CASTLE, COFFIN, STOMACH: DRACULA AND THE BANALITY OF THE OCCULT

Abstract

Fools, Fools! What devil or what witch was ever so great as Attila, whose blood is in these veins?

— Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)

Art is completion; not merely a history of endeavour.

— Stoker, Personal Reminiscences (1906)

“HE CAN, WHEN ONCE HE FIND HIS WAY,” says Van Helsing of Dracula, “come out from anything or into anything, no matter how close it be bound” (211; ch. 18). Recent criticism has claimed similar powers for Stoker’s text, and its relationship to late-Victorian social formations. A wide territory has been staked out. Moving beyond earlier universalizing Freudian readings, Carol Senf sees the anxiety the novel expresses about gender roles as indicative of Stoker’s difficulty in accepting the rise of the New Woman. Talia Schaffer and Christopher Craft read the homosocial relations in the novel in the light of sexological discourses of inversion and the emergence of the homosexual as a “type of life” (Foucault 43); Stephen Arata, noting Stoker’s frequent use of racial metaphors, has seen the text as expressive of a “reverse colonization” in which “the spectacle of the primitive and the atavistic” (“Occidental Tourist” 624) is brought back to a town house near Piccadilly Circus, the hub of the empire.