SOURCE: Seed, David. “The Narrative Method of Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 40, no. 1 (June 1985): 61-75.

[In the following essay, Seed provides a stylistic analysis of Dracula.]

When Bram Stoker's Dracula first appeared in 1897, it was greeted with a chorus of acclaim for its power from the reviewers. One dissenting voice was that of the Athenaeum, which charged the novel with structural weakness:

Dracula is highly sensational, but it is wanting in the constructive art as well as in the higher literary sense. It reads at times like a mere series of grotesquely incredible events; but there are better moments that show more power.¹

This aloof dismissal seems to have established a consensus attitude toward the novel that has met with an almost complete critical silence. Only of recent years have critics begun to examine its methods, and even now all too little attention is paid to its formal complexities.

The main emphasis in Dracula criticism has been on its sexual themes. Stephanie Demetrakopoulos declares confidently: “It is obvious that the very attraction of the novel was that all this sexuality was masked and symbolic; it can be enjoyed surreptitiously and hence denied even to oneself.”² And C. F. Bentley has given a thorough, Freudian account of this area of the novel, proposing incest, rape (the “killing” of Lucy), and repulsion at menstruation (Mina's stained nightgown) as subjects that receive this oblique treatment.³ His argument demonstrates conclusively that the novel introduces issues that the English characters treat as taboo and that can be understood only by probing beneath the text's surface. Thus when a wolf leaps at Lucy's bedroom window and literally frightens her mother to death, it can be interpreted as an emblematic representation of the incursion of the animal and the death of the maternal in Lucy. Hence her haunting of Hampstead Heath inverts motherhood into callousness when she seizes children for prey.⁴ Or again, Dracula's assault on Mina is presented as a literal defilement of the marriage bed. Her husband (Jonathan Harker) lies in a drugged stupor as Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood. This quasi-sexual tableau is followed by some heavily underlined symbolism. The blood from her mouth stains her husband's white nightrobe and a piece of the host brands her forehead with a mark of Cain, which can only be purged by Dracula's death.

An alternative tack is taken by Franco Moretti and Burton Hatlen. In the course of Marxist readings of the novel, Moretti sees Dracula as a personification of capital, while Hatlen takes him to represent “the threat of a revolutionary assault by the dark, foul-smelling, lustful lower classes upon the citadels of privilege.”⁵ The one argument depends on crude transposition, the other on an astonishing distortion of Dracula's true nature. He represents a reversion to a feudal aristocracy that imperiously claims allegiance independently of legal checks and balances. As David Punter rightly notes, “the vampire in English culture, in Polidori, in Bram Stoker and elsewhere, is a fundamentally anti-bourgeois figure. He is elegant, well dressed, a master of seduction, a cynic, a person exempt from prevailing socio-moral codes.”⁶ In short, he is a combination of Gothic villain, Regency rake, and monster.

While both of these approaches shed useful light on certain areas of the novel—particularly its repeated mating of sexuality with death and defilement, and its terminology of battle—neither pays adequate attention to the rigorous narrative method that Stoker uses. Unlike The Lady of the Shroud (1909) in which vampirism turns too easily into romance, Stoker followed out the logic of his chosen method in Dracula quite consistently.⁷ The recent discovery of Stoker's notes for the novel in the Rosenbach Foundation library of Philadelphia has now made it possible to see how he planned the structure of the novel. It was to consist of four books, each containing seven chapters, and to be entitled “To London,” “Tragedy,” “Discovery,” and “Punishment,” respectively.⁸ Book One was to start with the letters between Dracula and lawyer Hawkins of Exeter, whereas the final novel actually begins during these negotiations. A surviving fragment from the original draft of the novel, which Stoker's widow published under the title Dracula's Guest, and his notes indicate that he had originally intended to set the novel in Styria as a tribute to J. Sheridan Le Fanu's “Carmilla.”⁹ Eventually this plan was dropped.

