DRACULA AND THE PORTRAIT OF DORIAN GRAY
DRACULA
There is no doubt that the first four
chapters of Bram Stoker's Dracula are an account of a dark and terrible
dream. Stoker never pretended to be an
artist but in Jonathan Harker's journal he created great and powerful art. Harker writes his journal, we are told, in
shorthand, to keep it away from the Count who has taken to snooping and spying
when he isn't crawling lizard-like down the walls of his castle. Is Castle Dracula a figment of Harker's
imagination? This is suggested in Werner
Herzog's film Nosferatu. We
glimpse Castle Dracula in long shot, but it is only a series of ruins. Inside the castle everything is cosy and well
arranged. The Count is an amusing
eccentric whose personality grows darker, angrier, and more deadly by the day. Everything becomes plain when Harker
encounters Dracula's wives who view him as a good meal. Count Dracula appears and drives them away,
intent on keeping Harker for himself.
Harker guesses his fate and tosses a missive to the local gypsies who,
obligingly, hand the letters to the Count.
Finally, Harker glimpses the undead Count in his tomb. It’s plain that he must escape or become a
revenant.
THE NOVEL
Shakespeare's plays were written in blank
verse and prose. By Bram Stoker's time,
the late nineteenth century, playwrights had ceased using blank verse. The main literary form was now the novel
which had evolved over the preceding centuries.
The first novel may have been Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (1605-1615). Many early novels were cast in the epistolary
form which features an exchange of letters between characters. Thus, Dracula is an epistolary novel
which also includes newspaper reports, diaries, the Demeter's log, to heighten
its realism. Stoker is amassing specific
details of time and date to create a credible context to place his supernatural
tale. Realist accounts like the
newspaper report of the wreck of The Demeter and the ship's logs found
afterwards inform us of events where there were no living witnesses. Everything is dated accurately to convey the
idea of an immediate, detailed narrative.
The narrator is various characters, sometimes Stoker's own narratorial
voice intrudes to offer value judgements from within the culture.
THE RETURN OF THE REPRESSED
Victorian England is often identified as
conservative and repressive. In practice
this meant that groups like women and foreigners had few rights and little
public visibility. Women couldn't vote
and had few rights in respect of employment or property. In the novel Lucy Westenra is caught up with
the superficial aspects of marriage for wealth and property. She has three prospective suitors, the
aristocratic Arthur Holmwood, Dr Seward and an American, Quincey Morris. She is thus more susceptible to the vampire
when he arrives in Whitby after the wreck of The Demeter, a ship that Dracula has travelled on with his coffins filled with Transylvanian soil. Mina Harker is a middle-class woman whose
husband Jonathan is a solid (or stolid) middle-class professional working for
an estate agent. Mina demonstrates more
fortitude when faced by the dangers of Count Dracula. Female sexuality was beginning to be
understood, for instance through the work of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939). For most Victorian males,
female sexuality did not exist, the purpose of sex was for procreation and only
males were meant to enjoy sex.
Homosexuality was illegal, an unmentionable taboo. Foreigners existed, indeed proliferated in
London where Dracula hopes to begin his work, but they existed in the minds of
Victorians only as empty stereotypes.
Some critics have seen Count Dracula as an antisemitic caricature,
redolent of the eastern European Jews that had begun to occupy the East End.
Repression also manifests itself on a
personal level where painful memories are repressed but appear in a
contradictory form through obsessional behaviour. Sigmund Freud detailed the ways that the
savage, irrational, and anti-social demands of the Id were sublimated and
transformed into safe and regulated social activities such as competition for
wealth, sports and even games. The
repressed returns in the form of dreams, slips of the tongue and jokes that
often bear little relation to the original repressed material. Lucy's repeated somnambulism is a good
example of the return of the repressed in Dracula. It then transpires that Count Dracula has
been visiting Lucy and feeding on her.
CONVENTIONS OF THE GOTHIC NOVEL
The first Gothic novel was The Castle
of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole.
The Gothic novel was a reaction to the realist novels of Richardson (Pamela)
and Fielding (Joseph Andrews). By
the time Dracula was written in 1898 the Gothic genre was well-established, and
most people would have been familiar with its conventions.
·
Dark,
abandoned, decaying settings (i.e., Castle Dracula)
·
Romanticized
past (Count Dracula’s elaborate family history which is clearly a source of
pride to him)
·
Plot
conventions such as revenge, family secrets, prophecies, curses.
· Supernatural
beings (i.e., Vampires)
RELIGION & SCIENCE IN DRACULA
WILLS AND INTESTACY
An example of female rights in Dracula
is the leaving of wills and last testaments.
For instance, when Mrs Westenra dies of a heart attack when Count
Dracula returns to the house to feed on Lucy again, it appears that she has
named Arthur Holmwood, son of Lord Godalming and thus an aristocrat, as her
heir. This is problematic because it
forces Lucy into a marriage with Holmwood and it isn’t clear that this is what
Lucy wants since she has two other viable suitors, Dr Seward, and Quincey
Morris (page 178). This is a bone of
contention between Mrs Westenra and her legal representatives who eventually
give way to her wishes. Lucy dies
without a will, and she is therefore intestate.
She is now Count Dracula’s intestate bride. Van Helsing and his crew pursue the Count,
but they are also aware that the law may not be sympathetic to the things they
do which involve illegalities. For
instance, they are worried that they might face the noose if they kill the
Count, but Van Helsing reassures them that he will turn to dust when staked and
beheaded.
CHARCOT AND FREUD
Although Freud is not mentioned directly
in the novel (we may, however, see in Stoker’s description of Van Helsing, an
intimation of a European doctor rather like Freud), the work of Jean Martin
Charcot (1825-93) is (page 204). Charcot
was a French neurologist known as ‘the Napoleon of the neuroses’ who used
hypnosis to find an organic cause for hysteria (a psychological illness found
in women of the period which does not exist anymore). Freud also believed that he could use
hypnosis to uncover the workings of the unconscious. Charcot is known to have visited the Lyceum
and was also a major source for Stoker’s interest in trance-like states and somnambulism.
THE AESTHETIC MOVEMENT
Bram Stoker’s main rationale for writing
was financial to supplement his meagre income from the Lyceum. Many Victorians viewed literature as having a
serious moral, didactic or socio-political purpose. Yet it appears that Stoker created great art
when his purpose was to produce entertainment.
Dracula has something in common with penny dreadful Victorian
literature which had lurid content and cheap, distasteful subject matter.
During Stoker’s lifetime the Aesthetic
Movement had begun to evolve out of earlier art movements like Romanticism and
the Pre-Raphaelites. The Aesthetic
Movement essentially viewed art as having its own value and purpose which can
be summed up in the dictum ‘art for art’s sake’.
It gained greater prominence through the writings of Walter Pater and
Oscar Wilde in the 1870s and 1880s.
Aestheticism was also closely linked to decadence, illustrated in novels
like The Portrait of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and J.K.Huysmans A
Rebour (Against Nature), a novel that influenced Wilde and which was quoted
at his trials. In Chapter X of the novel
Dorian is sent a copy of A Rebour by Lord Henry and thinks ‘It was the
strangest book he had ever read.’ (p 120) The novel begins to influence
Dorian’s lifestyle, his drug taking, decadence and moral corruption become
apparent under its influence. Other
French writers to influence the novel are Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) and
Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) from whose book of poems Les Fleur du Mal
(1857) Dorian derives the idea of ennui (boredom) as symbolic of the times, the
fin du siècle (end of the century). (p 194)
Many hoped for a renewal in the new century.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lord
Henry Wotton states that the purpose of life is to find pleasure not to be
good. The Victorian audience found the
immoral or amoral basis of the novel and the character of Lord Henry to be at
odds with the dominant morality of Victorian Britain. The preface to Dorian Gray was, indeed,
quoted from at Wilde’s trial.
