[In the following essay, Varnado views Dracula as a dramatization of the “cosmic struggle between the opposing forces of darkness and light, of the sacred and the profane.”]

Bram Stoker's Dracula is one of those rare novels that merits the timeworn phrase “it needs no introduction.” Since its publication in 1897 the book has established an undeniable claim on the public imagination. Not only has it passed through innumerable editions (including foreign translations), it has entered the domain of popular culture through constant dramatizations, including radio, motion pictures, and television. The world has taken the book's grim protagonist to its heart in a way reserved for only a few mythical figures. In another decade Dracula will celebrate its hundredth anniversary, the benchmark Samuel Johnson thought should be the required testing period for a classic.

As with certain other works of supernatural literature, however, public approbation has done little to enhance the book's critical reputation. For reasons already set forth, supernatural literature has fared poorly among scholars and critics; consequently popular approval may at times prove to be a liability. It is only in recent years, with the rise of a more eclectic spirit in scholarly studies, that the novel has received any comment at all.¹ It should be clear, however, that the novel, like its vampire protagonist, is not going to die an easy death. Critics who in the past have not bothered to taste its strange contents (to continue the spectral metaphor) might well consider doing so. Far too much attention has been paid to Dracula's supposed weaknesses and not enough to its central strengths.²

The alleged weaknesses turn out to be of the same type that critics assign to the entire genre of supernatural tales: lack of relationship to the major themes of realistic literature. Critics who take such a view (for example, Edmund Wilson) cannot respond to the strengths of Gothic literature without attempting to rationalize the supernatural element in it. Impervious to the numinous core of this genre, they continually attempt to turn it into something else—repressed sexuality, sociology, Marxism, or whatever is at hand. An extreme example of this tendency is seen in Glen St. John Barclay's discussion of Dracula in his delightful but wrongheaded study, Anatomy of Horror. Despite the humor that informs Barclay's work, Barclay manages thoroughly to misconceive the nature of many of the books he discusses, including Dracula. Stoker, he says, “has in the first place the deficiency commonly found among writers who concern themselves almost exclusively with occult themes of having either no interest in human personality, or no ability to analyze it.”³ This, as explained above, is to mistake the purpose of such literature; it is like complaining that a limerick is not sufficiently metaphysical or that Oedipus Rex is not duly concerned with political theory.

A myopic view such as this leads Barclay into all sorts of misinterpretations. Jonathan Harker is simply “half-witted.” The several women in the story “acquire the faintest interest as human beings only when they begin to turn into vampires.” Finally, Barclay is led to the logical impasse of attempting to explain the book's undeniable popularity as the result of repressed sexuality: “towering erotic symbolism, which is what Dracula is all about.” The vampires, Barclay assures us, are “incarnations of sexual desire”; the passages in which they pursue their bloodletting are “the literary equivalent of orgasm.” The scene in which Lucy is impaled by Van Helsing and her suitors is an example of mutual rape culminating in mutual orgasm. And so on. It never seems to occur to Barclay (whose pungent wit deserts him) that if such a reading is correct—if the appeal lies in sublimated sexuality—the book would of necessity have died a natural death in an age like ours when explicit sexual description is all too common. Despite his keen humor (for example, the proper background music for the impalement of Lucy would be the “Anvil Chorus”), Barclay's conclusions are ultimately of the sort Edmund Wilson arrived at in his reading of James's The Turn of the Screw.

Fortunately more substantial assessments of the book are available. For example, David Punter recognizes that Dracula “is not only a well-written and formally investive novel but also one of the most important expressions of social and psychological dilemmas of the late nineteenth century.” Sensing a mythic quality in the book, he sees it in essence as “the inversion of Christianity and particularly of Pauline Christianity in that Dracula promises and gives—the real resurrection of the body, but disunited from the soul.”⁴

The suggestion of Christian symbolism is echoed by Leonard Wolf. According to Wolf, Dracula takes on the aspect of an anti-Christ as he seeks to spread his infection to others. Wolf points out a number of biblical and Christian references, including vampire-like sacraments of baptism and marriage.⁵

Both Punter and Wolf approach the book in what I believe is the correct way, for Dracula more clearly than other Gothic works of fiction dramatizes the cosmic struggle between the opposing forces of darkness and light, of the sacred and the profane. Indeed, this antinomy which we have seen in other works of the occult is at the heart of Dracula, where it takes on the proportions of a worldwide struggle, sweeping racial, geographical, even ontological counters in its wake. The actors in the story, whether human or superhuman, take on symbolic significance, so that they become surrogates for traditions, cultural forces, and races of people of Europe and Asia.

These ideogramic structures are glimpsed in the novel's dramatic opening section. The story begins with a seemingly prosaic account from a journal kept by Jonathan Harker, a London solicitor. At the request of the law firm for which he works, Harker undertakes a journey across Europe to the Carpathian Mountains. There, in a castle set among the mountains, he is to meet with a client of the firm, a certain Count Dracula, and work out business arrangements for the Count's intended move to England. Harker reveals himself through his journal entries as a modest, pleasant, eminently businesslike member of the middle class. He carefully notes train schedules, hotel arrangements, dates, food, and comments with naïve enthusiasm on the landscape, the local people, and the customs he encounters. Everything is normal, decent, even ordinary, characteristics which invest the account with what Otto might have described as the rational element that surrounds reality and structures it.

Despite the sanity and objectivity of these passages, Stoker mingles subtle hints of the numinous, or nonrational. As the train on which Harker travels reaches Budapest, he notes: “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.”⁶ A feeling of something akin to wonder emerges as Harker penetrates this region of eastern Europe, suggesting that the rational and the nonrational are symbolized in terms of West and East, respectively.

Harker has read up on the region in the British Museum and notes its curious racial mix: “The section of Rumania is composed of Saxons, Dacians, Magyars, and Skeleys, the latter of whom are descended from the Huns.” Unable to “light upon any map or work giving the exact locality of the Castle Dracula,” Harker has discovered that it is set “on the borders of Transylvania, Moldavia, and Bukovina, in the midst of the Carpathian Mountains, one of the wildest and least known portions of Europe.” These mysterious hints and suggestions are pointed up when he adds,

I read that every known superstition in the world is gathered into the horseshoe of the Carpathians, as if it were the center of some sort of imaginative whirlpool; if so, my stay may be very interesting. (Mem., I must ask the Count all about them.)

At a hotel in Klausenburgh, where he spends the night, he notes:

I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty.⁷

The accumulating sense of mysterium registers on Harker as he penetrates farther into this alien region. At the Golden Krone Hotel in Bistritz, the “cheery-looking woman” who greets him delivers a letter from Count Dracula, welcoming Harker to “my beautiful land”; but Harker grows apprehensive when the landlord pretends that he cannot speak German and his wife rather histrionically crosses herself and insists on giving Harker a rosary. There is irony (almost humor) in Harker's British imperturbability when confronted with these ominous tokens. The following day, as he travels by coach toward the Borgo Pass, where he is to meet his mysterious client, Harker notices the peasants making the sign against the evil eye and murmuring vrolok and viboslak (“werewolf” or “vampire”); but he merely notes: “Mem. I must ask the Count about these superstitions.”⁸

As the carriage proceeds on its way, Harker is entranced by the sublime mountain scenery but cannot escape a growing sense of unease.

As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills … the dark firs stood out.

The road grows steep, the passengers in the carriage become excited, and at last, at the entrance to the Borgo Pass, Dracula's carriage appears. After one of the passengers quotes a line from Burger's “Lenore” (“For the dead travel fast”), Harker at last succumbs to the sense of mysterium, commenting: “I felt a strange chill and a lonely feeling come over me.”⁹

It is notable that up to this point everything has been kept within the established boundaries of the natural, or rational. After Harker is transferred to Dracula's coach, however, the sense of the nonrational manifests itself with increasing intensity. As the coach pursues its steep ascent to the castle, Count Dracula displays his preternatural powers by dispersing a pack of wolves that menace the coach and by locating a treasure trove by means of the blume falem—the magical flame that appears on the eve of St. George. These clear signs of occult activity increase the conflict between rational and nonrational that grips Harker; but he persists in his determined resolve to ignore anything that threatens his sane, rational outlook.

Nonetheless, once he is within the walls of Dracula's castle, Harker's defenses begin to crumble. Like other “haunted castles” in Gothic literature, this castle stands as a symbol of the mysterium tremendum. In the exciting scenes that follow, Stoker intensifies the sense of the numinous and establishes its cosmic dimensions in the tale. To better understand the idea Stoker is projecting in this section of the tale, we must refer again to an important passage in The Idea of the Holy in which Otto works out the implications of what he calls “negative numinous.” This passage, which appears in a long footnote, is only a suggestion of a concept Otto referred to several times but never satisfactorily explained. There is enough, however, to indicate that had he lived he might have provided a finished metaphysic of the “negative numinous.”

The “ferocity” is the origin of Lucifer, in whom the mere potentiality of evil is actualized. It might be said that Lucifer is “fury,” the hypostatized, the mysterium tremendum cut loose from the other elements and intensified to mysterium horrendum. The roots at least of this may be found in the Bible and the early Church. The ideas of propitiation and ransom are not without reference to Satan as well as to the divine wrath. The rationalism of the myth of the “fallen angel” does not render satisfactorily the horror of Satan and of the “depths of satan” (Rev. 2:24) and the “mystery of iniquity” (Thess. 2:7). It is a horror that is in some sort numinous, and we might designate the object of it as the negatively numinous. This also holds good of other religions than that of the Bible. In all religions, “the devilish” plays its part and has its place as that which, opposed to the divine, has yet something in common with it. As such it should be the subject of a special inquiry, which must be an analysis of fundamental feelings, and something very different from a mere record of the “evolution of the idea of the devil.”¹⁰

Otto's concept of the “negative numinous” finds a striking embodiment in the character of Dracula. Though inimical to all evidence of the divine (he cringes with horror at Jonathan Harker's rosary), he nevertheless shares certain aspects of the divine power, for example, the ability to change his shape, become invisible, and read thoughts at a distance. Similarly, his lust for blood is a kind of propitiation of the dark forces he is leagued with as he seeks to evangelize the world to this ominous religion. Moreover, the mysterious laws that govern his activities are related to the divine. When he learns that Harker's law firm has purchased for him a large, ancient manor house in England with an antique chapel on its grounds, he says: “I rejoice that there is a chapel of old time. We Transylvanian nobles love not to think that our bones may be amongst the common dead.”¹¹

Such negative religious aspects of Dracula extend to his castle, his class, and to Transylvania itself. “We are in Transylvania,” he tells Harker, echoing biblical language, “and Transylvania is not England. Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.” As the story continues it becomes evident that England and Transylvania stand as archetypes of the known in contrast to the unknown, the rational to the nonrational. “I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London,” Dracula says, “to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.”¹²

Throughout the book Stoker surrounds Dracula with an aura of legendary associations. He seems to personify the East, with its mystery, as opposed to the orderly, rational bourgeois life of the West. The feeling is reinforced by Dracula's numerous references to his race:

We Szekelys have a right to be proud for in our veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights for lordship. Here, in the whirlpool of European races, the Ugric tribe bore down from Iceland the fighting spirit which Thor and Wodin gave them, which their Berserkers displayed to such fell intent. … Here too when they came they found the Huns, whose warlike fury had swept the earth like a living flame, till the dying peoples held that in their veins ran the blood of those old witches who, expelled from Sycthia, had mated with the devil in the desert. Fools, fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?¹³