While Book One corresponds more or less to the opening section of the novel (chapters 1-5), Book Two received considerable changes. The Whitby sections were contracted from three to two chapters, and the rest of the section was enlarged as Stoker developed Lucy's role. Chapters 6-16 of the novel describe Lucy's “illness,” the fight for her life, her death, and the subsequent opening of her tomb. The ceremonial vow to pursue Dracula to the end is retained as a conclusion to that section. Stoker originally planned to have Quincey Morris go to Transylvania in the middle of Book Three; this would have awkwardly complicated the novel's use of setting and perhaps for that reason was dropped. Book Three corresponds to chapters 17-21, and Book Four to chapters 22-27 of the novel. Stoker seems to have seen his four books as representing a narrative preamble, the working out of Dracula's intentions, their discovery, and the final pursuit. Although he altered the relative lengths of the sections, he retained these broad distinctions.

The first section of the novel dramatizes the gradual breakdown of rational explanation before mystery. Jonathan Harker, though a “business-like” lawyer, is denied the privileged prominence of Wilkie Collins' first narrator in The Woman in White, Walter Hartright. Rather, the fact of his professional status makes his subsequent breakdown all the more ominous. Harker constantly tries to normalize the strange into the discourse of the nineteenth-century travelogue. As a defensive reaction to his voyaging into an unmapped area beyond the reach of train timetables, he first tries to rationalize his experiences in terms of local color, and then, failing that, through muffled unease. When a peasant woman begs him on her knees not to go to Castle Dracula, he comments: “It was all very ridiculous, but I did not feel comfortable.”¹⁰ In practice this ostensible rejection of the strange becomes more and more difficult to maintain. Harker's entry into the East, which he notes starts at Budapest, is signaled by the narrating pronoun shifting from “we” to “I” and is further confirmed by Harker's total loss of direction in his journey to the castle.

The four chapters of Harker's journal all end on a point of crisis: the attack by the wolves, his realization that he is a prisoner, his near seduction, and his vision of Dracula in his box. The progression of events is remorselessly toward confronting Dracula's own vampirism, confronting the very thing that Harker's rationalism is unwilling to accept. There is therefore a constant backwards pull in Harker's journal, an attempt to retard or even suspend the flow of events so that he can organize them into some kind of explanation. Thus on the morning after his encounter with the “young women,” he notes: “If it be that I had not dreamt, the Count must have carried me here. I tried to satisfy myself on the subject, but could not arrive at any unquestionable result” (p. 40). The language of proof and evidence breaks down before the gaps and ambiguities in Harker's experiences. Franco Moretti has rightly pointed out that the first-person narratives in this novel represent characters' efforts to preserve their individual identities against the threat posed by Dracula, but without indicating how precarious they are.¹¹ In common with Seward and Mina, Harker decides to record events in as much detail as possible in the anxious hope the circumstantiality can counter strangeness. Keeping his journal thus becomes a therapeutic act of self-preservation, apparently all the more secure from Dracula's scrutiny because it is written in shorthand. In spite of this defense, Harker's journal breaks off at the point where he has resigned himself to meeting death at Dracula's hands, and we subsequently learn that Harker has gone through a complete mental and physical collapse.

His journal gives the reader a “memory,” a store of images that enables him to interpret the fragmentary signs that fill characters' later accounts. Their very incapacity to analyze their accounts—in this respect as in others, Harker sets the pattern—compels them to be as accurate as they can. One of the crucial events in the novel's opening sections is Harker's vision of Dracula shortly after one of his feasts. He is described thus:

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 were 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.

