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With his 1897 novel Dracula, Bram Stoker created a horror icon that may live as long as the title character did. Inspired in part by John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla(1871), Stoker envisioned the archetypal literary vampire, a degenerate aristocrat of foreign extraction who preys on innocent young Englishwomen. Stoker named his villain for a fifteenth-century Romanian warlord, but otherwise these two Draculas are very different. The fictional character is based on legend, not history, and Stoker sifted through various versions of the myth of the undead to create a textbook on the care and feeding of vampires. Almost every subsequent writer on the subject is in his debt. Yet Stoker was not a professional author; he earned his living as manager to stage star Henry Irving, whose autocratic personality may have been channeled into Count Dracula. Stoker certainly recognized the theatrical potential of his book, and quickly arranged for a play to be produced; much of the novel's fame results from a constant series of adaptations for stage and screen.
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The story finds realtor Jonathan Harker traveling to Transylvania and Castle Dracula, where he discovers, in a series of sinister incidents, that his host is a vampire who intends to invade England. Harker escapes, but Dracula carries on with his plans, and the bulk of the novel is a game of cat and mouse between the predatory nobleman and his antagonist, the wise old Dr. Van Helsing. The most horrifying scenes involve the corruption of a beautiful woman, Lucy, and her subsequent slaughter by her former suitors. Ultimately Dracula’s designs on Harker's wife Mina are revealed; he is driven from London and destroyed outside the walls of his castle.
Dracula is a completely remorseless monster, yet he is memorable because he is also enviable. Wealthy, immortal, irresistible and nearly omnipotent, he sleeps all day and spends his nights invading bedrooms. In fact the book is hotbed of sexual symbolism, rife with seductions, exchanges of bodily fluids, and female forms penetrated by long wooden stakes. Contrary to popular misconceptions, Dracula is not killed by such a shaft, but succumbs to an equally symbolic decapitation. Stoker seems to have been unaware of the Freudian implications of his work, and later wrote angry attacks on the introduction of sex into fiction. Yet lust is a characteristic of the great villains who dominated the Gothic novels of a century before, and Dracula, a medieval horror set loose in a civilized society, is the culmination of that literary tradition.
Films based on Dracula
External Links
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