—prosper or ‘go to the wall’.

As noted previously, Dracula is not a destroyer. He is an accumulator. Moretti describes him as a saver, an ascetic, an upholder of the Protestant ethic.¹⁴ The Count has hoarded his gold for such a plan as now festers in his brain. Armed with his capital he can embark upon his schemes for economic control of the City of London. In this he acts as a perfectly rational entrepreneur. It is noticeable that for several economic groups there is no conflict of interest with Dracula. The assorted solicitors, gypsies, seamen, porters, and estate agents with whom he conducts business do very nicely from their client. He pays well, and in cash. For both his menial requirements and his property deals he is the perfect employer-client. These accomplices have no need to fear his sucking their blood: he can buy it.

In fact, Dracula, the arch-capitalist, is no mere common entrepreneur. In his vampiric/financial dealings he acts as an ardent monopolist, someone who will brook no competition. ‘Like monopoly capital, his ambition is to subjugate the last vestiges of the liberal era and destroy all forms of economic independence’.¹⁵ No wonder he holds such terrors for his complacent, bourgeois competitors. In the name of destroying an agent of the devil, Stoker's heroes are, on a socio-economic reading, ridding themselves of a materializing threat to their bourgeois ideology and prosperity.¹⁶ It is they, representatives of a petty free-trade ethos, whom he is out to subjugate. The vampire/monopolist concedes no possibility of independent survival, personal or economic. Unlike Godalming, the ‘tamed’ aristocrat who accepts the legitimacy of middle-class hegemony, Dracula is the embodiment of the anachronistic land-owning class, seeking to sequestrate the newly-earned privileges of the nouveaux riches and reopen the historic struggle between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. Feudal monopoly and the free-competition principles of nineteenth-century capitalism are shown as irreconcilable concepts, historically bound to precipitate an economic struggle to the death.

Actually, during the 1890s monopolistic concentration of capital was even more evident in the economies of some of Britain's advanced, industrial competitors than in her own. All the more reason, then, why ‘monopoly’ should appear as a foreign, alien threat and why Van Helsing is necessarily on the side of the British, for Holland was a neighbouring sanctuary of free-trade.¹⁷ On the other hand, by the end of the Victorian era many economists saw free-trade as already moribund. The age of the giant, multi-national monopoly was about to be born. From this angle, the narrow-minded laissez-faire fanatics opposing Dracula who would seek to stifle this development are themselves no better than reactionary relics of a bygone age, attempting to arrest the course of history.¹⁸

If only for the sake of parity, as Marxism has been read into Dracula so has fascism. Elements of Bram Stoker's novel actually found their way into the philosophical underpinnings of Nazi Germany. The late and unexpected flowering of the Gothic genre at the turn of the century unearthed a receptive audience in the German-speaking world. What may have been no more than a harmless release in Britain appeared frighteningly profound elsewhere. In the depths of her disillusionment following the First World War, Germany was searching for her own Teutonic hero capable of restoring her past glory. Count Dracula offered the perfect model, being of a conquering race and descended from Attila the Hun. Many German authors, among them Hans-Heinz Ewers, were attracted by the potential of the vampire metaphor. The sexual element was frequently exaggerated, and a combination of Nordic myths, Teutonic blood rites, and Wagnerian imagery haunted and thrilled the reading public of defeated Germany, gradually acquiring a political significance of its own. In the same way that Dracula could be depicted as a Darwinian ‘superman’, vampires in German literature came to represent superhuman Übermenschen, whose function was to herald the establishment of a New Order based on blood.¹⁹

Racist elements of German nationalism were also accommodated by German vampire fiction. In the works of Ewers,²⁰ the undead were on occasions depicted not as supermen but as squalid, wandering Jewesses, symbolic of a race that was seen to be infecting the Continent, and leading to an upsurge of blood-mania in the common people. Prior to gaining power in 1933, Hitler and the ideologists of the National Socialist Party were happy to utilize any powerful myth for their own ends, and Ewers' depiction of sacrilegious blood-lust, gratuitous cruelty, and his exultation of pre-Christian, Germanic forms of worship made him a celebrated author, until he became too much of an embarrassment.²¹Dracula was also ripe for a new medium: the screen. The German director F. W. Mirnau adapted the novel for the silent cinema, and the classic Nosferatu (1922) was the result. Stoker's widow, however, successfully sued for breach of copyright, so that the only extant copies of the film are pirate versions.²²

During the Second World War the equation of the Hun-like Dracula with the Hun-like Nazi produced a happy circumstance for the Allies to manipulate and exploit. The Americans recognized the hate-appeal of Stoker's vampire, and Dracula was presented to encapsulate the image of the traditionally cruel Germany. On American wartime propaganda posters a German soldier would appear. He wore a hellish expression on his face and sported bared canine teeth dripping with blood. Later, the association of the Count with whichever enemy America happened to be fighting was reinforced by the provision of free copies of Dracula to U.S. forces serving overseas.²³