(p. 51)

An exclusively sexual interpretation of this passage would not do justice to its multiple suggestiveness. Blood here brings rejuvenation as well as repletion from sex and from the consumption of food. Blood is extended metaphorically in the novel to include feeling (Arthur Godalming's heart as well as body bleeds for Lucy), sexuality, and the vital principle itself. The lunatic Renfield's repetition of the biblical phrase “the blood is the life!” (p. 141) draws explicit attention to this line of symbolism, which is introduced by Dracula's view of his blood as inheritance.¹² His assaults are thus dictated as much by ancestral pride as by magical necessity. The redness of his eyes visually extends the blood-symbolism to the color of the setting sun, which brings the vampires to life. Similarly Stoker plays on the double meaning of “sanguine,” which defines Renfield's temperament and hints at his susceptibility to Dracula. The main point, however, about the description is that, whatever meaning it may carry, visually it is completely unambiguous. Considering the treatment of the supernatural in nineteenth-century literature, Andrew Lang suggests that the writer is caught between the Scylla of vagueness and the Charybdis of being absurdly explicit: “If you paint your ghost with too heavy a hand, you raise laughter, not fear. If you touch him too lightly, you raise unsatisfied curiosity, not fear.”¹³ Stoker contains these rather stagy revelations within a journal that tries to avoid recognizing their disturbing implications. Nevertheless, Harker's journal conveys the overwhelming physical force of Dracula, on which later chapters can capitalize, and sensitizes the reader to the significance of dogs or wolves, bats, the sunset (which characters naively insist on treating as merely “beautiful”), and other details. The reader is thus invited to make a series of recognitions, to spot resemblances between later events and those in the opening four chapters. The excursion to Whitby, for example, repeats Harker's travelogue; Mina thinks she sees Dracula's eyes glowing in the night but dismisses it as an optical illusion, exactly the kind of rationalizing reflex that Harker makes; and Dr. Seward thinks, again like Harker, that he is going mad. In all these cases a principle of delay is involved. Until the third section of the novel, only the reader has access to all the journals and letters, and he is therefore in a position more favorable to making these recognitions.

A rhetoric of resemblances is implied at many points in the novel, in chapter 5, for instance. There is no greater jolt in Dracula than this abrupt transition from horror to domestic happiness in Lucy's letters from Mina. It is as if the novel has changed mode without sacrificing immediacy. Richardson, after all, insisted that Clarissa would contain “instantaneous Descriptions and Reflections.”¹⁴ In his discussion of the epistolary novel, Ian Watt has stressed its historical connections both with suburban privacy and with revealing the individual self,¹⁵ but Stoker's use of the letter form stresses its social significance as an act of communication from sender to recipient. Harker can only rhetorically address his journal to Mina in its closing lines because he has no confidence that anyone else will see it, whereas in chapter 5 we suddenly find ourselves within a set of social relationships. It is only here that the characters who will be Dracula's opponents begin to define themselves. The stylistic gap between these letters and Harker's journal implies a moral gap between two worlds that cannot have contact, and yet details like the Bradshaw in Dracula's library have already indicated that the remote and exotic can join, albeit grotesquely, with the facts of contemporary life. Lucy's triple proposals parallel in inverted and sexually reversed form Harker's near seduction by the female vampires. This rhetorical parallelism looks forward to further similarities (between Lucy and Renfield particularly), defines Lucy's role as prize, and forces together two spheres that the characters' culture and very assumptions about reality lead them to keep separate. Such a parallel thus forms a rhetorical anticipation of the sequence of events that begin with Dracula's arrival in England. The second phase of the novel is introduced appropriately by a guidebook description of Whitby that repeats the rhetorical pattern of Harker's journal. In both cases local lore and jargon of the picturesque give way to sublime terminology and the reluctant admission of mystery.

At this point we need to recognize a crucial difference between the respective structures of The Woman in White and Dracula. Walter M. Kendrick has argued convincingly that “the reader of a sensation novel engages in the discovery of an artificial pattern, and the enterprise need not teach him anything.”¹⁶ In spite of Hartright's editorial role as an arranger of texts, Kendrick shows that the promised continuity emerges only at the very end of the novel. This is not the case with Dracula. In spite of the complexity of its second section, Stoker never uses so peripheral narrators as does Collins, and he allows the pattern of events to emerge well before the end of the novel. We shall see in a moment how this process takes place, but it is also important to note that in the second section Stoker presents two sequences of action (that of Dracula's and that of his opponents'), one explicit and one implicit. His principle of narration is that only Dracula's opponents are granted narrative voices and they can only record what in each case they have plausibly experienced.¹⁷ One of Wilkie Collins' characters obligingly summarizes his author's principles in this way:

The plan he has adopted for presenting the story to others, in the most truthful and most vivid manner, requires that it should be told, at each successive stage in the march of events, by the persons who were directly concerned in those events at the time of their occurrence.¹⁸

No such summary could be provided in Dracula because the narrative means varies according to the four stages of the novel.

