Who Is Dracula's Father? E-Book

Jon Sutherland

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

When it was first published in 1897 – 120 years ago – Irish author Bram Stoker's Dracula was ranked by the Daily Mail above work by Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe, as well as Wuthering Heights. Yet it never made Stoker any money. Since 1931's film Nosferatu the Vampire, however, it has never been out of print and is legendary among fans of the dark, macabre and mysterious … Critic John Sutherland, a Dracula fan since childhood – and author of the literary puzzle classics Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre be Happy? explores the enigmas and puzzles of this towering giant of gothic novels, such as: Who was Dracula's father? Why does the Count come to England? Does the Count actually give Jonathan a 'love bite'? Why does every country we know of have a vampire legend? And finally – how long is it before we're all vampires? The book also includes 'Dracula Digested' by John Crace, author of the Guardian's Digested Reads column.

Leseprobe

WHO IS DRACULA’S FATHER?

And Other Puzzles in Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece

JOHN SUTHERLAND

For Paul Barber

Contents

Title PageDedicationPreface  Who is Dracula’s father?Is Count Dracula the great Impaler incarnate?How dead is Dracula?Bram Stoker (1847–1912), a short biographyWhat colour is Dracula’s moustache?Quincey P. Morris: vampire?Where did Dracula’s (English-speaking?) harem come from?Who washes Dracula’s pinafore?Why does Van Helsing swear in German?J.S. Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872)Why does the bloofer lady target children?Why did Henry Irving not bite?Nosferatu? What does that mean?Why does Dracula take risks? (Dr Freud explains)What do Stoker’s notes tell us?How much German does Jonathan speak?Why Whitby?What is the point of R.M. Renfield?Why are the Gypsies so loyal to Dracula?What else was happening in 1893?Dracula: a chronological plot summaryWhat happened in Munich?Why is Stoker’s vampire aristocratic?Who invented the Dracula tux?How rich is Dracula?Why won’t Dracula let Jonathan go home?Whose face does Jonathan remember?Is Dracula’s blood warm?Why are Dracula’s palms hirsute?Is Dracula gay?What is ‘Carfax’?Where would you find a ‘gesunder’ in Dracula?Why is Dracula so interested in blue flames?How does Vampire Lucy escape from a lead-lined coffin?Where have all the vampires gone?Coincidence, or something else?How ordinary a vampire is Count Dracula?Is Van Helsing’s giant spider real?  Appendix: Dracula Digested, by John CraceCopyright

Preface

I believe the reward from reading fiction arises less from what you know than what you don’t know – what, perhaps, you’ll never know. Puzzles.

In what follows I have, as it were, picked up Bram Stoker’s Dracula and shaken it, to see what puzzles fall out. Interspersed with those puzzles are a few separate features, including a brief biography of Stoker on page 14 and a short summary of Dracula’s narrative on page 99. Don’t rely on the movie versions. They take liberties. (But enjoy the best of them. Even the worst sometimes afford a perverse pleasure. Who would not be charmed by Dracula’s Dog?)

I was very lucky to be a friend of Dr Paul Barber in the 1980s, when I was working in America. Barber is the most admired of scholars who have looked, anthropologically, folklorically, and every which way at the vampire phenomenon. His conclusions are stated in his now classic work, Vampires, Burial and Death (1990, reprinted 2010). It’s a masterly summation of fact, fiction and fantasy. And in the lighter-hearted cogitation, I have borne in mind Paul Barber’s instruction that we should keep separate in our minds the ‘folkloric vampire’ and the ‘fictional vampire’.

Lovers of Dracula, and those coming to it for the first time, are lucky to have the fullest critical biography yet produced: David J. Skal’s Something in the Blood: The Untold Story of Bram Stoker, the Man Who Wrote Dracula (2017). Insight into the novel has recently been further enriched by the facsimile reproduction and transcription of the author’s preliminary memoranda in Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, edited by Robert Eighteen-Bisang and Elizabeth Miller (2008).

There is a wealth of discussion about Dracula on the web, upon which I have drawn. If I have missed any acknowledgement of what is borrowed, I apologise, and will make amends in future editions.

Judge of a man by his questions rather than by his answers

VOLTAIRE

Who is Dracula’s father?

Who spawned Dracula? There are two contenders worthy of discussion here. Elsewhere (see page 6) we will examine the popular notion that Dracula is none other than Vlad the Impaler, the infamous 15th-century prince of Wallachia – in which case his father would be Vlad II Dracul, a nobleman of similar rank. But there is another possibility.

Before he goes to Transylvania, Jonathan Harker bones up in the reading room of the British Museum. One can indulge a fanciful vision of him under Panizzi’s great dome, alongside George Bernard Shaw.

We may note, in passing, that Bram Stoker actually started his five years of casual research for in the public library of Whitby, over a relaxing summer holiday in the town, in 1890. One book in particular caught his fancy, William Wilkinson’s From that volume (there cannot have been an overwhelming demand for it in the library) Stoker took the following, transcribed, supposedly by Harker, verbatim into the narrative: