Bram (Abraham) Stoker was born Nov 8, 1847. Bedridden until the age of seven with an unexplained illness, he went on to study mathematics and explore his passion for theatre, and eventually ended up working for the Irish Service and marrying (his wife was previously courted by Oscar Wilde).
Stoker claimed the idea for Dracula (which took seven years to create) came to him from a nightmare, but admitted that he was also inspired by his Hungarian friend who’d told him tales about European vampires. He suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed but continued to write until his death. His wife sold the rights to Dracula to Universal Pictures for $40,000. It’s said that this transaction has lead to the continued popularity of the novel.
Horror expert, Peter Straub wrote:
“Stoker opened his internal doors and allowed sexual fears, fantasies, and obsessions he ordinarily kept out of sight to find expression on the page, encoded into the receptive language of vampire seduction and penetration”.
“Henry Irving was Stoker’s Dracula. Stoker knew what psychic battles he drew on in the creation of his most famous character”.
“Unfortunately, by applying debased, parlour version of Freudian analysis to this novel, several generations of readers and critics have rendered the sexuality in Dracula completely banal. Everyone thinks they understand that the book portrays a conflict between Victorian repression and anarchic eroticism, and that the slaying of the vampire at its conclusion represents the triumph of repression. In this drastic misreading, the vampire embodies the erotic, which threatens the orderly societal fabric woven from premarital chastity, well-supervised courtships, lengthy engagements and sensible marriages, so the vampire must be destroyed. Finis.”
“Good horror never works in such a reductive template (all category horror is about good vs. evil, and that’s that. Why it’s weightless and disposable – no more than a formula)”.
“Stoker’s willingness to surrender to his own text allows for psychic distress signals and linguistic giveaways, elevating this novel from other horrors”. (This I can subscribe to, Dracula is downright HEAVY! and works its magic on your mind without conscious detection.)
A war between dark and light? A tale as old as time? Straub says the opposite: it is not which is why it is Dracula, and that the Doppelganger (Dracula and Jonathon) is the most psychologically loaded version of duality (the other we don’t like to see in the mirror).
I believe it’s a love story above all else, and I have to mention the movie ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7leC4YClrI) because having seen it before I read the novel, I can't separate the two. It has remained with me, a part of me, since I first viewed it. If art is to reveal truth, this is pretty close (esp. the love scene) – even better that its origins came from the page.
From the novel (Bram): “No man knows till he has suffered from the night how sweet and dear to his heart and eye the morning can be”.