Vincent Gilmore's explanation only approximately fits the practice of Section Two, the section in which Dracula reaches England and corrupts Lucy. The proliferation of letters, journals, telegrams, and newspaper articles fragments this section far more than any other. Stoker is here creating a narrative in which the gaps between the narrating documents become as important as the sections of narrative proper. Pierre Macherey has drawn attention to the silence out of which a book grows, “a matter which it endows with form, a ground on which it traces a figure.”¹⁹ Stoker's novel increasingly exploits its own silences in such a way that Dracula himself in Section Two becomes paradoxically a personification of absence. Since his actions now take place “offstage,” we only apprehend them through tantalizing glimpses or through the parallel pathologies of Lucy and Renfield. Stoker simultaneously emphasizes the modern means of recording and transmitting information (telegram, portable typewriter, phonograph, etc.) and their inadequacy to cope with Dracula's protean threat. Dracula's opponents are drawn together by misfortune and also by the socially cohesive means that they use to communicate with each other. This is why the letters take on importance as summons or requests for help and why they repeatedly give way to the urgency of telegrams. The transmission of these letters not only reassures the correspondents as to their mutual dependability but also agonizingly reminds them of how much may be taking place in the gaps between those letters.

This textual complexity in the second section must surely be related to Stoker's treatment of the Gothic mode. The first four chapters seem to present a miniature pastiche-Gothic novel. In place of the Apennines, as in Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, we now have the mountains of Transylvania. Although Dracula claims that his descendants stretch back to Attila the Hun, his literary pedigree is rather more obvious. Like Montoni and Heathcliff, he is defined by his strength, pride, and recurring association with darkness. Transylvania clearly supplied Stoker with a revamped Gothic setting, which he then filled out by drawing on contemporary anthropological accounts.²⁰ After chapter 4, however, he had the problem of introducing fantastic and feudal materials into a familiar contemporary country. Here again we should turn to Wilkie Collins. Reviewing M. E. Braddon's Aurora Floyd in 1865, Henry James praised Collins for introducing “the mysteries which are at our own doors” into fiction and for getting rid of hackneyed Gothic props. He continues: “Instead of the terrors of ‘Udolpho,’ we were treated to the terrors of the cheerful country-house and the busy London lodgings. And there is no doubt that these were infinitely the more terrible.”²¹ The historical shift that James sees taking place in fiction of mystery happens within Dracula. Stoker exploits the reader's memory of Section One, an intensely literary memory, by keeping Dracula well below the surface of the text once the novel has shifted the setting to England. By so doing he avoids a head-on collision between modern and ancient materials.

Literary allusion performs a very specific function in nineteenth-century accounts of mysteries or the supernatural. A dismissive reference to earlier Gothic fiction usually increases the authenticity of the narrative and paves the way for a fresh evocation of the mysterious. Thus the narrator of Le Fanu's Uncle Silas rejects Ann Radcliffe's laborious descriptions, or the governess in The Turn of the Screw denies that her house was a Udolpho or that it possessed a confined lunatic. The one allusion precedes a violent murder, the other notoriously ambiguous apparitions. In the same way, Stoker introduces references to the fantastic in order to challenge the reader's secure distinction between literature and reality. A fellow passenger of Harker's quotes Gottfried Bürger's “Lenore” when Dracula's coachman arrives, as if to confirm that the dead can walk. As his skepticism decreases Harker himself compares his journal to the Arabian Nights. Even more important for complicating the relation of fantastic texts to reality are the allusions to “The Ancient Mariner” in the Whitby chapters. Mina's own mariner, Mr. Swales, actually reverses Coleridge's character in arguing against the lies and exaggerated claims inscribed on the tombstones of dead sailors in Whitby graveyard. But then a newspaper account of the arrival of Dracula's ship quotes Coleridge's poem to better convey the mystery of the event. This transposition of one kind of text to another reflects what is happening at this point in the novel. As if to put the minimum strain on the reader's credulity, Stoker presents Dracula's voyage to England through a medium at several removes from direct narrative. The ship's log is translated by the Russian consul, transcribed by a local journalist, and finally pasted by Mina into her journal.