With the passing of the years the immortal Count has confirmed his adaptability. After Germany's second defeat he proved equally adept at symbolizing the perceived Soviet menace in the Cold War. In the era of the McCarthy-ist witch-hunts for alleged communist sympathizers in the United States, Dracula switched from exemplifying the cruelty of the Nazi to personifying the Red threat. Similarly, he was no longer the exemplar of capitalism: he was now its staunchest enemy. These turn-arounds were made all the more plausible in the light of the adjustment of European frontiers. Transylvania was again part of Romania, and conveniently lay behind the Iron Curtain. Dracula was a communist; the bogeyman from the East.

In fact, the novel consistently leans heavily on the distinction between East and West, dark and light, the primitive and the modern. Harker, in the first paragraph of the book, is made aware as he travels beyond ‘Buda-Pesth’ that he is leaving the West and entering the East—that part of Europe that had been indelibly influenced by the Ottoman Empire (and later by the Soviet Union). Then, as his calèche carries him up the Borgo Pass leading to Dracula's castle, he notes the dark, rolling clouds overhead, and a heavy, oppressive sense of thunder in the air: ‘It seemed as though the mountain range had separated two atmospheres, and that now we had got into the thunderous one’ (D 1:18). Everything, to the cloistered Harker, that is civilized and enlightened about the West is being left behind. So, in the 1890s no less than today, the upright citizen of the West is alarmed by the concealed terrors presented by the East.

Dracula as a Cold War parable equates the demonic Count with the power of Soviet-inspired communism: both present a material threat to the Western world.²⁴ Neither intends to further its ends by outright invasion, which carries too many risks. Subversion is the chosen instrument. The complacent defences of the West are not attacked by storm but infiltrated by stealth, though the aim in each case is the subjugation of the West into East European colonies/vampires. Furthermore, just as communist subversion has the industrial work-force as its principal focus, so Dracula directs his attack at helpless women, turning them, in effect, into a ‘fifth column’ to assist his schemes. Dracula is now a Red under the Bed, as well as a vampire hovering above it. His subversive strategy is revealed in his painstaking legal preparations, so as not to arouse suspicion in the British police or legal profession. He ensures he has numerous hideaways once he arrives. He shrewdly does not permit any of his unwitting official collaborators (solicitors, estate agents, etc.) to know the identities, far less anything of the duties, of the others (D 3:43-4). That is why he employs an Exeter solicitor to purchase a house in London, while he himself arrives at Whitby.

The Cold War moral is that constant vigilance must be observed. Otherwise the vampire/communism will achieve its objectives by taking advantage of the built-in vulnerability that has accompanied the West's rapid scientific and technological progress. This smug superiority has contemptuously discounted the probability of successful subversion, and even British laws will assist the Count: the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ philosophy hands him a ticket to success. Moreover, the Van Helsing clique dare not publicize the danger for fear of ridicule. They are therefore compelled to act as clandestinely on their part as Dracula does on his: they must operate outside the confines not only of conventional medicine and religion, but also of the law.

This hawkishness in the name of defending home values is manifested in Van Helsing's strictures against the naïve liberalism of Seward: ‘Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot?’ (D 14:229). Van Helsing is referring to hidden knowledge shared only with Dracula, and he is seeking to override ‘rational’ objection so that he can perform his desecrations without opposition. Dissenters against the McCarthy excesses were swept aside in ways which were uncomfortably comparable.²⁵ It is significant that the war against Dracula/communist infiltration should be spearheaded by a specialist of the mind, who is well able to manipulate the inarticulate fears of honest citizens for devious ends. One isolated attack on appropriately-named Light-of-the-West Lucy is to be avenged by the full weight of Western revenge.

Intruding into this analysis, and not for the first time, is the strange twist provided by Quincey Morris, the embodiment of the United States. It has been proposed that Stoker is covertly challenging United States reluctance to involve herself in world affairs, and to bring about an end to the isolation behind which she was, in the 1890s, sheltering.²⁶ The evidence for this emerges when Renfield, in a bubble of sanity, comments upon the Monroe Doctrine (D 18:291)—an axiom of American foreign policy dating back to 1823, but operational for a century thereafter. The Monroe Doctrine, in essence, decreed that Europe should stay out of American affairs, and the United States would reciprocate. This policy naturally hampered Anglo-American understanding and contributed to the mutual ignorance that prompted Stoker's book A Glimpse of America. Renfield probably speaks Stoker's thoughts, looking forward to the day ‘when the Pole and the Tropics may hold allegiance to the Stars and Stripes’ (D 18:291).

