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ABSTRACT
The essay deals with the bifurcated representation of time in Dracula that is split into a modern and pre-modern time. In Stoker’s novel, the time of Western modernity and the modern nation depends on the repression of the past and of the past-becoming of the present. While modern technologies purportedly create an imaginary sense of control over the wayward mythologies of the past, supplementing and stabilizing the modern present, they cannot fully obstruct the haunting of the prehistory of modernity represented by the vampire and Transylvania. The predominant fears of the novel derive from the powerful eruption of this prehistory in the form of a Gothic romance that spawns unspeakable sexual perversions, adulterating both the modern time and the Victorian body. This essay performs a close reading of the passages primarily belonging to the first part of the novel that depict the perils and pleasures of being haunted by the distant past and shows how the oft-sexualized eruption of the past in the novel forces modernity to regress to the romance genre.
Notes
1 All references to the novel are from Bram Stoker, Dracula (London: Penguin Books, 1994).
2 Barrows insightfully comments on the narrative’s fixation on exact time, noting that ‘standard time, for Stoker, served a double function, preserving England’s ontological purity by excising the temporally untranslatable and providing a model for a total narrative, able to assimilate various classes, nations, dialects, and media’ (2010: 265).
3 I use the word ‘prehistory’ to refer to the prehistory of modernity throughout the essay.
4 See Senf Citation1979: 164 and Arata Citation1990: 623.
5 See Coundouriotis Citation1999–2000.
6 For instance, see Valente Citation2000.
7 In a brilliantly light-hearted manner, Wicke also wonders: ‘[w]hat, after all, is the stenographic version of “kiss me with those red lips,” Jonathan’s hot inner monologue as he lies swooning on the couch surrounded by his version of Dracula’s angels?’ (1992: 471)
8 In a similar vein, Law observes that ‘catching up is a central, and deadly, occupation in Dracula’ (2006: 983). He also notes the ‘deadly presentism’ of the Western characters (983) and suggests that the diary form, which Jonathan and others deploy, serves ‘as antidote to retrospective narration’s dilatory effects’ (2006: 984).
9 While I am not convinced that such modern technologies prove to be of any practical use in the Western characters’ fight against Dracula, this point has been made by Picker (Citation2001: 776). For other comments on the use of technology, see Yu 2006: 156.
10 Viragh claims that Dracula stands for ‘minority cultures and languages [that] are increasingly threatened with assimilation and extinction’ (2013: 232). Seeing Dracula as a subaltern, he further claims that ‘[the] divergent and contradictory ethnic strands’ in Dracula’s oral history ‘reveal [his] inability to clearly articulate his cultural history’ (2013: 236). I believe Dracula is well able to articulate his cultural history, and does so through the romance of blood that may be found in many a version of racially motivated minor nationalism.
11 See Hatlen’s comments on Godalming’s almost bourgeois humility which is in stark contrast with the auratic, over-sexual stance of Dracula (1980: 83).
12 Similarly, Richards relates the obsession with the power of recording in Dracula to a desire to appropriate the authority and the reliability of the contemporary newspaper by mimicking it (2009: 451). Stenography in Dracula may in turn be said to mimic the nation-binding factuality of the newspaper. See also Wicke Citation1992: 488.
13 The parallelism between Dracula’s archaic technologies and the modern ones of the Western characters has been noted by Kujundzic (Citation2005: 93).
14 For the intimations of homosexuality in Dracula, see McCrea Citation2010, Craft Citation1984 and Halberstam Citation1993.
15 The image of Dracula as a Christian hero also becomes perverted, not just sexually, but also in terms of national and religious affiliation; according to Coundouriotis, Dracula turns into an unsettlingly hybrid hero: ‘an Ottomanized European … a dissonant figure fitting uncomfortably, a blasphemous Christian hero’ (Coundouriotis 1999–2000: 153).
16 This sense of proximity may also be the result of Dracula’s manipulation of pornographic language and plot codes, which Pikula examines in her article on the use of the ‘sex-sells’ tactics of the novel and its sexual representations of ‘vampire otherness’ (2012: 284).
17 McWhir brilliantly explains the transformation of Jonathan and the other Western characters into semi-national heroes, noting that they achieve their ‘reassertion of clear social categories and civilized values’ through ‘recognition – and even use – of a kind of power that seems quite inimical to order and peace and trains that run on time’ (1987: 39).
18 Among the commentators, Hennelly Jr. (1977) articulates most clearly the invigoration of the ideologically sterile, anaemic Victorian fin-de-siècle in Dracula by the spirit of medievalism.