Section Two then begins with a proliferation of narrative details that cannot immediately be understood. Stoker's exploitation of literary allusion and the journal form both increases the reader's uncertainty and fragments the narrative. It is true, initially at least, that the journals' styles reflect character, Harker's being rather ceremonious, Lucy's more girlish and verbose, Seward's businesslike, and so on. But the characters of all the protagonists except Mina are superficial and easy to grasp. When Lucy states, “I must imitate Mina, and keep writing things down” (p. 108), she is echoing the compulsion felt by the main journal writers to record experience in as much detail as possible. Each partial and individual account is based on the general principle that the recorder's capacity to analyze lags well behind the circumstantial detail recorded. And this is where Van Helsing comes in.

Abraham Van Helsing combines the roles of detective, psychic investigator, philosopher, and scientist. He seems to have been based partly on Max Müller (a friend of Stoker's) and partly on Le Fanu's Dr. Hesselius.²² Whatever his origins, his narrative role is clear. He is called into the novel to cure Lucy, who becomes the rallying point for Dracula's opponents. It is Van Helsing who counteracts the fragmenting effects of the narrative documents in Section Two. His injunction at the end of chapter 12 (“wait and see”) is as much a comment to the reader as to Dr. Seward, since Van Helsing is gradually leading characters and reader alike out of their bewilderment. He articulates the confidence that an explanation exists for the partial and diverse phenomena that fill the narrative and accelerates the process of coming together that takes place in the second half of Section Two. That section's concluding chapter (16) is startlingly homogeneous after the interruptions of letters, telegrams, and newspaper articles. It consists not only of one single journal entry but of a group action (the second killing of Lucy), whose solidarity is confirmed by the final vow of resolution.

Van Helsing not only confronts the irrational but explains it. At two key points in the novel (in chapters 14 and 24) he expounds vampire lore to his skeptical companions by locating vampirism within a broad context of Nature's mysteries. Even the caves inhabited by Dracula are “full of strangeness of the geologic and chemical world.” The caves become a Shelleyan metaphor of man's ignorance: “There are deep caverns and fissures that reach none know whither” (p. 319). In the article quoted earlier Andrew Lang expresses astonishment at the survival of the supernatural in an era of scientific progress: “Why, as science becomes more cocksure, have men and women become more and more fond of old follies, and more pleased with the stirring of ancient dread within their veins?”²³ Lang finds a partial answer in evident dissatisfaction with positivism, and Van Helsing similarly criticizes Seward for being too literal-minded. The former then embodies an authoritative intellectual evolutionism that acknowledges the persistence of the primitive and that leads toward a Manichaean account of the clash between good and evil. Van Helsing's standpoint in this respect anticipates Stoker's own in a 1908 article entitled “The Censorship of Fiction.” Here, as in Dracula, Stoker suggests a battle that is both internal as well as external:

The force of evil, anti-ethical evil, is the more dangerous as it is a natural force. It is as natural for man to sin as to live and to take a part in the necessary strife of living. But if progress be a good and is to be aimed at in the organisation of national forces, the powers of evil, natural as well as arbitrary, must be combated all along the line. It is not sufficient to make a stand, however great, here and there; the whole frontier must be protected.²⁴

Dracula comes from a frontier area and in a sense emerges from the mysteries of Nature herself. Van Helsing's rallying of the troops parallels the masculine rhetoric of steeling one's self to duty.²⁵ The possibility of demonic depths to the self must be suppressed so that Dracula can be disposed of through external action.