Actually, Stoker did not have long to wait. The year of Dracula's publication, 1897, also marked Diamond Jubilee Year, celebrating sixty years of Queen Victoria's reign. The year was awash with imperial pageantry and festival. The British Empire, although actually in decline, had never appeared stronger. But across the Atlantic the American giant was beginning to stir. Dracula, in fact, becomes in retrospect curiously prophetic of the Spanish-American war of 1898, which is often taken to mark the United States' inaugural appearance in global power-politics. By the time of Stoker's final years the United States was on the brink of superseding the old-established European balance-of-power system and its ageing empires—such as that of Austria-Hungary, which Dracula represented.²⁷ Moreover, in the novel Morris provides military aid to the effete Europeans in the form of Winchester rifles (D 25:396). America thereby becomes the arms supplier of the free world in fiction not long before she does so in fact.

It might be said that the Texan has declared war on a European adversary with the objective of gaining ultimate supremacy over the Old World. America fails in the novel, only to succeed in the real world over the course of the twentieth century. Some might say that America has come to colonize Britain as effectively as Dracula had once aspired to do. Morris' spirit has been recycled through the triumphant ‘family’ to flourish in economic terms in the succeeding generations.²⁸ America is the land of the future, just as Quincey lends his name to the child of the future.

Ideologically, it is the collective resources and talents of the West that must be seen to prevail; the alliance of free men and women. It can be no isolated hero operating alone who will slay Dracula, but a corporate body in which everybody has a part to play in the downfall of the ‘solitary’ Count. The totalitarian monolith, embarked on a kind of inversed imperialistic quest—‘the primitive trying to colonise the civilised world’²⁹—must meet his match against the power of combination; the strength and solidarity which emanate from the democratically organized, committee-style ‘Council of War’ (D 18:285; 26:420). The Western partners would weaken their own security should they withdraw from their alliance. A disorganized group of individuals is easy prey to the concentrated force of the vampire/communism. Only when the alliance is forged in the second half of the novel can Dracula be confronted by an adversary whose combined strength is superior to that of its constituent elements.

The NATO allies in Dracula (Britain, the United States, and the Netherlands) possess two other decisive advantages over their Eastern adversary. The first is their freedom of thought and action: the Dracula-hunters perceive themselves as having ‘self-devotion in a cause and an end to achieve which is not a selfish one’ (D 18:285)—that is, they want to save the world (or so they think), not control it. Even Stoker's mode of address—diaries, letters, journals, etc.—emphasizes the plurality of perception and sense of individuality which the vampire threatens to subjugate, until they are collated to present an amalgamated account prior to the trans-continental quest. The second advantage is that of scientific ingenuity and progress. The East, then as now, is described as lacking sophisticated technological hardware. Transylvania is behind the times, rundown, unable to advance from traditional crafts and practices. Britain, however, is portrayed in Dracula as a veritable showpiece of efficiency and modern engineering: Mina taps away on her typewriter, Seward goes one better and records his diary on to a phonograph, Harker takes advantage of a telephone, and Morris is an amateur photographer. Throughout, letters and telegrams are delivered with improbable despatch. It is, then, no surprise that armed with these weapons—social, political, psychological, and technological—ultimate victory for the West is assured.

Notes

1. Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion, p. 121.

2. Burton Hatlen, ‘The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula’, p. 83.

3. Ornella Volta, The Vampire, p. 145.

4. See the discussion on evolutionary degeneration, page 190.

5. Reproduced in Leonard Wolf, The Annotated Dracula, p. 300.

6. Carol A. Senf, ‘Dracula: the Unseen Face in the Mirror’, p. 163.

7. Mark M. Hennelly Jr, ‘Dracula: the Gnostic Quest and the Victorian Wasteland’, p. 22.

8. R. W. Johnson, ‘The Myth of the Twentieth Century’, p. 433.

9. Royce MacGillivray, ‘“Dracula”: Bram Stoker's Spoiled Masterpiece’, pp. 525-6.

10. Richard Astle, ‘Dracula as Totemic Monster: Lacan, Freud, Oedipus and History’, p. 103.

11. See Gabriel Ronay, The Dracula Myth, pp. 149-55.

12. Ernest Jones, in Christopher Frayling (ed.), The Vampyre: Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula, p. 327.

13. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Chapter X.

14. Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms, p. 91.

15. ibid., p. 92.

16. Jackson, p. 122.

17. See Moretti, p. 93.

18. ibid., p. 94.

19. Ronay, pp. 157-9.

20. For example: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1910), The Vampire (1921), Nightmare (1922).

21. Ronay, pp. 159-60.

22. Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Bram Stoker: Creator of Dracula, p. 190.

23. Ronay, p. 166.

24. See Richard Wasson, ‘The Politics of Dracula’.

25. See Ronay, p. 169.

26. Wasson, p. 26.

27. See Astle, p. 103.

28. Moretti, pp. 251-2.

29. Senf, op. cit., p. 164.