"It is out of the lore and experience of the ancients and of all those who have studied the powers of the Un-Dead. When they become such, there comes with the change the curse of immortality. They cannot die, but must go on age after age adding new victims and multiplying the evils of the world. For all that die from the preying of the Un-dead become themselves Un-dead, and prey on their kind. And so the circle goes on ever widening, like as the ripples from a stone thrown in the water..." Van Helsing, Chapter 16
The Death of Dracula... Or was it???
This page will review the death of Dracula in Bram Stoker's novel and compare it to the death scenes in film adaptations of Dracula.
I will be looking at how the death scene in the novel actually leaves the door wide open for Dracula to "live on" in not just adaptations of the novel, but in sequences as well. For example, in the book, Dracula is killed with a knife-- not a stake as is the rule for killing vampires, even according to Van Helsing himself. Why did they not stake him?? Also, it says that he crumbled into dust, but perhaps it only appears that way. Dracula is a shape shifter, and one of his forms is in fact mist. Dracula lives on, because, well, HE LIVES ON! Another "proof" of his death is Mina's full recovery from vampirization. Maybe, Dracula released his hold on her. Or maybe she wasn't cured, as the Mina Harker from the film League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. Maybe the scar went away because she was now supernatural and able to alter her looks?
Regardless, the story of Dracula has been re-done countless times, and will be continued. Our obsession with Dracula and its significance has grown into such a phenomenon that it cannot be unknown or ignored. It takes on many forms, just as Dracula shape shifts.
However, as much as I enjoy literary analysis, sometimes I would just like to stake Dracula's cultural significance and just enjoy a thrilling Gothic horror story for its very own sake as I did when I first encountered the novel in my pre-teen years.
"Imagine a Dracula in which wooden stakes are wooden stakes, and blood is merely blood. This is not an easy task when we consider the extent to which the text has been pushed to the brink of total libidinal abandon" Elizabeth Miller
"The nails drew with a screeching sound, and the top of the box was thrown back.
By this time the gypsies, seeing themselves covered by the Winchesters, and at the mercy of Lord Godalming and Dr. Seward, had given in and made no further resistance. The sun was almost down on the mountain tops, and the shadows of the whole group fell upon the snow. I saw the Count lying within the box upon the earth, some of which the rude falling from the cart had scattered over him. He was deathly pale, just like a waxen image, and the red eyes glared with the horrible vindictive look which I knew so well.
As I looked, the eyes saw the sinking sun, and the look of hate in them turned to triumph.
But, on the instant, came the sweep and flash of Jonathan's great knife. I shrieked as I saw it shear through the throat. Whilst at the same moment Mr. Morris's bowie knife plunged into the heart.
It was like a miracle, but before our very eyes, and almost in the drawing of a breath, the whole body crumbled into dust and passed from our sight.
I shall be glad as long as I live that even in that moment of final dissolution, there was in the face a look of peace, such as I never could have imagined might have rested there.
The Castle of Dracula now stood out against the red sky, and every stone of its broken battlements was articulated against the light of the setting sun."
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Chapter 27
"Dracula's deathlessness both as a hero and as a narrative is due to him being a receptacle of primordial mysteries that bound death, blood, love, and our obsessive craving for immortality together...Moreover, Dracula's ambiguous slide between poles of absolute evil and redemptive love, between terror and vulnerability, his conversion from executioner into victim in more recent popular productions disclose a dilution and/or revision of the notions of good and evil that is a characteristic of the modern times." (Popa, 45)
"...the hero is highly adaptable, and we are not referring now only to his rich polymorphousness; he also exerts a huge power of fascination that made artists, film-makers, and writers create new works inspired by his personality. In fact, as Elizabeth Miller noticed, "every generation creates its own Count Dracula, reflecting the fears, anxieties, and fantasies of its own time" (Popa,45)
Elizabeth Miller, a tireless debunker of academic Dracula myths, proposes a thought experiment: "Imagine a Dracula in which wooden stakes are wooden stakes, and blood is merely blood. This is not an easy task when we consider the extent to which the text has been pushed to the brink of total libidinal abandon" (Miller, "Coitus Interruptus" n.p.). (Clasen, 379).
"By adopting a biocultural perspective we can see how Dracula gives strong emotional shape to conflicts and fears that are deeply ingrained in human nature, but also how the novel is a product of its time. Count Dracula is a contextually inflected embodiment of ancient, evolved terrors: the vampire is a supercharged predator, a fierce beast reminiscent of ancestral predators to which we are hard-wired to attend, the kind with sharp teeth and homicidal intent. He is also highly contagious, a parasitic disease-bçarer^ a supernaturally animated corpse with a range of disturbing abiliües and connotations. Moreover, supernaturalism plays a crucial and ambivalent role in the novel. On the one hand. Count Dracula embodies 'bad' supernaturalism, the horrible idea of a decomposing corpse coming to life with ill intent. On the other hand. Van Helsing's band of vampire hunters embody a 'good' supernaturalism inflected by Stoker's Christian ethos. Stoker intertwines this bifurcation of supernaturalisms with a basic social conflict rooted in adaptive dispositions, namely the coniflict between egalitarianism and dominance. Van Helsing's crew, the solid Christians, embody an egalitarian ethos; Dracula is dominance incamate. In Stoker's woridview, this makes Dracula bad and the vampire hunters good. All these elements work together to produce the total imaginative effect of the novel" (Clasen, 381)
"Human attention is preferentially engaged by themes of adaptive significance: we are endlessly fascinated by stories about sex, murder, neglected children, incest, devious sociopaths, and so on (Cooke). Hence, Stoker's story about a dangerous, contagious monster is well-engineered to capture our attention..." (Clasen, 381)
"Up until a few thousand years ago, our ancestors were regularly pounced on by ferocious feline predators, bitten by snakes, and attacked by conspecifics (Hart and Sussman; Quammen). This million-year-long struggle for existence has shaped our species profoundly, and we retain our keen interest in such enemies, even in environments that completely lack them. That is why we are still fascinated by dangerous beasts (Coss; Grimes; Ohman), including the supernatural kind found in horror stories like Dracula (cf. Scalise Sugiyama). Alpha predators with sharp teeth and hooked claws may be gone from our natural environments, but they live on in our horror stories. In E. O. Wilson's words, "a sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could [in ancestral environments] see you through to the next morning ... We stay alive and alert in the vanished forests of the world'" (Clasen, 387)"And this explains why Count Dracula388 Mathias Ciasen is such an interesting creature, even as a 500-year-old vampire with supernatural abilities is a highly implausible idea: Dracula taps into an adaptive mechanism for
danger management by meeting the input specifications of this adaptation and then some, that is, by being basically a tweaked predator. As Van Helsing says to the seasoned hunters Morris, Seward and Holmwood after Dracula has eluded them: "You follow quick. You are hunters of wild beast, and understand it so" (267). Dracula is fundamentally bestial, and has prominent fangs, "pointed like an animal's"(155), and sharp nails. He is repeatedly described as an animal—a panther (266), a lion (ibid.), and a tiger (278)—and he has fiery, red eyes, superhuman strength, and a volatile temper" (Clasen, 388)