Both Van Helsing and Stoker in his article insist that opposition to evil must be a collaborative, even national, enterprise; and Hatlen has rightly pointed out that Dracula's opponents represent key areas of the Victorian establishment: Seward and Harker are members of the medical and legal professions; Lord Arthur Godalming is the liberal aristocrat; Quincey Morris (in effect a courtesy Englishman) is a man of action and a protector of frontiers.²⁶ Their collective action thus represents society, even civilization itself, turning to the defensive, and the first signs of this process are textual. When Lucy dies, Van Helsing seizes the opportunity to read her diary and correspondence. This is the first in a series of instances in which characters read each other's records. This act of information gathering fills Section Three of the novel, although it begins earlier in chapter 14, for instance, where Mina reads her husband's journal. We are given no description of their wedding ceremony, but a ritual transmission of texts takes place. Mina wraps Harker's journal in white paper and seals it as “an outward and visible sign for us all our lives that we trusted each other” (p. 105). Mina does not act on this textual sacrament until sixty pages later when she reads it, transcribes it, and then calls on Van Helsing to validate it. This he does and thereby releases Harker from his agonizing uncertainty about the truth of his record. In chapter 17 Mina strikes a bargain with Seward, exchanging Harker's journal with the doctor's phonograph cylinders, partly so that they can get to know each other better.

This collaboration makes explicit the social dimension to recording characters' experiences. Stoker's surprisingly modern emphasis on the means and transmission of information brings society's self-defense into the very narrative process of the novel. Since understanding Dracula is a necessary precondition to defeating him, the exchange and accumulation of information literally is resistance to him. Characters become proportionately less vulnerable the more they act together, and the more they act together the more conscious they become of recording. Mina, for instance, recognizes the crucial role Harker's journal has to play in predisposing her to accept Lucy's fate (“If I had not read Jonathan's journal first, I should never have accepted even a possibility”; p. 181). And Van Helsing urges Seward, as he gives him Lucy's diary, “Read all, I pray you, with the open mind” (p. 219). At this stage the novel draws repeated attention to its own processes. Thus on 30 September Seward notes: “Harker has gone back, and is again collating his material. He says that by dinner-time they will be able to show a whole connected narrative” (p. 225). Whereas The Woman in White moves toward an end point where all the pieces will fall into place, Dracula narrates its own textual assembly. The reader participates in this formation of continuity. He becomes a reader among other readers.

As this collaboration takes place the surface of the text changes radically. In chapter 17, the first of Section Three, Seward's diary breaks off at the point where Mina is entering his study. Her journal takes over immediately from that point. There is, in other words, no gap between their accounts, only a shift in perspective. This is crucial. As the gaps between individual accounts close, so Dracula becomes better known, better defined, and therefore the easier to resist. This explains why Dracula simultaneously assaults Mina and tries to destroy the journals (luckily, there is another copy). Their very existence poses a threat to him and enables the initiative to action to swing round to Van Helsing. The less Dracula is formulated, the more of a threat he represents. Once the different accounts have been put together, Dracula begins to diminish in stature. He turns out to be subject to Nature's laws (though only some of them) and to be a disappointingly conventional embodiment of Nordau's and Lombroso's criminal type. In spite of the rather whipped-up excitement of the chase back to Transylvania, Dracula's actual death comes as rather an anticlimax, partly because he has been progressively scaled down in the preceding chapters.

The concluding section of the novel (chapters 22-27) revolves around the formulation of a plan of pursuit and the pursuit itself. It contains the resolving action that the assembling of information facilitates, and, as Moretti has pointed out, is narrated collectively.²⁷ It is no longer relevant for Stoker to maintain stylistic idiosyncrasies, so these attenuate themselves more or less out of existence. Although the narrative is still refracted through three journals (those of Harker, Seward, and Mina), nothing stands in the way of the narrative's linear impetus. On the contrary, Stoker exploits the brevity of entries in chapter 26 to accelerate the flow of events toward their predictable conclusion.

