‘Imperious’? He is clearly the alpha wolf, the werewolf. One notices that in this confrontation Dracula is at his most hirsute, with a heavy beard. Underneath his large hat he will certainly have the telltale unibrow.
Stoker did not, however, develop this concept in the narrative. When he lands in Whitby, Dracula is a large dog, possibly a small wolf; not ostensibly werewolfian. Stoker was, to put it simply, keeping two narrative balls in the air until the second half of the novel.
One reason the lupine theme did not, in the event, work for Stoker is because the emergence of the werewolf depends on long-separated lunar phases. Dracula is nocturnal – any night is vampire night. And Dracula can, as a vampire, change into more things than man’s four-legged, hairy enemy. It makes for a more rapid narrative and interesting contest between the Count (Dracula) and the Professor (Van Helsing).
One of the things which constantly strikes one, on a thoughtful reading of the novel, is how Stoker, while writing, kept in play a range of different narrative possibilities. Dracula the hairy wolf-man is one he did not develop, nor fully erase. It was narrative ammunition not fired but always at the ready.
Dracula’s hairy palms: a second reason
There is another aspect to Dracula’s hairy palms. The sin of Onan. Early European society was obsessed with the vice – or was it a disease? – of self-abuse, to use the coyest phrase. (There are, of course, enough un-coy names to fill a small encyclopedia.)
A classic, and in its time hugely influential, warning was that proclaimed by the Swiss physician Samuel Tissot in his L’Onanisme, ou Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1754). Among the deadly ‘maladies produites par la masturbation’ which parents and physicians should keep their eyes open for, given the incorrigible secretiveness of the self-abuser, were pallor and daytime debilitation verging, in its extreme, on paralysis. The Onanist reduces himself by his manual malpractice to ‘a being that less resembled a living creature than a corpse … it was difficult to discover that he had formerly been part of the human race’. If not un-dead then certifiably un-living. And the guilty hand of the chronic masturbator would be (hairily) marked – like Cain’s forehead. A sign conspicuous of God’s curse on the vile manual practice.
Fear of masturbation reached phobic heights in the 19th century. That the hairy palm was a giveaway was widespread lore (it survives to this day as a schoolboy joke). Since this hairiness was rarely actually seen, other than by those given to the solitary vice, as the shameless Rousseau called it, the afflicted would, presumably skim over their palms every day with their morning razor. Ladies might presumably epilate.
Britain and America – in fact all countries who had undergone a Puritan moral revolution – were obsessed about the horrible consequences of self-abuse. Machines were developed, more complex than the legendary female chastity belt, to keep the dreaded vice at bay (the ‘Stephenson Spermatic Truss’ was one such). The Kellogg brothers, fanatical on the subject to the point of lunacy, touted their corn flakes as a sovereign preservative.† Involuntary nocturnal emission, spermatorrhea, was usefully controlled by such machinery and dietary measures. Dracula evinces all the signs of a chronic self-abuser: pallor, night-walking, enfeeblement during daylight hours. And, of course, that giveaway hairy palm. Corn flakes would not, one fears, help.
One of the explanations for adult masturbation being epidemic in the male Victorian population was late marriage. Another was segregated education. Lucy’s three suitors are all, we can safely assume, around thirty; she is not yet twenty. Are Arthur, Quincey and Jack to simply cross their legs? Or have recourse to ladies of easy virtue? Or simply make use of the ever-ready Mrs Hand? Look at their palms and see. Myself, I would conjecture the judicious and discreet use of expensive courtesans – at least by Arthur and Quincey; Jack Seward seems cut from different, more moralistic, cloth.
The most thorough exploration of this topic, historically, with illuminating sidelights on to Dracula is Deborah Mary Birch’s jaunty article ‘Hairy Palms, or, Onania and all its Frightful Consequences’ (which I am gratefully plundering).‡
Birch notes, as I hadn’t, that in later versions and all the leading screen versions the hairy palm detail is removed. It could, some editor may have realised, inspire sniggers rather than shudders. But one should recall that in May 1897 it was still a shuddery subject.
Hair has the unique feature of being both inside and outside the body. And it surrounds human genitalia. The evolutionary reason for this is not clear. Eyebrows (to keep sweat out of eyes while hunting) are, by contrast, quite explicable. We can surmise that the hairy palm suggests, vaguely but powerfully, as does pubic hair, sexuality. As do the werewolf’s lunar ‘monthlies’. As Birch notes:
The sexual symbolism of both the wolfman and Dracula is hard to miss; monthly attacks that can be measured by the cycle of the moon, sexual and (when appropriate) homoerotic connotations of blood sucking – the red substance often compared to that invaluable life source, semen. In an attempt to hide their true nature, werewolves often shaved their palm but hair, insubordinate foe, grows back; watch for stubbled hands, we are warned. [Birch’s italics]
And warned we shall be.
* Hyperthricosis has been given a relevant nickname: ‘werewolf syndrome’.
† A comic novel on the Kellogg brothers’ mission to heal the private parts of America, The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle, was published in 1993.
‡ http://www.academia.edu/6291687/Hairy_Palms_or_Onania_and_
all_its_Frightful_Consequences.
Is Dracula gay?
The question has, of course, been asked over and again. Two factors are relevant in attempting any answer. Most noteworthy is that Stoker worked all his professional life in a world – that of the London theatre – which was uniquely tolerant of homosexuality. There has been much speculation as to the relationship of Henry Irving and Stoker, his acolyte and personal servant. And what else? Stoker probably saw the actor naked, in the dressing room, more often than he did his wife in the bedroom.
Stoker might have adventured down this path – the love that dare not write its three-volume novel – to do something genuinely groundbreaking. He did not. It is more than likely that he was inhibited by a historical event, and his personal connection with it.
The 1890s saw the downfall of Stoker’s friend, and onetime love rival from Dublin days, Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s action for libel against the Marquis of Queensberry for labelling him a ‘somdomite’ was opened on 3 April 1895. It ended in loss for Wilde. The second, vengeful trial, brought against Wilde by the state for gross indecency, took place three weeks later. It inspired speeches by the defendant from the witness box, gallantly defending the freedom to love where love took a man. The jury could not decide. It led to a third trial, which opened on 22 May 1895 and a less enlightened twelve jurors (all men; statistically there would have been a gay among them). Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years’ hard labour.
He was released on 19 May 1897, three weeks before Stoker’s novel was released. The Wilde trials inspired a manic horror at sodomy across the nation – a moral panic, no less. Wilde and his ‘vice’ had no public defenders the length and breadth of the land in August 1897. Nor was there sympathy for works of literature such as The Picture of Dorian Gray, which were wholly lax on ‘the unspeakable crime of the Oscar Wilde sort’, as the hero calls it in E.M. Forster’s Maurice (a book he could not publish in the Edwardian period in which he was writing it without fear of prosecution).
For Stoker it was a tricky problem. By 1897, when Dracula was published, he had had two years to work out what precautions a wise author would take. He and Wilde were known to be friends. Many knew that the two of them had been suitors for the same woman, Florence Balcombe, now Stoker’s wife. He obliterated from the novel any possible tincture of gay.
But perhaps not entirely. Discussion about Dracula being gay or not has centred on one particular clue the novel seems to
throw the reader’s way. When he comes down to rein in his concubines, slavering as they are to ravish Jonathan, there is an angry exchange between the vampiric sultan and his harem. ‘You yourself never loved; you never love!’ angrily protests one:
On this the other women joined, and such a mirthless, hard, soulless laughter rang through the room that it almost made me [Jonathan, recalling the event in his diary] faint to hear; it seemed like the pleasure of fiends. Then the Count turned, after looking at my face attentively, and said in a soft whisper:–
‘Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so? Well, now I promise you that when I am done with him you shall kiss him at your will. Now go! go! I must awaken him, for there is work to be done.’
Clearly Dracula has a taste for Jonathan Harker’s blood. When he sees his guest with a shaving cut, as Jonathan relates, ‘his eyes blazed with a sort of demoniac fury, and he suddenly made a grab at my throat’. But he leaves the vulnerable Englishman’s neck unbitten all the weeks Jonathan is resident in his castle. Nothing would be easier than to drop a ‘potion’ in his guest’s nightcap and, when the legal business is signed and sealed, suck him dry as a bone.
And that ‘soft whisper’ surely hints at something erotic stirring within. But Dracula never takes advantage of his helpless victim. Nor of any male: not even poor Renfield, who is desperate for his master’s jugular kiss and the ‘perpetual life’ that comes with it.
There are possible explanations. One is that Dracula does not want Jonathan to be mentally disabled before the legal business is all dealt with. A terminally anaemic solicitor’s clerk might be below his best on the finer points of property law. Another, as argued elsewhere (see page 130), is that Dracula needs Jonathan as a model Englishman to style himself on. That is all he wants to suck out of him.
Most probable, at the authorial level, is that Stoker simply did not dare take the risk of tarring himself with Wildeism.
An ‘unspeakable vice of the Oscar Wilde kind’, did Forster call it? So be it. Stoker would not speak of it in his novel. Nonetheless he would intrude, sotto voce, the merest hint for the smart reader. That ‘soft whisper’ echoes suggestively in the reader’s mind.
What is ‘Carfax’?
Oxonians will have no problem in firing off the answer. It is the crossroads at the centre of their city, a spot redolent with history – some of it as cruel (the public burning of the ‘heretics’ Latimer and Ridley, for example, in front of a jeering crowd) as anything Vlad Tepes could come up with.
The word ‘carfax’ is not, generally, used to describe locations elsewhere than at the heart of Oxford. Etymologically the word can be traced to the French quatre faces, four faces. It’s a very high-table name. Dracula, we may note in passing, has four visages at least, changing with whatever situation he finds himself in.
Jonathan is confronted with the first of those faces when his host, masquerading as an excessively hairy coachman, picks him up at a crossroads – the Borgo Pass. It symbolises. One road leads to safety; the other to damnation. Jonathan makes the wrong choice. A forced move, as they say in chess. Dracula has already tossed his luggage on to the coach.
The Castle Dracula Hotel now proudly claims to be located on that very pass: a sinister hostelry, one might think, to rank with the Overlook Hotel in Stephen King’s The Shining. Some TripAdvisor reviewers (particularly the one cited prominently, who complained about the staff being ‘ignorant’) are doubtless frozen into photographs on the Hotel Castle Dracula walls, like King’s Jack Torrance, one can fantasise.*
On his wild ride to Castle Dracula Jonathan passes a number of cross-shrines. His English, Protestant eye will find them offensive. They are routinely located at crossroads, symbolising roads taken/not taken in life. Both vampires and werewolves (the Count, at this stage is ambiguously both) are, lore has it, magnetically drawn to carfaxes/crossroads. As the authoritative website Werewolves.com informs us:
Many of the lobisomem [the Brazilian word for werewolves, if you did not know it] legends have to do with how one transforms into a beast, and then transforms back. In many of these legends, the lobisomem will turn when they get to a crossroads on Friday night at midnight, full moon or no. In order to get back into man form, the lobisomem must find the same crossroads where they originally turned into the savage beast. And still, in other areas of the country, it’s believed that a lobisomem must run through seven cemeteries before they can be transformed back.
Vampires share a traditional interest in crossroads. As does the Devil, of course. Robert Johnson, the greatest blues singer in history, allegedly sold his soul at a Delta crossroads, in return for his mastery over the ‘Devil’s Music’. The authoritative website Vampires.com (we’re lucky to be living in this internet age) tells us all we need to know. And more:
For ages crossroads have been considered places for evil activity. A known meeting place for the unholy. Crossroads are unhallowed ground haunted by demons, the Devil, witches, fairies, ghosts, spirits, and of course, vampires. In Russian folklore, the undead were believed to wait at crossroads, drinking the blood of weary travelers unlucky enough [to] pass their way. In Romanian lore, living vampires, those who are destined to become vampires after death, send their souls out of their bodies at night to wander crossroads.
