Anxieties of Transition: Trespassing within “Dracula” by Bram Stoker
Bram Stoker utilizes the boundaries set up by Gothic literature to craft a novel filled with subverted transitional spaces—transforming the concept of terror altogether. In pursuing blurred boundaries within Dracula, scholars might begin to expose spatiality surrounding anxieties of progress, gendered spaces, boundaries of the body, and a culture’s sense of self. Through this essay, I will attempt to pursue how the environment within Dracula is embedded with transition and how those transitional elements affect the narrative. Through considering the intrinsically spatial element of defending a place, culture, etc., I expect that the findings of this essay will assist in displaying the implications of Dracula’s ability to trespass boundaries. The structure of this essay will introduce the Gothic narrative, examine transitional spaces within both external environment and physical environment, discuss Dracula’s ability to trespass boundaries, acknowledge the relationship between environments, and conclude by exposing and analyzing the significance of Dracula’s subversion.
Dracula is relentless when providing readers with an uncomfortable, tense narration consistent of barriers (both physical and metaphysical) and sublimity. The representation of the Gothic, as Stephen Arata puts it, brings the terror home by intersecting “racial strife, political upheaval, and the fall of empire” all within London (Arata 465). Edmund Burke’s original categorization of the sublime (male, darkness, obscure, infinite, etc.,) and the beautiful (female, lightness, tangible, limited, etc.,)[1] feels eerily within reach of cultural identity in Bram Stoker’s novel. Dracula’s character, at the very least, acts as a placeholder for the sublime: something intangible, obscure, endless, male, and dominant. The progression of his osmosis, however, transforms gothic “body-snatching” into an all-consuming sacrilege absorption. What then, can be said about the ecology of gothic space within Dracula? What can be drawn from a macabre novel filled with controversial indeterminacy? Through an examination of environment (spatial and physical), this essay will attempt to expose the entangled approach Stoker takes when creating and subverting boundaries.
The first section of argument will focus primarily on spatial settings, time and location, within Dracula. Dracula’s osmosis is framed by the suspended, in-between state of space within the novel—the spatial environment then sets the scene for Dracula’s apprehension of physical environment. Jonathon Harker’s accent to Dracula’s estate at the beginning of the novel displays a kind of environmental disorientation that permeates the remaining narration(s); when Jonathon notes that “time seemed interminable as we swept on our way” any intended control over the narration falters and collapses on itself (Stoker 20). Time—rather than being a reliable, linear account—becomes a capsule for doubts and fears to crowd into one another; the space that exists within environment transforms into an interconnected space of tension, turmoil, and unknown. The lack of control continues further into Jonathon’s account when he writes “the time I waited seemed endless” while waiting to meet Count Dracula (Stoker 21). His reference to the obscurity of time saturates Mina Murray’s account when she writes how “the time and distance seemed endless” on her way to the Abbey (Stoker 88). Dracula even acknowledges the instability attached to time when he tells Jonathon to make England less interesting, so he doesn’t “forget how time flies by” (Stoker 30). In crafting a location filled with uncertainty surrounding boundaries, Stoker establishes a framework that self-perpetuates disintegration.
The boundaries produced within character location display a similar, obscure account. The juxtaposition between Jonathon and Mina’s recollection of spaces—specifically with the security of those places—produces an environment seeped in arcane locality. Through environmental boundaries, the novel introduces the concept of involuntary possession: being controlled by something or someone other than the self. In his account of Dracula’s estate, Jonathon writes that the space contains “doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted,” (Stoker 32). Mina, however, encounters an opposite but equally obscure aspect of this phenomenon with her statement: “the door was shut, but not locked, as I had left it” (Stoker 87). The novel introduces two sides of the same environmental issue by disrupting a sense of asylum in both Jonathon and Mina’s accounts—Jonathon introduces an account of confinement while Mina introduces an account of endless allowance. The locations that consume characters (in different spheres of text) lack enough reliability for those characters to adequately process spatial disruption. The external locations’ lack of stability establishes the potential for the characters residing in those environments to be equally unstable; the second section of argument will begin to highlight the concept of physical disorientation.
Leila May elaborates on the merging of spheres and categories of Victorian society in her article, “‘Foul Things of the Night’: Dread in the Victorian Body.” In her conclusion, May states that Dracula displaces the Victorian dread “onto a fetishized creature, a metonymical composite producing a metaphorical monster” (May 22). I would like to extend May’s argument by acknowledging that the dread is not displaced but rather absorbed by Dracula’s character in the novel. To do so, I will begin to examine physical environment(s) within Dracula and how Dracula’s character appropriates environment. Through the color red, Dracula is able to connect with both physical and spatial environment. Jonathon notes that Dracula’s eyes were blazing, and that “the red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them” (Stoker 42). Dr. Seward expresses a similar concern when stating that Dracula’s “eyes flamed red with devilish passion” after catching him in the act of feeding on Mina (Stoker 251). The redness depicted in Dracula’s eyes permeates the novel; in chapter VII, Mina describes the landscape of Kettleness as bathed “in a beautiful rosy glow” to which Lucy states: “His red eyes again! They are just the same” (Stoker 91). The redness of the landscape translates to Dracula’s own features: glowing with the color red. Additionally, Mina notes that Lucy’s throat had “two little red points like pin-pricks,” (Stoker 89). Dracula becomes interconnected with the environment characters residing in the environment through an absorption of identifiers. To extend the claim, I would like to complicate the discussion of Dracula’s ability to trespass boundaries as a negative, invalid advance.
I am increasingly concerned with the display of Dracula’s character as negative conflicting the display of redness in the environment as positive. For example, Dr. Seward describes the sun as “setting full and warm, and the red light streamed in through the window” giving color to Lucy’s cheeks (Stoker 139). Additionally, Dr. Seward writes “how humanizing to see the red lighting of the sky beyond the hill” when translating the spatial environment amidst terror (an empty coffin) (Stoker 186). I am curious to examine what separates the positive features of environment from Mina’s comment about her red mark upon her forehead being a sign that she “was still unclean.” (Stoker 279). With the disordered narration providing Dracula the ability to blur environmental spaces, where does one draw the line between positive and negative attributions? Who holds that authority?
In Sara Ahmed’s book, Strange Encounters : Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality, she writes that ethnographic translation produces “a radical de-terming of the foreign;” Ahmed suggests that the process of ethnography transforms the stranger into the familial in order to destroy anxieties surrounding otherness (Ahmed 58). Dracula’s Western characters—Jonathon Harker, Dr. Van Helsing, Dr. Seward, Arthur Holmwood, and Mina Murray—exhibit the tendency toward ethnography that Ahmed refers to: diluting strangeness with familiarity and translating (through which, transforming) the object of otherness. Previous critics have established Dracula’s otherness as a “contagious and highly dangerous” threat to Victorian culture’s sense of self (Clasen 387). It must be argued, however, that such critics are extending Western ethnographic methods that establish a hierarchical system of oppression: claiming the Western characters as better and insisting on the study of the inferior subject-culture (Dracula) to transform the strangeness into familiar knowledge. Dracula has been placed into literary confinements by both characters and scholars to establish boundaries, designate hierarchy, and diffuse his character’s dominant nature—though scholars have continued to skim over the lack of stability within Dracula’s narrative.
Attila Viragh elaborates on the concept of an ethnographic approach to Dracula by acknowledging the fact that Dracula’s “voice and perspective are always mediated by other characters and therefore excluded from direct narrative representation” (Viragh 238). In the novel, Western characters are given the space to insert their potentially false and biased interpretations of Dracula’s attributions. The study of Dracula is filled with endless layers of de-terming by both characters within the text and scholars of the text; Dracula has been stripped down, examined, and translated again and again in an active attempt to understand his otherness. Anxieties surrounding transitional spaces within the text have evolved outside of the narrative—the defense of culture has become an obsessive focal point for scholars to land on. Perhaps more significant than Dracula’s ability to penetrate boundaries is the terror that emerges from those transitional spaces (both within and outside of the text). As a result, Dracula has been placed into literary confinements by both characters and scholars to establish boundaries, designate hierarchy, and diffuse his character’s dominant nature—though scholars have continued to skim over the lack of stability within Dracula’s narrative.
After the Westerners eradicate Dracula, Mina writes that his castle “stood out against the red sky” (Stoker 325). I cannot help but to read the final statement of the estate as an unsuccessful attempt to minimize the effects produced by Dracula’s character. The defeat of his otherness is supplied by the “superior” group in the novel; the final scene is an example of erased platform for voice and therefore erased existence. Rather than embodying the color red, the castle stands against any sense of identity Dracula contained; the separation between redness and Dracula’s character attempts to diffuse his threat toward Victorian culture. The end of the novel exemplifies the Western attempt to separate Dracula from the environment and therefore retain control of blurring boundaries in the novel. Harker reiterates the attempt of eradicating Dracula’s existence with the paratextual note: “We want no proofs; we ask none to believe us!” (Stoker 327). Before moving forward, scholars must ask where authority lies in the accounts of Dracula and if the Western characters maintain enough reliability to adequately decipher the spatial disruption attached to character attributions.
Work Cited
Ahmed, Sara. Strange Encounters : Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. Routledge, 2000.
Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies 33.4 (1990): 621-45.
Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Printed for Samuel F. Bradford, by J. Watts., 1806.
Clasen, Mathias. “Attention, Predation, Counterintuition: Why Dracula Won’t Die.” Style, vol. 46, no. 304, 2012, pp.378-398, 500, 505.
May, Leila S. “‘Foul Things of the Night’: Dread in the Victorian Body.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 93, bo. 1, 1998, pp. 16-22.
Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Norton Critical Edition, 1997.
Viragh, Attila. “Can the Vampire Speak? Dracula as Discourse on Cultural Extinction.” English Literature in Transition 1880-1920, vol. 56, no. 2, 2013, p.231+. Gale Literature Resource Center.
[1] Edmund Burke details his categorization of the “sublime” and the “beautiful” in his novel, A Philosophical Inquiry to the Categorization of the Sublime and the Beautiful.