The note that precedes the text of Dracula makes it clear that Stoker was anticipating skeptical resistance to his subject from the reader. He therefore builds the skepticism into his characters and into the very organization of the narrative. The two central sections fragment and distance the true nature of events and then lead the reader toward acceptance through an arduous process of comparison and assembly. The existence and nature of Dracula is confirmed by the plausibility of the text, by our predisposition toward evidence, proof, and verification. All the non-Transylvanian characters keep records (even Renfield has a notebook to tot up his finds) or contribute to the record; the porters, sailors, and lawyers on the periphery of the action primarily serve to supply information. And Mina even goes to the lengths of converting herself into a text to be studied when she examines the transcript of her hypnotic trances. It is the authenticity of this assembled text that Stoker tries to shake in his postscript to the novel, as if to demand through Van Helsing an act of faith in the reading. In fact, Dracula demands no such leap and demonstrates a considerable agility in manipulating the reader's imagination.

Notes

1. Review of Dracula, in Athenaeum, 26 June 1897, p. 835; also quoted by Harry Ludlam, A Biography of Dracula: The Life Story of Bram Stoker (London: W. Foulsham, 1962), p. 108.

2. “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Frontiers, 2, No. 3 (1977), 105-6.

3. “The Monster in the Bedroom: Sexual Symbolism in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Literature and Psychology, 22 (1972), 27-34.

4. Demetrakopoulos. “Feminism, Sex Role Exchanges, and Other Subliminal Fantasies,” p. 107.

5. Moretti, “The Dialectic of Fear,” New Left Review, No. 136 (1982), p. 73; Hatlen, “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” Minnesota Review, N.S., No. 15 (1980), p. 92.

6. The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the Present Day (London: Longman, 1980), p. 119.

7. In The Lady of the Shroud the protagonist Rupert St. Leger inherits a castle in the Balkans, where he is visited at night by a woman dressed in grave-cloths. The hints that she is a vampire evaporate when it is revealed that she is actually a princess hiding from the Turks. The two marry and live happily ever after.

8. Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu print these chapter headings in The Essential Dracula (New York: Mayflower Books, 1979), p. 27.

9. McNally and Florescu, The Essential Dracula, p. 40; Bram Stoker, Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (London: G. Routledge, 1914), p. 9.

10. Dracula, ed. A. N. Wilson, World's Classics (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983), p. 5. Subsequent page references are incorporated into the text.

11. “The Dialectic of Fear,” p. 77.

12. Punter discusses some aspects of the novel's blood symbolism in The Literature of Terror, pp. 256-58.

13. “The Supernatural in Fiction,” in his Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), p. 277.

14. Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, abridged and ed. George Sherburn (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), p. xx.

15. The Rise of the Novel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957), ch. 6.

16. “The Sensationalism of The Woman in White,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 32 (1977), 21.

17. The one apparent exception to this plan is the lawyer's letters relating to the transportation of Dracula's boxes from Whitby to London. Harker reads them approximately a hundred pages after they appear in the text. This probably reflects a concession to narrative clarity on Stoker's part.

18. William Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, ed. Harvey Peter Sucksmith Oxford English Novels (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 112.

19. A Theory of Literary Production, trans. Geoffrey Wall (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 85.

20. For these sources, see McNally and Florescu, The Essential Dracula, p. 23.

21. Notes and Reviews, ed. Pierre de Chaignon la Rose (1921; rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), p. 110.

22. See McNally and Florescu, The Essential Dracula, pp. 26, 117.

23. “The Supernatural in Fiction,” p. 279.

24. “The Censorship of Fiction,” The Nineteenth Century and After, 64 (1908), 481-82.

25. The various connections between narration and gender have been admirably explored by Geoffrey Wall in his “‘Different from Writing’: Dracula in 1897,” Literature and History, 10 (1984), 15-23.

26. “The Return of the Repressed/Oppressed in Bram Stoker's Dracula,” pp. 82-83.

27. “The Dialectic of Fear,” pp. 77-78.