4 - ‘For the Dead Travel Fast’: The Transnational Afterlives of Dracula

Summary

As he spoke he smiled, and the lamplight fell on a hard-looking mouth, with very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, as white as ivory. One of my companions whispered to another the line from Burger's ‘Lenore’. ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell’. (‘For the dead travel fast’.)

(Stoker 1997: 17)

In the opening chapter of Bram Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker recounts his travels via Budapest and the northern Romanian town of Bistritz towards the castle of Count Dracula. He has been instructed to join a coach to the Borgo Pass where a driver and carriage will be waiting to take him on to the castle. In the scene quoted above, Harker meets the mysterious driver who he discovers has very red lips and sharp-looking teeth, and he overhears one of his travel companions whispering ‘Denn die Todten reiten schnell’ (‘For the dead travel fast’). As Harker himself notes, these words reference the gothic poem ‘Lenore’ by the German author Gottfried August Burger, in which the eponymous heroine rides swiftly through the night on horseback accompanied by a stranger who looks exactly like her recently dead fiance William. This reference to that earlier gothic text is, of course, a hint at the vampiric status of the coach driver, but the quotation also resonates with the broader theme of travel and cultural encounter that runs throughout the novel. On the very first page, Harker reflects that ‘The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East’ (1997: 10), and that his travels were taking him ‘among the traditions of Turkish rule’ (1997: 10). The novel then repeatedly returns to this motif of travel in which Harker is venturing into an orientalised East, and it is notable that Dracula's later travels to London represent something of an inversion of this colonialist narrative, where it is now Dracula who is entering the West. The vampire figure, in Stoker's text and beyond, is positioned as a traveller – a threatening Other – who can transgress both physical and geographical borders, and it is important to note that this exploration of alterity was initially very much tied to its origins in late Victorian Britain.