In these and other passages Stoker incorporates both legendary and historical elements, thus imbuing the story with a cosmic dimension. He reinforces this dimension with the character of Dracula himself. Dracula is apparently based on the historical figure of Vlad Tepes, a voivoide (or ruler) of Wallachia from 1456 to 1462, who must rank as one of history's bloodiest tyrants. His favorite method of execution was impalement, which he often witnessed with sadistic delight. “There was impalement from above—feet upwards—and impalement from below—head upwards; or through the heart or navel. There were nails in people's heads, maiming of limbs, blinding, strangulation, burning, the cutting of noses and ears.”¹⁴

One of Stoker's imaginative triumphs in the novel is his synthesis of the vampire legend in the person of Vlad Tepes, who was known as Dracula (son of the Devil). By means of this central ideogram, Stoker was able to draw together racial, geographic, and cosmic notes and fuse them into a striking image of the “the daemonic.” In The Idea of the Holy, Otto returns several times to a discussion of the daemonic element. A striking exhibition of it, he says, is seen in some remarks by Goethe, from which he quotes:

“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason. It chooses for itself obscure times of darkness. … In a plain, prosaic town like Berlin it would hardly find an opportunity to manifest itself. …”

“Does not the daemonic (asks Eckermann) also appear in events?” “Pre-eminently so,” said Goethe, “and assuredly in all which we cannot explain by intellect or reason. And in general it is manifested throughout nature, visible and invisible, in the most diverse ways. Many creatures in the animal kingdom are of a wholly daemonic kind, and in many we see some aspect of the daemonic operative.”¹⁵

Goethe's remarks may explain the association of the vampire with bats, wolves, and rats. Similarly, the daemonic is associated with such qualities as energy, fury, implacable hatred, and a general “overpoweringness.” The daemonic, says Goethe, was manifested in Napoleon, a

daemonic character [which] appears in its most dreadful form when it stands out dominatingly in some man. Such are not always the most remarkable men, either in spiritual quality or natural talents, and they seldom have any goodness of heart to recommend them. But an incredible force goes forth from them, and they exercise incredible power over all creatures, nay, perhaps even over the elements. And who can say how far such an influence may extend?¹⁶

The preternatural powers with which Stoker invests his vampire are aspects of the daemonic. Like the monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Dracula is symbolically associated with darkness, slyness, cruelty, and fierce egotism. Like the monster, he commits various atrocities, although these seem at times like mere means to ends; for his ultimate goal is to establish and maintain himself in opposition to that sacred power in which he indirectly participates.

After Harker's escape from the castle, the setting of the novel changes to England, where Dracula, bringing with him his coffins of sacred earth, has established himself at his estate of Carfax. This change of scene is used to introduce a new ontological tension into the story. England, as we have already seen, is the polar opposite of Transylvania and the East. It is the rational center of the novel, the realm of reason, science, practicality, order, common sense.

To carry out this idea, Stoker assembles in England a cast of characters who, in one way or another, are all representatives of the rational. This small group of people, who become Dracula's opponents, are members of the bourgeoisie, with its norms of respectability, hard work, probity, and good sense. As a consequence, they are deliberately depicted as “type characters” but in the best sense of the term. Stoker distinguishes each character by a strongly individualistic touch. For example, Lucy Westenra, Dracula's first victim, is a charming, if slightly idealized, picture of Victorian femininity: witty, intelligent, romantic. On the other hand, Mina Murray, Lucy's confidante and former schoolmate, is practical and ambitious. Lacking Lucy's inherited wealth, she has trained herself as an expert stenographer and dreams of aiding her fiancé, Jonathan Harker, when he returns to assume his duties as a solicitor.