Supposed vampires were routinely, like suicides, buried at crossroads and staked fast to the dirt – because ‘it was believed that once they rose, they wouldn’t know which path to take back home’. Dracula is not, of course, a stupid vampire. If he doesn’t know where to go he studies his Bradshaw.
Dracula chooses to reside in Carfax from the available properties his estate agent has shown him. The old ruin has everything a vampire could want: pre-eminently, sacred earth round its decayed chapel, and the ‘quatre faces’. Dracula can never have too many cruxes, it would seem. On his way to Carfax he travels via King’s Cross, Charing Cross, and stays for a few recuperative days in a new refrigerated storage warehouse at Cross Angel Street. He likes cold. And cross-streets.
There is, of course, a paradox in Dracula’s relationship with the cross which I have been unable to make sense of. The cross is a potent vampire repellent. The innkeeper’s wife gives Jonathan a crucifix. Out of politeness he (wisely) takes and wears it, despite an Anglican twinge of conscience. He later writes in his journal:
Bless that good, good woman who hung the crucifix round my neck! For it is a comfort and a strength to me whenever I touch it. It is odd that a thing which I have been taught to regard with disfavour and as idolatrous should in a time of loneliness and trouble be of help. Is it that there is something in the essence of the thing itself, or that it is a medium, a tangible help, in conveying memories of sympathy and comfort? Some time, if it may be, I must examine this matter and try to make up my mind about it.†
For Van Helsing (a cradle Catholic) the crucifix is as potent a weapon against Dracula as his trusty hammer and wooden stake. As I say, the contradiction teases. Does Dracula love or hate the cross? I would be grateful for answers.
* King’s novel echoes throughout with elements from Dracula as does his early Vampire novel, Salem’s Lot (1975). King recalled beginning to write it after teaching Dracula to a high school class.
† Commentators note Francis Ford Coppola’s elaborate play with Catholic symbolism – particularly the cross – in his take on Dracula and assume, as with The Godfather, he is exploring his own religious upbringing. In passages like the above Jonathan seems on the point of converting.
Where would you find a ‘gesunder’ in Dracula?
Virtually every Victorian bedroom had them. Outside lavatories, and the absence of night-lights, made them necessary.
‘Gesunders’, they were called: the thing that ‘goes under’ the bed. Even, unromantically, on the couple’s honeymoon. I can remember the ones in my grandparents’ house being emptied of a morning, a napkin decently covering the contents. I worked, one 1950s summer, in a seaside Clacton hote
l. I remember an old housemaid weeping because she had been told that she must empty chamber pots containing ‘number twos’, or be sacked.
Chamber pots, not trousers, were the true Victorian unmentionables. And yet, strangely, they are mentioned in Dracula. In Stoker’s surviving notes there is a huge amount of material about Whitby along with page after page of Yorkshire dialect words and their meanings, which clearly fascinated him.
There are many bedroom scenes in Dracula. But it is not in one of those that our gesunder is briefly glimpsed. Mina and a local Whitby resident – an old man almost as garrulous as Van Helsing – have the following exchange in a churchyard. Mr Swales has lived long enough to have a wholly cynical view of the human condition; particularly in Whitby.
‘Yabblins! There may be a poorish few not wrong, savin’ where they make out the people too good; for there be folk that do think a balm-bowl be like the sea, if only it be their own. The whole thing be only lies. Now look you here; you come here a stranger, an’ you see this kirk-garth.’ I nodded, for I thought it better to assent, though I did not quite understand his dialect. I knew it had something to do with the church. He went on: ‘And you consate that all these steans be aboon folk that be happed here, snod an’ snog?’ I assented again. ‘Then that be just where the lie comes in. Why, there be scores of these lay-beds that be toom as old Dun’s ’bacca-box on Friday night.’ He nudged one of his companions, and they all laughed.
Who Is Dracula's Father? Page 11