In Part 1 of our discussion on Dracula, we welcome editor Rachel Feder to discuss whether Bram Stoker's biography is relevant to our interpretations of the novel, Dracula's place in the history of Gothic literature, different types of Gothic literature, and some of the most prominent characters in the novel.
Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver, where her courses often bring literary history into conversation with contemporary culture. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the sign of Frankenstein and the poetry collection Birth Chart.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Dracula, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Dracula.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Dracula: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KJEv5xKOtQt6aFUPcgMWg?si=ef328110a1014367.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dracula/part1/transcript.
In Part 1 of our discussion on Dracula, we welcome editor Rachel Feder to discuss whether Bram Stoker's biography is relevant to our interpretations of the novel, Dracula's place in the history of Gothic literature, different types of Gothic literature, and some of the most prominent characters in the novel.
Rachel Feder is an associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver, where her courses often bring literary history into conversation with contemporary culture. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood under the sign of Frankenstein and the poetry collection Birth Chart.
To learn more or purchase a copy of the Norton Library edition of Dracula, go to https://seagull.wwnorton.com/Dracula.
Learn more about the Norton Library series at https://wwnorton.com/norton-library.
Listen to our Spotify playlist inspired by Dracula: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5KJEv5xKOtQt6aFUPcgMWg?si=ef328110a1014367.
Have questions or suggestions for the podcast? Email us at nortonlibrary@wwnorton.com or find us on Twitter @TNL_WWN.
Episode transcript at: https://seagull.wwnorton.com/dracula/part1/transcript.
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[Mark:] You are listening to the Norton Library podcast, where we explore classic works of literature and philosophy with the leading scholars of the Norton Library, a new series from W. W. Norton that introduces influential texts to a new generation of readers. I'm your host Mark Cirino with Michael Von Canan producing, and today we present part one of our two episodes devoted to Bram Stoker 's classic novel, Dracula. To join us for this conversation, we welcome its editor, Rachel Feder. In this first episode, we discuss Bram Stoker's life and his great novel. We explore the elements of Gothic literature, and Rachel introduces us to the iconic characters that populate this novel. Rachel Feder is an Associate Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She is the author of Harvester of Hearts: Motherhood Under the Sign of Frankenstein and the nonfiction title The Darcy Myth: Jane Austen, Literary Heartthrobs, and the Monsters They Taught Us to Love. Rachel is also the author of a poetry collection, Birth Chart and co-author of AstroLit: A Bibliophile’s Guide to the Stars. Rachel Feder, welcome to the Norton Library podcast.
[Rachel:] Thank you for having me.
[Mark:] Well, it's so good to have you on to talk about your edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and maybe the best place to start is with Bram Stoker himself. Who was he and what do we need to know about him?
[Rachel:] You know, lots of literary scholars steer clear of biography. Not me. As my students or anyone who's read anything I've written will tell you, I love the intersections of biography and literary history, sometimes to the point of just gossip, straight gossip. I think it can be really useful. But I wonder: what does it mean to bring in biography when we're talking about a monster story, when we're talking about a supernatural tale? So just to give another example, if you'll let me talk about Frankenstein for a minute. We're here to discuss Dracula you know. So, when it comes to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, there are infinite readings available. You can bring that novel to bear on whatever is going on in a society at any given moment both in terms of creations that need to be collectively cared for, that we need to take responsibility for, and in terms of systems and structures that marginalize and oppress folks, that exclude them from full participation in healthy, thriving communities. But whatever else it is, Frankenstein is also always a creation myth. As my students like to say, it's an origin story. And so to me, bringing in biography makes a lot of sense in that context. It makes sense to ask: what are the origins of the text in writings about parenthood and social ills from Shelley's own parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin, who were so influential to her, and Shelley's own fraught experiments and experiences of community formation and family formation and motherhood. But Dracula profoundly is not an origin story. Recently I was chatting with my kid about when he could read various monster classics because he's my kid and I told him he could read Dracula before he can read Frankenstein, and