The male characters are sketched with equally broad but convincing strokes. Lord Godalming, generous and dependable, displays the better qualities of the British upper class. John Seward, a psychiatrist, is cool, resourceful, scientific. Even Quincy Morris, the plucky, faintly comic American who joins the group, is, within the context of the novel's action, convincing enough. Although Morris speaks a rather absurd, and often criticized, variety of American slang, Stoker drops hints suggesting that this is an ironic pose intended to amuse his English friends. Obviously, these characters are not intended by Stoker as fully developed characterizations but rather as sharply etched representatives of the rational structure surrounding the occult, or the nonrational, elements of the narrative.

The scene of action during most of the long middle section of the novel is the area around London and the nearby town of Purfleet, where John Seward owns and operates a sanitarium for the mentally ill. Through something more than coincidence, the grounds of the asylum adjoin Carfax Manor, the ancient, decaying estate Dracula has purchased and to which his coffins are transported. In choosing this setting Stoker again provides a highly effective ideogram for the numinous, since an asylum, or madhouse, suggests the scientific and the rational, on the one hand, and the alien and the nonrational, on the other.

It is, in fact, a simple step for Stoker to transpose the events at the asylum into the realm of the supernatural. This is readily seen in the character of Renfield, one of the patients at the sanitarium, who is secretly in league with Dracula. Not only does the character Renfield serve to introduce a note of ghastly humor into the story, he links the events at the sanitarium with Dracula as well.¹⁷

When introduced, Renfield suffers from an obscure form of mania that causes him to collect flies, spiders, and sparrows, about which he keeps a meticulous record in a notebook. The secret of his delusion is his lust for blood, which Dracula has promised to satisfy in return for his services. The quasi-religious nature of his delusion is evident when Dracula draws near the asylum and Renfield's manic delight in insects suddenly disappears.

“What?” Seward asks. “You don't mean to tell me you don't care about spiders?”

To which Renfield replies in biblical language:

“The bride-maidens rejoice the eyes that wait the coming of the bride; but when the bride draweth nigh, then the maidens shine not to the eyes that are filled.”¹⁸

Renfield's curious lapses from maniacal strength to passivity, and his abrupt changes from the wildest insanity to the most lucid self-possession exemplify the rational-nonrational paradigm that infuses the story.

At this point, Stoker introduces the final ideogramic element in his tale, in the person of the Belgian physician, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. Van Helsing's aid is requested when Seward and Lucy's other friends realize that in their struggle against Dracula they are out of their depth. Their efforts, especially those of Seward, are based on science and other rational means; but these prove ineffective. Paradoxically, it is Seward the scientist who grasps the idea that science alone is not sufficient. As a consequence, he calls on his old mentor, Van Helsing. “He is a seemingly arbitrary man,” Seward explains; “but this is because he knows what he is talking about better than anyone else. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician, and one of the most advanced scientists of his day.” Van Helsing now assumes the role of Dracula's chief adversary. Moreover, he takes on the character of an ideogramic figure in the novel. He is best understood as the Jungian archetypes “the wise old man” and “the cosmic man.”

That there is a connection between the Jungian archetypes and Otto's conception of the numinous is clear from statements made by Jung, who was well acquainted with Otto's writings. In Psychology and Religion, Jung concedes:

Religion, as the Latin word denotes, is a careful and scrupulous observation of what Rudolf Otto aptly termed the “numinosum,” that is, a dynamic existence or effect, not caused by an arbitrary act of the will. … The numinosum is either a quality of a visible object or the influence of a visible or an invisible presence causing a peculiar alteration of consciousness.¹⁹

The relationship between the Jungian archetypes and the numinous is set forth by Jung: “when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or fascinating effect or impels to action.”²⁰

Of the archetypes Jung collected in his various studies of human consciousness, two seem closely related to Stoker's novel: “the wise old man” (cosmic man) and “the demon.” The demon is an aspect of what Jung called the “shadow” archetype, the dark, hidden portion of the personality. Curiously, it is related to that of “the wise old man,” a benevolent, sagacious type suggesting the complete development Jung called “individuation”:

One of the archetypes that is almost invariably met with in the projection of unconscious collective contents is the “magic demon” with mysterious powers. … The image of this demon forms one of the lowest and most ancient states in the conception of God. It is the type of primitive tribal sorcerer or medicine-man, a peculiarly gifted personality endowed with magical powers. This figure often appears as dark-skinned and of mongoloid type, and then it represents a negative and possibly dangerous aspect. Sometimes it can hardly be distinguished, if at all, from the shadow; but the more the thematical note predominates, the easier it is to make the distinction, and this is not without relevance insofar as the demon can also have a very positive aspect as “the wise old man.”²¹

In Dracula these related but distinct ideograms are personified in the vampire and his implacable antagonist Van Helsing. Dracula—“dark-skinned and of mongoloid type … negative … possibly dangerous”—represents the demon, an aspect of the cosmic man that embodies the profane, or negative, aspect of the numinous. Van Helsing, Dracula's equal in power, determination, and occult knowledge, evinces the benign (or sacred) elements of the numinous. Stoker, in fact, has drawn what would seem to be a series of conscious parallels between the two; both come from foreign countries and speak with distinctly awkward accents, and both, in turn, can be imperious, arbitrary, and crafty.

There are differences, however. With his plain, Belgian respectability and bourgeois cast of mind, Van Helsing typifies an orderly, rational pattern that even at times contains humor. His Belgian accent, which one critic²² calls “delicatessen Dutch,” is used deliberately to suggest the faintly risible overtones of his character, as in the well-known speech concerning King Laugh. Although he is a celebrated scientist, his view of life is strongly conservative, or traditional, and while he is on occasion stern and arbitrary, he is by nature kindly, even avuncular.

Dracula manifests many of the same characteristics but perverts them into a malign parody of the sacred. He possesses no humor yet is capable of a queer irony. His smile is described as “cruel,” and he often sneers. His accent, as clumsy as that of Van Helsing, carries no comic overtones but rather hints at a kind of alien poetry. When the wolves howl about his castle, he tells Harker: “Listen to them—the children of the night. What music they make! … you dwellers in the city cannot enter into the feelings of the hunter.”²³

The physical appearances of the two contrast strikingly. Dracula's face is

strong—very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples, but profusely elsewhere. … His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose. … The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy mustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking with peculiarly white teeth that protruded over the lips.

He has “pointed ears,” and the entire face gives an impression of pallor. He is tall, cadaverous, and dresses in black.²⁴

Van Helsing, on the other hand, is of medium height, strongly built, and deep-chested. His head is “noble, well-sized, broad and large behind the ears.” He is clean-shaven, and his face is large and square with “a mobile mouth, good-sized nose … and big bushy brows.” His hair is red, and his blue eyes are “widely set apart and are quick and tender or stern with the man's moods.”²⁵

The impression in each case is one of power but power arising from opposite sources. Although Van Helsing is a notable scientist, he realizes that science is powerless against Dracula and for help turns to his deeply held Catholic faith and to white magic. Dracula, by contrast, employs black magic.

The struggle between these two “cosmic men” forms the central portion of the story.²⁶ This conflict is deepened by Stoker's artistic incorporation of the many legends and beliefs concerning vampires. Stoker's strategy in employing this material coincides with the “rational versus nonrational” pattern we saw above. By structuring the story on a firmly realistic basis and introducing as his protagonist a man of impeccable scientific background, Stoker conjures the reader into accepting the marvelous. This strategy is clearly pointed up in an interesting speech by Van Helsing:

To believe in things that you cannot. Let me illustrate. I once heard of an American who so defined faith, “that which enables us to believe things which we know to be untrue.” For one, I follow that man. He meant that we shall have an open mind, and not let a little bit of truth check the rush of a big truth, like a small rock does a railway truck. We get the small truth first. Good! We keep him, and we value him; but all the same we must not let him think himself all the truth in the universe.²⁷

