April 20:
On this day in 1912 Bram Stoker died, at the age of sixty-four. Though the author
of a dozen novels, three short story collections, and four non-fiction books,
Stoker is known almost exclusively for Dracula,
published in 1897. The novel brought little fame or fortune in Stoker's
lifetime, and in his last year he made so little from his writing that he had
to petition for a compassionate grant from the Royal Literary Fund. Nor did Dracula's erotic violence raise
eyebrows, although Ibsen's Ghosts,
premiering in the same year and much tamer, had caused a furor for bringing up
the issue of venereal disease. The reviewers of the day, perhaps reluctant to
note the psychosexual subtext for fear of self-condemnation, tended to approach
Dracula as an entertaining potboiler;
modern critics read the book as a "veritable sexual lexicon of Victorian
taboos," or as "sex without genitalia, sex without confusion, sex
without responsibility, sex without guilt, sex without love—better yet, sex
without mention."
Waves of vampire hysteria
swept Europe throughout the 1700s, and by the time Stoker took his turn with
the legends they had been worked by Goethe, Coleridge, Byron, Southey, Dumas,
and others. The first English story in the bloodsucking line was John Polidori's
"The Vampyre," written in 1819, from a fragment of a story developed
by Byron, to whom Polidori was personal physician. (Polidori's tale may be most
memorable as the answer to one of the classic questions in games of literary
trivia: What was the other horror
story born during the stormy Lake Geneva literary evening when Mary Shelley
conceived of Frankenstein?)
While there is a subtext
of depraved, confused, or repressed sexuality in much of the vampire
literature, some biographers believe that Stoker's interest in the theme came
from his personal life, specifically his complex relationship to the famous
actor Henry Irving. Stoker was manager and lifelong companion to Irving, and
infatuated to the degree that he gave his son the name Irving Noel Stoker. Dracula, so this reading goes, is a
jumble of homoeroticism, Stoker having transferred his conflicted relationship
with Irving to the world of the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince, Vlad the
Impaler, son of Vlad Dracul.
Daybook is contributed by Steve King, who teaches in the English Department of Memorial University in St. John's, Newfoundland. His literary daybook began as a radio series syndicated nationally in Canada. He can be found online at todayinliterature.com.
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