he asked why and I explained that even though the book is dark and it's violent and it's tragic and it's sad and it's scary and all of that, you don't feel bad for the monster itself. He's just evil incarnate. You're rooting for his destruction in an uncomplicated way. You don't feel for him. You don't sympathize. And interestingly, there are film adaptations that try to give him a backstory, because modern taste demands that. We want a backstory. But Stoker never gives this one. Dracula is just this thing. Sometimes it's an animal, sometimes he seems kind of dead, sometimes he sort of looks like Walt Whitman, on whom we think Stoker had a pretty big crush, but always he's just pure evil, and he does his evil by eating people, but also through like real estate. He's a creature and a system and a structure of destruction. So, to me, the biographical question might be counterproductive in the case of Bram Stoker and Dracula, because what can end up happening when we assert interpretations of Stoker's life is that we then end up leaning on those interpretations in place of backstory. So, for example, we can talk about Stoker's interest in figures like Walt Whitman, as I just mentioned, his passionate feelings for Henry Irving and the writer Hall Caine, this question of how much he was really interested in his wife romantically, the way that he and Oscar Wilde sort of shadowed one another over the course of many years. You can use those biographical touchstones, which are all a little shady, a little bit speculative, to motivate a queer reading of the novel, and then you run into some difficulties as well because Stoker made some very problematic comments about queer authors in his life, because claims that Stoker was himself queer really start with some speculations made by his great nephew, which were then picked up by scholars. But even if we could make some strong biographical assertions about Stoker in queerness, and this is just one example of a biographical direction that we might take a reading of the novel, I'm not sure that's the best way into a queer reading of the novel, because it gives us that backstory, that emotional dimension that maybe queer identity in the Victorian period was something Stoker himself was trying to navigate, you know, as a person in the world. And part of what's so interesting and so challenging about Dracula is that it doesn't give us that, which is not to say there's no queerness in the novel, there definitely is, as there is I would argue in every nineteenth-century British vampire novel, starting with Polidori’s “The Vampyre,” which is basically just Polidori dragging Byron, continuing in Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, another Irish Gothic text that was influential on Stoker. But I think biography might not be the best way into that queerness. In the novel itself we get Dracula beating back his brides to claim Jonathan Harker, shouting, “this man belongs to me;” and Mina writing that she loves Lucy with all the moods and tenses of the verb; the various vampire hunters all giving blood transfusions to Lucy and discussing this as a form of polyamory. But Stoker denies us a take, he almost always denies us a take.
[Mark:] In your introduction you discuss Stoker's childhood and the place where he grew up. How does that bear upon a reading of Dracula.
[Rachel:] So Stoker was born in a seaside suburb of Dublin on November 8th, 1847. He spent much of his childhood bedridden as a result of a mysterious illness, and as far as I know we still don't know what that was. He recovered and the illness doesn't seem to have had a lasting physical effect on him. He went on to attend Trinity College where he was a prize athlete and a social success and, as I always like to tell my students, academically average. You can be academically average and still write one of the most canonical novels in the English tradition. But, so while it didn't have a lasting effect on him, we do think that all that time kind of cooped up and not really being able to do anything was likely instrumental to the development of his deep imagination. And continuing in that vein, in terms of how Stoker's childhood intersected with Irish history, while the Stoker family was privileged enough to stay relatively safe from the cholera epidemic and Great Famine that coincided with Bram Stoker's birth, this image of horrors lurking just outside the door during his childhood is really clarifying. We see this in Lucy's girlhood bedroom in the novel, where you know the window being left just a bit ajar can bring disaster, not to say that that was Stoker's exact situation, but this idea that you're kind of in the safe domicile but just outside dangers are lurking and things are really scary, I think that's really resonant. And there are other connections too. So, Stoker biographer David J. Skal, who has been instrumental to my understanding of Stoker, has connected the so-called coffin ships that carried malnourished and diseased Irish immigrants to North America to the spooky ship that carries Dracula to England.
[Mark:] Can you say a few words about how Stoker became a professional writer and ended up writing Dracula and what the reception might have been at the time? Was it popular at the time or has it only come on to be canonical?