Despite its humorous overtones, the epistemological basis of the speech is clear enough. It continues as Van Helsing expounds the history of vampirism:

All we have to go upon are traditions and superstitions. These do not at the first appear much, when the matter is one of life and death—nay, of more than either life or death. Yet we must be satisfied. … Take it, then, that the vampire and the belief in his limitations and his cure, rest for the moment on the same base. For let me tell you he is known everywhere that men have been. In old Greece, in old Rome; he flourish in Germany all over, in France, in India, even in the Chersonese; and in China. … He have follow the wake of the berserker, Icelander, the devil-begotten Hun, the Slav, the Saxon, the Magyar.²⁸

The recitation of racial and geographical names, reminiscent of earlier speeches by Dracula, serves to infuse the story with a sense of cosmic action. As the struggle between these two cosmic men continues, it is lifted above the rational elements of the tale into a region of dread and wonder. Historical traditions, legends, and occult lore give the book a quality that must be considered epic.

In the concluding section of the novel, Stoker faced the somewhat difficult task of sustaining this intense level of numinous feeling. Having been irrevocably defeated in England, Dracula now attempts to return to his castle in the Carpathians. Because he retains a degree of occult influence over Mina Harker, however, he must be pursued and extirpated by Van Helsing and his group.²⁹ They follow Dracula back to his native Transylvania, which, as we have seen, is the focal point of the novel's nonrational forces. The cyclical pattern is now complete, with the rational forces of the West in pursuit of the nonrational East.³⁰ But a new element has been added. In the opening section of the novel, Jonathan Harker, as representative of the bourgeois West, comes equipped with the ineffective powers of civilization. Now, under the tutelage of Van Helsing, the group understands the preternatural elements they face. They have been initiated into the cosmic pattern of the sacred and are able to deal with the counterforces of the profane. Thus, “When we find the habitation of this man-that-was,” Van Helsing explains,

we can confine him to the coffin and destroy him. We obey what we know. But he is clever. I have asked my friend Arminius, of Buda-Pesth University, to make his record; and from all the means that are, he tells me of what he has been. He must, indeed, have been that Voivoide Dracula who won his name against the Turk, over the great river on the very frontier of Turkey-land. … In the records are such words as “stregoica”—witch, “ordog” and “pokol”—Satan and hell; and in one manuscript this very Dracula is spoke of as a “vampyr.” … There have been from the loins of this very one great men and good women, and their graves make sacred the earth where alone this foulness can dwell. For it is not the least of its terrors that this evil thing is rooted deep in all good; in soil barren of holy memories it cannot rest.³¹

In the chase sequences that bring the novel to its exciting conclusion, Stoker retains control over the fugitive emotions he deals with by grounding the action in a firmly realistic context. As Van Helsing and his group return to the East, they encounter the same small difficulties and obstacles that Harker faced in the novel's opening passages. Details of luggage, train schedules, lodging, and conflicts with local officials keep the narrative firmly in place against a background increasingly mysterious. When at last the travelers reach Transylvania and the vicinity of Dracula's castle, the effect is one of a great cloud slowly being lifted. The exotic geography of the region—its mountains, stately rivers, half-civilized people, wolves, gypsies, and the great castle itself³²—come into weird, faintly disturbing focus, as though one were remembering a dream. The writing takes on a fifth-dimensional quality, as seen in the following passage from Mina Harker's diary:

When we had gone about a mile, I was tired with the heavy walking and sat down to rest. Then we looked back and saw where the clear line of Dracula's castle cut the sky; for we were so deep under the hill whereon it was set that the angle of perspective of the Carpathian Mountains was far below it. We saw it in all its grandeur perched a thousand feet on the summit of a sheer precipice, and with seemingly a great gap between it and the steep of the adjacent mountain on any side. There was something wild and uncanny about the place. We could hear the distant howling of wolves.³³

This exciting coda, culminating in the savage ritual of Dracula's extinction, has a theatrical quality about it that is reminiscent of Poe:

The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew too well.

