Great Books Audio

Dracula by Bram Stoker

1 May 2008

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Dracula is an 1897 novel by Irish author Bram Stoker, featuring as its primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula. It is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of diary entries, telegrams, and letters from the characters, as well as fictional clippings from the Whitby and London newspapers and phonograph cylinders. This literary style, made most famous by one of the most popular novels of the 19th century, The Woman in White (1860), was considered rather old-fashioned by the time of the publication of Dracula, but it adds a sense of realism and provides the reader with the perspective of most of the major characters. By use of the epistolary structure, Stoker, without employing either an omniscient narrator or any awkward framing device, maximizes suspense by avoiding any implicit promise to the reader that any first-person narrator must survive all the story’s perils. Although some critics find the novel somewhat crude and sensational, it nevertheless retains its psychological power, and the sexual longings underlying the vampire attacks are manifest. As one critic wrote: What has become clearer and clearer…is that the novel’s power has its source in the sexual implications of the blood exchange between the vampire and his victims…Dracula has embedded in it a very disturbing psychosexual allegory whose meaning I am not sure Stoker entirely understood: that there is a demonic force at work in the world whose intent is to eroticize women. In Dracula we see how that force transforms Lucy Westenra, a beautiful nineteen-year-old virgin, into a shameless slut. The Dead Un-Dead was one of Stoker’s original titles for Dracula, and up until a few weeks before publication, the manuscript was titled simply The Un-Dead. The name of Stoker’s count was originally going to be Count Vampyre, but while doing research, Stoker became intrigued by the word dracul. Dracula is derived from the word draco in the Megleno-Romanian language, meaning devil (originally dragon). There was also a historic figure known as Vlad III Dracula, but whether Stoker based his character on him remains debated and is now considered unlikely. The novel has been in the public domain in the United States since its original publication because Stoker failed to follow proper copyright procedure. In England and other countries following the Berne Convention on copyrights, however, the novel was under copyright until April 1962, fifty years after Stoker’s death. When the unauthorized film adaptation was released in 1922, the popularity of the novel increased considerably, owing to the controversy caused when Stoker’s widow tried to have the film banned.