She, the New Woman—also, by the way, married and sexually experienced—is able to defeat the vampire, while the pure, sweet, and still virginal Lucy is not.

Poised as it is on the threshold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Dracula displays the period’s uneasy balance between the relative importance accorded to science and religion. Dracula, in the time-honored fashion of fictional monsters, is explicitly connected with hell, and represents an inversion of traditional Christianity. “Dracul,” indeed, is the word for “devil” in the Count’s native Wallachian, and one of his incarnations is a crawling lizard-like creature; the fact that Harker first meets him on the feast day of St. George, the dragon-slayer, sets up the theme of dragon-slaying, the fight between religion and coarse instinct, as does the peasant woman’s gift to Harker of a crucifix, which, as a Protestant and a man of science, he regards with suspicion and bemusement.

Dracula is presented as a sort of anti-Christ, Renfield as his St. Paul; both speak in language that consciously echoes or paraphrases the Gospels. Dracula’s speech during his mock-marriage ceremony with Mina is meant to be particularly shocking and still succeeds, even in our own irreligious age: “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for a while; and shall be later on my companion and my helper” (p. 306). As anti-Christ, Dracula also offers his followers what Christianity claims to offer: the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

The novel’s vampire fighters are all nominal Christians, and indeed almost their last word before Quincey Morris expires and the unholy stain disappears from Mina’s forehead is “a deep and earnest ‘Amen’ ” (p. 399), but simple faith has clearly not been sufficient to slay this dragon: Modern science, intellectual effort, and the bonds of friendship have all been needed to back it up.

As the twentieth century progressed, the religious elements of the vampire myth became less interesting to the public, and the vampire figure began to take on different attributes. The strangest and most perverse has been the transformation of the vampire from a figure of terror to a romantic outsider, a sexy, Byronic hero. Barnabas Collins of the kitschy television show Dark Shadows ( 1966-1971 ) was perhaps the first sympathetic vampire, but the type was perfected in Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire (1976) and its sequels, which developed a new archetype, the self-conscious and confessional vampire. Performers and directors, most notably Frank Langella, who played Dracula on Broadway in 1977, have added a decidedly sensual element to what was originally intended to be a purely terrifying monster.

Stoker’s monster was not born without precedent; there was already a vampire tradition not only in folklore but in literature as well. John Polidori’s The Vampyre had been a brisk seller in 1819, as had James Malcolm Ryder’s Varney the Vampyre: or, the Feast of Blood (serialized 1845-1847). Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s more recent Carmilla (1872) described a female vampire with lesbian leanings. Famous works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey had also contained vampire imagery. Dracula owes something to each of these; and something of Dracula has gone into the many works of vampire fiction that have followed it. And while the figure of the vampire has continued to evolve, sometimes in surprising ways, it is Bram Stoker’s Dracula that has come closest to crystallizing it, and Dracula’s images that have had the most persistent power to haunt our memories.

Brooke Allen holds a Ph.D. in English literature from Columbia University. She is a book critic whose work has appeared in numerous publications including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Criterion, The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The Hudson Review, and The New Leader. A collection of her essays, Twentieth-Century Attitudes, was published in 2003.

TO
MY DEAR FRIEND
HOMMY-BEGa

How these papers have been placed in sequence will be made manifest in the reading of them. All needless matters have been eliminated, so that a history almost at variance with the possibilities of later-day belief may stand forth as simple fact. There is throughout no statement of past things wherein memory may err, for all the records chosen are exactly contemporary, given from the standpoints and within the range of knowledge of those who made them.

CHAPTER I

JONATHAN HARKER’S JOURNAL

(Kept in shorthand)

3 May. Bistritz.b

Left Munich at 8.35 p.m. on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6.46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible. The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East; the most Western of splendid bridges over the Danube, which is here of noble width and depth, took us among the traditions of Turkish rule.1

We left in pretty good time, and came after nightfall to Klausenburgh. c Here I stopped for the night at the Hotel Royale. I had for dinner, or rather supper, a chicken done up some way with red pepper, which was very good but thirsty. (Mem.,d get recipe for Mina.) I asked the waiter, and he said it was called ‘paprika hendl,’ and that, as it was a national dish, I should be able to get it anywhere along the Carpathians.