As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.

But on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat; whilst at the same moment, Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart. …

The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun.³⁴

The firm prose of the final scenes adds the note of credibility the reader needs in order to accept the lurid events. As is true of all masters of prose narrative, Stoker's sense of proportion and balance never deserts him. He retains the feeling of realism—uppermost in writing of this kind—until the final words, structuring the numinous emotion in a context of versimilitude. The reader puts the book down and returns to the real world with the distinct feeling of having glimpsed a deeper reality underlying the various marvels encountered in Dracula.

Notes

1. See Elizabeth MacAndrew, The Gothic Tradition in Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979); Judith Wilt, Ghosts of the Gothic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980); Glen St. John Barclay, Anatomy of Horror: The Masters of Occult Fiction (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978); David Punter, The Literature of Terror (London: Longman, 1980); and Leonard Wolf, ed., The Annotated Dracula (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1975).

2. Royce MacGillivray lists the strengths of the book as vividness, concision, pictorial quality of the background, and poetic language. See his “‘Dracula’: Bram Stoker's Spoiled Masterpiece,” Queen's Quarterly, Winter 1972, pp. 518-27.

3. Barclay, Anatomy of Horror; this and the next two quotations are found on pp. 44, 45, and 49, respectively.

4. Punter, Literature of Terror, pp. 256, 261.

5. Wolf, Annotated Dracula, p. 255.

6. Throughout, I use the Modern Library edition of Dracula, which carries the copyright date 1897 but no publication date of its own.

7. Stoker, Dracula, p. 2.

8. Ibid., p. 6.

9. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 9, 12.

10. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), pp. 106-107.

11. Stoker, Dracula, p. 26.

12. The quotations in this paragraph are from ibid., pp. 22, 23.

13. Ibid., p. 32. Richard Wasson points out instances of this racial motif, as well as the contrast between East and West, in “The Politics of Dracula,” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920 9.1 (1966), pp. 24-25.

14. Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula (New York: Warner, 1972), p. 42.

15. Quoted in Otto, Idea of the Holy, pp. 150-51.

16. Ibid., p. 152.

17. Royce MacGillivray, who is generally critical of Stoker's characterizations, admits that Renfield is an exception. “‘Dracula,’” p. 525.

18. Stoker, Dracula, p. 111.

19. Jung, Psychology and Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1938), p. 4.

20. Jung, “Personal and Collective Unconscious,” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1956), p. 80.

21. Ibid., pp. 106-107.

22. Barclay, Anatomy of Horror, p. 45.

23. Stoker, Dracula, p. 20.

24. Ibid., pp. 19-20.

25. Ibid., pp. 199-200.

26. Mark M. Kennelly, Jr., sees the struggle as between “rival epistemologies in quest of a gnosis which will rehabilitate the Victorian Wasteland.” “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest and the Victorian Wasteland,” English Literature in Transition: 1880-1920 20.1 (1977), pp. 13-25.

27. Stoker, Dracula, p. 211.

28. Ibid., pp. 262-63.

29. Carol L. Fry, in an otherwise perceptive article, suggests as the reason for the novel's success the “repressed sexuality” seen in the relationship of Dracula, Mina, and Lucy. “Fictional Conventions and Sexuality in Dracula,” Victorian Newsletter, Fall 1972, pp. 20-22.

30. This pattern is noted, but is given a different interpretation, by Mark Kennelly in his “Dracula: The Gnostic Quest,” p. 17.

31. Stoker, Dracula, pp. 264-65.

32. Judith Wilt comments: “The ‘haunted castle’ is the [entire] planet, and the beat of special and dangerous mysteries in one continent calls forth its answer from another.” Ghosts of the Gothic, pp. 93-94.

33. Stoker, Dracula, p. 411.

34. Ibid., p. 416.