[Rachel:] It was a little bit of a slow burn. Stoker got his professional start in the civil service while working as an unpaid theater critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. The Dublin Evening Mail, which Le Fanu, who wrote Carmilla, which I mentioned previously, actually co-owned, and in that role he [Stoker] became friendly with the famous actor Sir Henry Irving when Irving would visit Ireland. And so he ended up taking Irving up on a job and moving to London with his wife, Florence Balcombe, a society beauty who, interestingly, had previously been courted by Oscar Wilde. And there he served various roles at the Lyceum Theater in the West End, and he was really at the center of the London theater world. So now we remember him as an author, and he was a little bit of a workaholic and was definitely writing lots of things all the time. But I think it's really helpful to think of him as a theater kid first and foremost. I feel like that's important to the, sort of, the general vibe. And what we get from stoker – he had lots of famous friends, as I mentioned. He was a workaholic; he was able to go with Irving on his tours, including to the United States, and we see his interest in the US apparent in the addition of a rootin’-tootin’ cowboy to the band of monster hunters in Dracula. He wrote a lot of different things: there's a horror novel about a monstrous worm; there’s a novel about a genderbending woman named Stephen. I always tell my students a joke; he’s this great example of just “if you write enough you'll eventually write something really good,” which is a little bit of a hot take. But I think it’s helpful to understanding him as you know this prolific kind of creator and creative who's mostly known for one thing.
[Mark:] Rachel, was Dracula a bestseller in 1897?
[Rachel:] So, Dracula appeared in 1897 to mixed reviews. It didn't sell particularly well, at least at first. There was a small initial print run, but then there was a second print run pretty quickly when it was published in the United States in 1899. Reviews were mixed again. Very relatable. But it has remained in print since its 1897 publication. So, I think that's really the key to understanding it canonicity, and dramatic adaptations – remember Stoker, huge theater kid – dramatic adaptations started appearing almost right away. So it was a little bit of a slow burn, but slowly and surely Dracula made its way into the public consciousness and over the course of years became a huge part of the popular imagination: both a very famous vampire tale and a key example of the Victorian Gothic.
[Mark:] In your introduction to Dracula you mentioned the genre “Gothic” quite frequently, and I think Gothic conjures up an image in most of our minds what does it mean to you? How are you using that term, and what is Dracula's relationship to the gothic?
[Rachel:] I think a lot about the gothic. I teach the gothic in a, sort of, long eighteenth and nineteenth century, transhistorical way, and I really used the introduction to write my own theory of the gothic. That was a space where it was something I sort of always wanted to write, and this seemed like the perfect place. So, I offer that just by way of a disclaimer, which is to say this is what the gothic means to me as someone deeply embedded in questions and discussions of the gothic, but this is not a dictionary definition or a crowdsourced definition of the gothic. But to me, the gothic is really defined historically and defined in relation to the history of the novel in England, the British novel, in England, in the eighteenth century. So, the earliest novels in England hued pretty closely to reality and were quite didactic are often played with, sort of, found text, were pretending to be real text in a way that now when we see that we recognize it as a trope, but at the time people were still sort of learning how to read these texts and sometimes assumed that they were true stories. And these earlier eighteenth-century realist novels were actually quite dark as well. So, they have these kind of dark pockets, and that darkness very often has to do with gendered experience and with inequality, and then as the century progresses, and really reaching its peak in the 1790s, we see the gothic emerge. And the gothic in this context is really a publishing phenomenon, which is to say: okay now we know how to read novels; what if these novels became these places to dive into our shared fears and desires, to the subconscious, to the impossible, to possible worlds, a place to reckon with how the past comes to bear on our lives and on our cultures? And that all happens in the eighteenth century. By the time we get to Dracula, we're sort of deep into a Gothic Revival, so we see the gothic emerge over the course of the eighteenth century. The 1790s was the explosion of the huge publishing trend. By the time Mary Shelley is writing Frankenstein, publishing it in 1818, it's already meta-Gothic, very self-aware, self-aware of the tropes. And then in the middle of the nineteenth century, in 1847, we get Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. And then in the 1880s and '90s we get, in order of appearance, the gothic classics The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray and Dracula. And those are the really canonical examples, but of course there's also, you know, the penny dreadful culture, Varney the Vampire, a much less famous vampire text which was serialized but racked up close to 667,000 words. So, you can think of that as like a best-selling YA series today. So there's this real taste for the gothic, and it kind of comes in and out. It's always, sort of, much like the hauntings of the gothic – the gothic often has these kind of strange spaces that bear some kind of mysterious relationship to the past – the gothic also haunts us. And something I love to discuss with my students is whether we're in a gothic revival right now, in terms of pop culture.
[Mark:] When you're talking about this, you're talking about people’s consciousness or subconscious, but we're also dealing with monsters and vampires. So, do you see the gothic as external or internal?
[Rachel:] So, Ann Radcliffe famously made this distinction between horror gothic and terror gothic, and terror Gothic was, for her, that's what she was doing. So they're these dark, spooky tales but it's really kind of like Scooby Doo at the end. It's not a ghost; it's the patriarchy. It's not a ghost; it's the evil count who murdered your father tricking you into thinking there is a ghost so that you never find out you're a princess, or whatever. So, in that case the gothic is external. It's these external forces that are coming to bear upon you or upon the heroine or the reader surrogate. And in the horror Gothic, which is where we get a lot of horror media today comes from, so an example would be Matthew Lewis's The Monk. So the horror is real; the devil is there; the evil is there, and it's supernatural but it's also personal. You have these dark desires as a human and so the novel becomes a place to explore them or to have this sort of safe catharsis. So it really depends which strain of the gothic you're looking at.
[Mark:] Also the one element that you spend a lot of time on in your introduction is the transgressive nature of the gothic. Can you explain that for us? I thought that was really fascinating.
[Rachel:] Yeah, absolutely. What's so interesting to me about the gothic but can also make the gothic really challenging, or poses challenges to literary analysis as we like to think about it – we like to think about analysis cohering in an argument that makes a point, that presents a reading that we think is the right reading – and something that the gothic does so problematically but also so beautifully is it creates these literary spaces that are subversive but not necessarily progressive. So, take a Radcliffe novel; go back to that. I've just made up a make-believe Radcliffe heroin but, you know, that one. And so you have this moment that's completely subversive. It's transgressive: you have a young girl, the patriarchy is haunting her, she's going to take control. Usually in a Radcliffe novel, part of that's going to involve meeting her love match, who is going to be an appropriate suitor, but in that moment the patriarchy, the systems and structures that be, the hauntings of the past, the sins in the past, familial Injustice, all of that is weighing on her, and she is going to rise up and she is going to right the moral compass. But then what happens at the end is the status quo is restored, and she marries the prince or she marries the knight and the evil is sort of sequestered. And so, it has this potential for social upheaval but then it always, or almost always, involves the reassertion of the status quo. Wollstonecraft is an outlier, but in general, that's what the gothic does.
[Mark:] So, how does that play out in Dracula?
[Rachel:] So, Dracula is such an interesting case study for the gothic, and the question that I like to ask my students, and that I believe I pose in the introduction is: when you're trying to figure out what is going on in Dracula, ask what is being made possible and who is being punished and why. And so, that's how we see this confluence of the subversive and the more socially conservative. What's being made possible? What's being made possible with Lucy having three suitors: the brilliant Jack Seward, the noble Arthur Homewood, and the adventurous and illustrious cowboy, Quincy. She has all of these suitors, and she's attracted all of this attention. What's being made possible is choice. She has choice, and who does she choose? She chooses the nobleman. She doesn't make a transgressive choice; she doesn't choose the weird, smart guy with a private asylum. She chooses the noblemen, and she doesn't lead anyone on, she lets everyone down easy, right away. She plays no games she's clear and firm in her decision, and her decision supports the status quo. And even so, she must be punished just because she's attracted so much attention. One woman should not have her choice of three eligible suitors, and so the monster is going to sneak into her childhood bedroom and destroy her. So, we see this assertion of the possible and then this punishment for the transgression. We see them happen at the same time. This goes back to my “you can't make sense,” you can't ascribe one or another reading onto Dracula because it's, kind of, always doing both.
[Mark:] You have talked about several of the characters in Dracula and I think it might be helpful to those who are about to approach this novel to maybe give a thumbnail of some of the major individuals that we’re about to meet, and I propose that we start with Jonathan Harker. What do we need to know about Harker?
