- Walter Benjamin
Two hundred years after its first publication, Dracula still continues to bite the neck of world culture over and over again, spreading its perplexing messages of darkness. What may be easily overlooked with this story is the notion that darkness is something evil, scary, horrific or in some way motivated to instill fear. Dracula is more than just a story that intends to entertain with frightening imagery, given that it represents those strange attributes of life that we want never to see the light of day, but that are nonetheless real: the foreigner inhabiting the non-foreigner, human blood as simultaneously attractive and repulsive, and finding beauty in death are jarring to anyone that finds himself sedated by the comfort of all that is pure and stable in his life. With its first taste of an audience about twenty years before Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Dracula is a midnight garden for all that is uncanny. Dracula is not a story intended to frighten, but rather reveal the other side of normal, the strange, and all that is taboo within the conventional protocol; fright is only the byproduct for those readers all too comfortable with normalcy.
Those things that we describe as "scary," generally those that bring the promise of pain, death, suffering and torture, do not belong in a one-size-fits-all category for everyone. They are frightening because they bring out certain insecurities in an individual that make them uncomfortable, so that a bloody bed sheet is not scary because it is just a classic age-old image of fright, but because it brings with it the potential experience of the unknown dimensions of death. With this in mind, Freud's development of the uncanny describes this discomfort as the horror that comes out of something once familiar and since forgotten.^1 Blood is nothing new, but becomes shocking when exposed in certain situations where one's own blood might well be next in line to spill. In terms of this" blood on the bed sheet" example, the uncanny comes out of the feeling that this image may be one of birth and therefore creepily familiar, or of death and the more chilling submission to finality. Central to this idea of uncanny is the notion that discomfort is spawned by the unexpected reminder that something that you thought you knew well is distorted by the fact that either you have forgotten it or did not know it as well as you thought you did.^2
Knowing oneself is an uncanny dimension revealed by many of the characters in Dracula. Lucy Westenra, in her correspondence with Mina Harker, develops her own vain character unknowingly when she asks if Seward ever tries to read her own face in Chapter V. Westerna's vanity is one quality which makes her a prime target for the vampire, at least metaphorically, because the trap of self-centeredness with its inescapable grip mimics the viral "taking over" style of vampirism; it consumes, as vanity does. In Francis Ford Coppola's representation of Westerna, she is constantly eyeing men as potential victims to feed her appetite, to perpetuate her vanity. While she may be seen in a negative light with these examples, Westerna is more child-like than anything else, unopened to a bigger picture of the world that Mina Harker has. That the novel is written as a collection of journal entries might lead to the portrayal of characters that are engrossed with themselves, and this is definitely the case with Lucy's character development; out of the other characters, she is the one that uses the first person "I" without much consciousness, whereas Mina speaks more through people rather than about them. If writing styles are what reveal these characters to the reader, then the vampire is what reveals the character to himself, and it is uncanny to think that to know oneself is to know the presence of the foreigner.
Interestingly, the insane and infected Renfield, booked at Seward's hospital and considered a fascinating case, alludes to the easy pitfall of giving into the foreigner's influence within. He goes into a fit when Seward asks him about his eating habits (whether or not he would bite into an elephant), and the resolve of his fit exemplifies the foreigner "let loose" in the psyche:
"I see," I said. "You want big things that you can make your teeth meet in? How would you like to breakfast on elephant?"
"What ridiculous nonsense you are talking!" He was getting too wide awake, so I thought I would press him hard. "I wonder," I said reflectively, "what an elephant's soul is like!" The effect I desired was obtained, for he at once fell from his high-horse and became a child again.
"I don't want an elephant's soul, or any soul at all!... To hell with you and your souls!"
