The Vampire in the Looking-Glass: Reflection and Projection in Bram Stoker’s Dracula

Abstract

The history of Dracula’s reception is a history composed of a series of usurpations. As the reproductions and revisions of the cinema have usurped the original text, so too the original text has usurped its author. While Dracula survives and continues as a living myth of popular fiction, Bram Stoker has passed away into relative obscurity. The peculiar survival of his text as a classic of a kind owes very little to the abiding interests and concerns of the literary or academic establishments, and its presence in our culture does not directly derive from an evaluation of its author s skills. In this sense, some may regard it as a peculiarly ‘pure’ text, comparatively free from critical attention, and fortunately bereft of the stigmata commonly induced in texts burdened with concepts of authorial genius. This notion might be developed into a declaration of Dracula as a beautifully clean text, a classic that has not been manufactured, but one that has survived through its self-perpetuating mythic appeal.^l There may be a partial truth in such an idea, but it is dangerously idealistic, for such a formula takes no account of the social conditions or cultural politics that have governed Dracula’s success. Those conditions, broadly, are the conditions of the cinema, and the salability of anxiety (for Dracula is rarely a horror film in the fullest sense).