[Rachel:] I would love to talk about Harker in terms of contemporary publishing trends, for a second, if that's okay. In contemporary publishing there are lots of YA novels and there are lots of adult novels and there are very few, what publishing briefly called new adult novels, so novels where the main character is just not quite a teen, not really into adulthood. There are some examples, but it's a kind of place where it's hard to publish. And so many of these classics are what I would call new adult novels. So back to Frankenstein, that's an example. Frankenstein goes to college, he misunderstands what it means to make a friend, he's spending too much time alone in his dorm room, and then we have the monster narrative. And really Dracula, when it comes to focusing on Jonathan Harker, it's a new adult novel in that same way. So, Jonathan Harker is going to see Count Dracula. He's on this big work assignment, he's really motivated, he wants to establish his career, he is engaged to Mina Murray, he is really excited about that. He is getting his adulthood started, and because he's so focused on those goals, he goes willingly into the monster’s castle, even though everyone is saying – another classic horror trope – don't go in that castle, wear this cross for your mother's sake, do not go in there, trying to create obstacles to just keep him from getting there. If he really looked around, it would be very clear that this is a bad idea. But we get him as this sort of model of new adulthood and then in that way possibly also this model of a type of insular British thinking, where he writes everyone off as superstitious and assumes that they don't know more than he does about things that they know about, when he doesn't know anything about them.
[Mark:] Okay, that’s excellent.
[Rachel:] So, that’s Jonathan Harker in a nutshell, I think, but you'll root for him, you'll root for him.
[Mark:] What about Mina Murray and Lucy Westernra?
[Rachel:] So, Mina and Lucy are such interesting models of Victorian womanhood. And they foil, the characters foil one another in such interesting ways, because Lucy, on some level, not entirely, she has some coquette tropes that attend to her and things like that. But we might see her as the angel, the angel in the home. She's this eligible young woman, everyone wants to marry her, she's beautiful, she's kind, gentle, desirable, and yet she asserts herself, as I mentioned, just a little too much and ends up getting erased from the novel. And I could talk more about the symbolism of that in ways that are, yes, spoilers, so I won't, but I will just ask you, if you are listening to this and you have not read the novel before, to pay attention to what would have been expected of Lucy in her life if she had moved forward with her goals. And how do shadow forms of those goals manifest for her in her monstrous future? With Mina we have more of the figure of the new woman. So she's gaining skills that are technological, she has some sort of marketable things that she's able to do, and she ends up actually being this amanuensis, where she's the one who's putting the story together, collecting everyone's narratives and typing things up and transcribing. So, she's this new woman in that she serves a public role, or it seems like she's stepping into this idea of serving a public role, even though within the novel it's confined to her small social group of monster hunters. But then she also is another type of idealized wife figure, where she is so loyal to Jonathan and then she ends up really mothering the whole group. And then, I don't want to, again, spoil anything about what happens to her, but her encounters with Dracula are very troubling later in the novel. So we really see stoker playing with the ideas and ideals of Victorian femininity.
[Mark:] Okay great, and we appreciate your discretion on the Norton Library podcast. We try to not reveal spoilers, so that's appreciated. How about the three men: Seward, Morris, and Holmwood?
[Rachel:] Well I mentioned them before as three different options for Lucy, but the way that they come together as this troop of vampire hunters, you know I spoke about constructions of femininity in terms of Lucy and Mina, and so we can really see them in that light as well, in terms of masculinity. So Quincy Morris is this rugged, American masculinity. Arthur Holmwood is this privileged noble man who is able to make a lot happen for the group by leveraging his privilege. And Jack Seward, I spent so much time in this text that I almost I feel like I know Jack Seward too well to even talk about him. But he is one of my, I would say, top three very problematic but interesting men of British Victorian fiction. And as much as he's in there telling a lot of the story and making a lot of things happen, he's also the point of contact to the two, kind of, outlier characters and been helping his teacher, who has this kind a deep education in different kinds of knowledge and is going to bring that to bear, on the one hand, and then, Renfield, who I don't want to spoil anything about but who I will just mention that this idea of mental difference or madness is a huge trope in the gothic. He is that figure and he's confined to Seward's asylum, and so Helsing and Renfield provide – we have Seward the scientist, Morris the adventurer, Holmwood the nobleman, and then with Helsing and Renfield, we get these more irrational or more occult types of knowledge or connections to the issue and the problem and the monster. And Seward is also our touchstone in that he brings both of those characters into the mix.
[Mark:] Oh, what a great outline of the novel, and that gives us great tools to approach it. Rachel Feder, thank you so much for joining us on the Norton Library podcast.
[Rachel:] Thank you so much for having me, it's been a pleasure.
[Mark:] The Norton Library edition of Dracula by Bram Stoker with an introduction by Rachel Feder is available now in paperback and ebook. Check out the links in the description to this episode for ordering options and more information about the Norton Library, including the full catalog of titles.
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