Freud defined two drives, Eros or the urge
to hedonism and pleasure seeking and Thanatos or the urge to destruction and
self-destruction. Freud maintained that
man is dominated by these drives which he/she seeks to sublimate in civilised
behaviour. The dominant theme of Dorian
Gray is hedonism and the double life of the Victorian gentleman, seeming to be
respectable but also attempting to find pleasure and satisfy destructive and
self-destructive urges. Wilde was
influenced by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Gothic novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
which also explores the notion of split personality and the double life of a
gentleman.
Lord Henry Wooton
Lord Henry is Dorian’s patron and
mentor. He articulates his belief in
pleasure-seeking at all costs and spurs Dorian on in his debauchery and
sensualism. Lord Henry is witty and full
of pithy aphorisms which re-surface in Oscar Wilde’s later society plays like The
Importance of Being Ernest.
Basil Hallward
Basil Hallward is an artist who paints
Dorian to immortalise and encapsulate his youth and vitality in an
artwork. Later, Basil wants to take the
painting to Paris to display it which greatly angers and terrifies Dorian
because Dorian realises that the painting has begun to chart his soul. Basil confronts Dorian with his dwindling
popularity and social reputation and questions him about it. Dorian then murders Basil to signify that he
is superior. Later Lord Henry refuses to
believe Dorian when he confesses to Hallward’s murder, declaring him incapable
of it. Lord Henry believes Hallward to
be dull and unworthy of being murdered.
Dorian Gray
Dorian seeks immortality, not in art, but
in life. The creator of the picture,
Basil Hallward, becomes symbolical of Dorian’s ruin and he murders him. To dispose of the body, he blackmails his
friend Alan Campbell who subsequently commits suicide. Although his portrait
becomes hideous and old, Dorian stays young.
Finally, he destroys the painting, and he grows old and dies.
THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY
Oscar Wilde’s novel ponders the relation
between life and art and considers the purpose of art. Dorian’s portrait records his crimes while
Dorian remains young. The portrait is a
moral record of Dorian’s life but when it is destroyed, Dorian ages and
dies. Like Count Dracula, Dorian Gray
has uncovered the key to immortality, but his immortality depends on the
existence of Basil Hallward’s portrait.
Wilde alludes to ‘the love that dare not speak its name’ (p 38). The preface to Dorian Gray was added later
after extensive criticism of the novel had been made. In it, Wilde defends the novels aesthetic and
moral stance. The preface was read at
Wilde’s trial as evidence of Wilde’s moral degeneracy. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) sued the Marquess of
Queensbury for libel as the Marquess had accused him of being a
homosexual. Wilde was the lover of Lord
Alfred Douglas (‘Bosie’), the Marquess’s son.
Wilde lost the case and was sentenced to hard labour and imprisonment in
Reading gaol. After serving his sentence
he lived in Paris under the assumed name, Sebastian Melmoth. Homosexuality was not a crime in France. Even Wilde’s wife had to leave Britain for
Switzerland, changing her name and that of Wilde’s sons to Holland. Friends like Aubrey Beardsley, editor of The
Yellow Book, lost their positions, everyone was desperate to distance
themselves from Oscar Wilde after his downfall.
In 2017 Wilde was posthumously pardoned.
Dorian’s portrait is made by Basil
Hallward. Basil is a representative of a
type, the artist, just as Lord Henry represents the English aristocratic
class. Dorian is also an aristocrat. Indeed, Lord Henry investigates Dorian’s past
extensively (p 35). Notions of genes and
heredity are important to Dorian, Lord Henry, and Basil because they explain the
origins of a person’s character and confirm her/him as belonging or not
belonging to a certain class (p 65).
Wilde was also influenced by the novels of Emile Zola (although he mocks
naturalism in Dorian Gray), a French novelist who wrote a series of
twenty novels known as Rougon-Macquart that investigates the influence of genes
and heredity in a family. Dorian is an
aristocrat, but he is also decadent and debauched.
Page references are to the most recent Penguin editions of both books.
Paul Murphy
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