Book Review: Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker is best known for his novel "Dracula", a horror story about a medieval vampire terrorizing 19th-century England.

Bram Stoker's novel Dracula (1897), is loosely based on European vampire legends and very loosely based on the fearsome reputation of Eastern European outlaw prince Vlad the Impaler. Dracula is well-known as an early horror classic about the ultimate outlaw--the vampire. It is less well known as one of those 19th century novels that fostered the modern view of life in the Middle Ages as nasty, brutish and short.

Stoker contrasts a fog-enshrouded London (a direct product of out-of-control industrial pollution) with the equally dark and brooding forests of Transylvania. Evil flourishes equally well in both places, but Stoker makes a clear value judgment based on the relative modernity of England versus the backward and medieval ways of his portrait of Transylvania. Dracula lives in a moldering castle that dominates the area. The local peasants are too terrified even to talk about him, let alone rise up against his lordly and feudal predations. Dracula differs from medieval lords in contemporary novels like Ivanhoe mainly in that he is a literal bloodsucker, not a figurative one.

Stoker also obsesses over the filth and plague that Dracula brings with him when he arrives by ship in England. The images of the plague, of course, go back to the Black Death, though no one at the time connected the rats to its spread. The image of Dracula's zombie-like victims reminds one of the popular 15th-century image of the Danse Macabre. Death, a skeletal figure, gathers in young and old, rich and poor, without distinction. All go to the grave and the worms eventually.

However, Stoker's portrayal of a medieval Transylvania invading modern, technologically advanced England insinuates a portrait of the Middle Ages based on many inaccuracies. Some historians suggest that Stoker may have taken only the name "Dracula" for his novel, ignoring the reality of the historical figure completely. He was probably also aware of Vlad's psychopathic 16th century descendant, Erzebet Bathory, who enjoyed torturing young women and eventually got the idea of maintaining her beauty by bathing in their blood. Erzebet's perverse excesses might be also what inspired Stoker's view of medieval vampires as creatures whose main attraction was a perverse sexuality. But this image of vampires was definitely not medieval, as this week's film review shows. In that most popular twist on the legend, Stoker added his own strange Victorian stamp and inspired an entire genre about one type of ancient and nocturnal (and eternal?) ghoul.