Critical Introduction

Bram Stoker's (1847–1912) Dracula is, like Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein, a major icon in the history of monsters. While there are vampire narratives that predate its publication, Stoker's creation is really the origin of the modern image that we have of the vampire, which has become vastly more popular in literature, art, cinema, and television since its publication than it was before. Stoker very loosely based his character on the legend of the fifteenth-century Romanian ruler, Vlad Dracula, more commonly known as Vlad Tepes or Vlad the Impaler, renowned for his cruelty and violence. The Irish novelist never visited the Transylvanian sites in which the novel is set, but instead created a dark fantasy of craggy peaks, ruined castles, and colourful, superstitious peasants.

The familiar image of the pale, powerful, elegant, courtly monster is established in the first moment that Count Dracula reveals himself to the everyman narrator, Jonathan Harker. His powers are somewhat diffuse, not spelled out at any one point. It seem, though, that he can become a bat, a wolf, even a cloud of mist. He is uncannily strong, can climb walls like a lizard, can mesmerize people, has some control over those he has bitten, and, of course, can live indefinitely by drinking the blood of humans. Much criticism of the novel has pointed out its exploration of the dangers of sex and sexuality, which were highly potent fears in the restrained and repressive Victorian era in which Stoker lived. Dracula is not, though, a sympathetic or sexually appealing character, as are many more recent vampires.

The novel's action takes place in a series of classic gothic settings, most notably Castle Dracula, in the remote Carpathian mountains. However, much of the drama of the novel is driven by Dracula's movement. He is frightening enough in his ancestral castle in a remote corner of central Europe; for the novel's original English audience, though, much of the terror is based on the vampire's arrival in Whitby, on the eastern coast of Britain. Dracula, with hooked “aquiline” nose, Eastern origins, and old-fashioned clothes, would have recalled to contemporary English readers another group they greatly feared and rendered monstrous through the lens of bigotry: Jewish immigrants, often accused in the period of bringing forms of contagion and corruption to England.