[...] I blew my whistle. The instant, however, that I did so he became calm, and said apologetically:-
"Forgive me, Doctor; I forgot myself..."^3
Simultaneously, Seward is probing into the mind of the insane while Renfield into the mind of the sane. This blurring of consciousness happens easily, as Seward longs to know the secrets of his patient's thinking, and Renfield to maintain order in the doctor's presence, and the ease of their transference is uncanny; this scene hints that it is easier than we think to engage in peripety with a foreign mind. Delving deeper into this uncanny realization of the blurring between self and other, philosopher Julia Kristeva cites Louis-François Veuillot in stating that, "In order to have brothers there must be a father," and the father of Renfield's insanity and Seward's curiosity is none other than Count Dracula, the omnipresent agent of infection. Kristeva's look at the uncanny facilitates analysis of it in terms of identity in Dracula, and deploys the uncanny as an agent in cultural development:
... uncanny strangeness is no longer an artistic or pathological product but a psychic law allowing us to confront the unknown and work it out in the process of Kulturarbeit, the task of civilization.^4
If the "task of civilization" is the realization of the foreigner's strangeness and the incorporation of it into society, then blood is that mysterious substance of culture that best represents the strangeness itself. Blood in Dracula is both sensual and horrific in the context of life, and yet its absence is that which makes death something beautiful, as when Stoker's description of Lucy's dead body is conveyed by doctor Seward, who states that, "It was as if the blood, no longer needed for the working of the heart, had gone to make the harshness of death as little rude as might be."^5 This conscious ambivalence to blood resonates with the unconscious ambivalence to identity blurring, yet both travel via the same network of infection. The best scene in Dracula to convey the coupling of blood and identity is Jonathan Harker shaving in Count Dracula's castle. Here, Harker's unease lies in his loneliness and discomfort with the strange dynamics of the castle itself. In addition to the strangeness of his surroundings is the sense that something beyond the physical is watching him and waiting to pounce. The physical strangeness of the surroundings is generated by the sense that something metaphysical is observing, and it is: it is the Count, always present but not always in a physical sense. It becomes difficult to distinguish between what is inanimate and what is alive, an odd characteristic of the uncanny cited by Freud.^6 The metaphysical uneasiness that Dracula provides and the physical eeriness of the castle manifest into the same material co-existence when Harker accidentally slices himself with his razor, because it is here that Dracula wants to drink Harker's blood, but must obey the crucifix at the same time - a culmination of metaphysical and physical unease in Dracula's presence, and at the same time, of the want to prey and need to abstain.
Parallel to Kristeva's description of the child as feeling foreign and uncanny is the propagation of another childhood fright, the dreaded tattle, which allows a glimpse at Harker's sustained connection between adult-self and child-self when he describes his eerie night in Count Dracula's castle, an uncanny slip of the child inside:
... there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot help but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had never come. It may be that this strange night- existence is telling on me; but would that that were all!^7
Revisiting the uneasiness of certain childhood situations, like being told on, within the contexts of an adult situation is a reminder of human doubling, the identification with another dimension of oneself, and how it can be deployed as a survival technique to ward off the sinister, perhaps deployed in an unconscious manner in the case of the example given in Harker's journal above. However, if survival is to be thought about in terms of human doubling, blood transcends the ontological sanctuary that doubling may provide, and keeps the individual in the objective here and now. Blood circulating in the body as a child is different than the blood circulating through the body as an adult, and in this way doubling is rendered futile in the objective sense, and death claims the individual regardless of existential life preservers. Blood, in this light, is sinister and has nothing to promise but objectivity. However, at the same time, outside of the context of death, blood establishes deep connection, whether it be in terms of the vampire or not. Van Helsing speaks to Dr. Seward about Arthur's sadness for Lucy's infection, and says, "Said he not that the transfusion of his blood to her veins had made her truly his bride?"^8 In addition to this example, blood holds hypnotic qualities that may coincide with the idea that blood is a substance responsible for love. Dr. Seward portrays this blood-hypnosis vividly when he is lured into drinking Dracula's blood:
With that he pulled open his shirt, and with his long sharp nails opened a vein in his breast. When the blood began to spurt out, he took my hands in one of his, holding them tight, and with the other seized my neck and pressed my mouth to the wound, so that I must either suffocate or swallow some of the - Oh, my God, my God! what have I done?^9
It is uncanny that this hypnotic attraction to blood brings with it a sense of guilt and/or danger, because the figure being attracted is caught between whether or not it is birth or death that is playing chase in his mind. In this equilibrium of thought, he drifts into the clutch of whatever is providing the blood, regardless of whether or not it promises life or sleep, as both are equally familiar.
By attempting to get at the root of what makes something scary, we discover that the most frightening aspects of all emerge from those things that are strange that try to fit into the same place as the familiar. Dracula, while it does not prioritize scaring its readers, conveys that which is most frightening: the emergence of something unknown from the interactions between what is known and what is mysterious. The nature of the unfamiliar and its method of actualization are that which will give fright to readers while reading Dracula, even if the unfamiliar simply wishes to exist without intentions to scare; that it will attempt to do so without you knowing is horrifying.
Works Cited
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Sigmund Freud. Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1959.
Bram Stoker. Dracula. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Julia Kristeva. Strangers to Ourselves. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.
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