Gothic Genealogies: "Dracula", "Bowen's Court", and Anglo-Irish Psychology

Author(s): Raphael Ingelbien

Reviewed work(s):
Source: ELH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter, 2003), pp. 1089-1105
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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GOTHIC GENEALOGIES:
DRACULA,
BOWEN'S
COURT,
AND ANGLO-IRISH PSYCHOLOGY
BY RAPHAEL INGELBIEN
Like all
enduring literary myths,
Dracula has been amenable to
many interpretations. Although
the aesthetic merits of
Bram
Stoker's
novel are still
contested,
its
popularity
with critics of all
persuasions
has been
rising steadily,
as is confirmed
by
the
publication
of two case
studies editions in recent
years.'
But the
reception
of Dracula is
certainly
not an
object
lesson in critical
pluralism.
Not
only
can a
variety
of
approaches
lead to
conflicting readings; controversy
also
rages
within some of the critical
paradigms
that have been
applied
to
Stoker's text. Nowhere has this been as obvious as in the
attempts
at
locating
Dracula in its historical and national contexts. The novel has
long
been a favorite of other kinds of criticism
(mostly psychoana-
lytic);
interest in Stoker's relation to Irish cultural
politics
is
compara-
tively
recent. But
any hopes
that firm
insights may
be
gained
from the
long
overdue historicist
placing
of Dracula in its Irish context were
soon
dispelled,
as the
ideological
controversies inherent in Irish
studies were
quickly imported
into the novel's
interpretation.
Who was Dracula? Besides
being
a Freudian
projection
of sexual
anxieties,
a
perverted archetype,
or a fin-de-siecle
fantasy,
where
might
the monster fit in what is also taken to be an
allegory
of
Ireland's
social,
political,
and cultural
upheavals
at the end of the
nineteenth
century?
The answers
proposed
so far look
clearly
incom-
patible.
For
some,
Count Dracula
represents
the Protestant Ascen-
dancy
in terminal
decline;
he is a
bloodthirsty
caricature of the
aristocratic
landlord,
clinging
to feudal
power
in the face of reform
and about to be
engulfed by
the forces of
modernity
and nationalist
agitation.
Stoker's novel must then be read as the indictment of a
class
incapable
of
adapting
to new realities. This
interpretation
has
chiefly
been favored
by
critics whose
sympathies
are
recognizably
(though
not
crudely)
nationalist,
like
Terry Eagleton
and Seamus
Deane. Their
reading
tactics have been
impugned by
Bruce
Stewart,
who considers alternative and
supposedly
closer
analyses
of Dracula
that
put
the monster in the nationalist and/or Catholic middle-class
ELH 70
(2003)
1089-1105

2004
by
The
Johns Hopkins University
Press 1089
camp:
Dracula and his faithful
Szgany
are cast as radical Land
Leaguers
intent on
political
violence,
or
exploitative
Catholic entre-
preneurs
known as
gombeen
men. Those revisionist views of the
novel are
complemented by
Michael Valdez Moses's
interpretation,
which draws attention to similarities between Dracula and the ill-
fated leader of the Home Rule movement Charles Stewart Parnell.2
Stewart himself backs
away
from those neat inversions of nationalist
readings
and
ecumenically
warns
against "privileging
one side
against
the
other,"
apparently setting
the interests of cultural
peace
above
those of critical
accuracy.3
Stoker's own
political sympathies,
divided as
they
were between
his own Protestant
background
and his alienation from its more
conservative
elements,
do not allow
biography
to settle the
dispute.
Even his
background
is somehow
disputed: although
Stoker's Protes-
tant education took him to the
Anglo-Irish stronghold
of
Trinity
College, Dublin,
some have
speculated
that his
mother's
Gaelic
ancestry
rather made him
"Anglo-Celtic,"
and thus
fundamentally
ambivalent.4 Politically,
Stoker seems to have
developed
from
early
imperialist sympathies
to the
position
of a
"philosophical
Home
Ruler,"
while his
journalism
reveals a
political thinking
dominated
by
a
"complex
and
fraught
dialectic . . . between a frantic endorsement
of
progress
as a natural law of social
development,
and its dark
alternative, atavism, barbarism,
chaos.""5 The role of that dialectic in
his most famous novel is still
open
to
conjecture.
Meanwhile,
readings proliferate,
the battle lines are
sharply
drawn,
and Dracula's
political identity
remains at stake.
This situation owes much to conflicts within Irish
studies,
but it
also results from an almost
exclusive-and,
I
suggest,
deficient-
focus on the
figure
of Dracula as a
monstrous,
protean body.
Critical
awareness of
Dracula's
Irish contexts
developed simultaneously
with
the
growing
influence of New Historicism and its Foucauldian
interest in the
body
as a site of
meaning.
This means that in
many
readings,
Dracula is
essentially
a bundle of somatic
properties.6
He is
largely
defined
by
his abnormal
features,
his
bloodsucking,
and the
various
guises
he assumes
through
his
supernatural
transformations.
To a certain
extent,
Stoker's Gothic sensationalism invites
precisely
such a
reading.
Dracula can
easily
be made to stand for the return of
a
repressed,
forbidden
sensuality
that threatens the
bourgeois
subjectivities
of his victims. This is reinforced
by
the novel's narrative
organization.
Dracula is
famously
made
up
of texts
spoken
or written
by
the
vampire's
victims and/or
pursuers;
its
eponymous
central
1090 Gothic
Genealogies
figure
is denied an
equal
measure of narratorial
authority,
which
apparently relegates
him
beyond
the bounds of articulate
subjectivity.
An
elusive,
fascinating cipher,
Dracula then becomes a mere
body
onto which various anxieties can be
projected-whether
it be
by
Freudian,
New
Historicist,
or other readers. Recent contextualizations
draw
extensively
on
contemporary pictorial
sources,
reminding
us
that Dracula
appeared
in a fin-de-si6cle context where caricatures
reflected dominant views on racial differences.
Interesting though
they undeniably
are,
those visual documents
clearly
offer no
way
out
of critical
controversy. John
Paul
Riquelme's
edition of Dracula
includes caricatures from
nineteenth-century periodicals,
in which
vampiric
bats and other monsters were made to
represent
the Land
League,
British
rule,
or
Parnell.7 Finally,
the critical rhetoric that is
applied
to the novel often underscores the
centrality
of Dracula's
body
and the wealth of
interpretations
it
encourages:
in the words of a
recent
commentator,
Dracula is
"an
overdetermined
figure
onto
whom are cathected
many
of the most formidable
political
and social
issues of
nineteenth-century
Ireland."s
Our Dracula is a
walking
infusion
set;
Stoker criticism is
largely
a form of
surgery
on Gothic bodies.
Yet Stoker's
vampire
is not
simply
a monstrous
body.
Given the
current
emphasis
on the
body
in
literature,
one
may easily forget
that
Dracula is also a
psychological subject,
and
that,
although
he does not
belong
to the cast of
primary
narrators,
he also
speaks
at
length.
Jonathan
Harker devotes several
pages
of his
journal
to careful and
revealing descriptions
of his host's
dwelling
and
habits;
he also
gives
the
reader
long,
verbatim accounts of Dracula's
garrulous
conversation.
Could the Count's
personal
effects,
gestures,
and
words,
so often
neglected
in favour of his
spectacular monstrosity,
contain clues about
his
identity?
More
specifically,
could the
psychology they betray
also
help
us locate Dracula in
recognizable
Irish cultural formations?
An answer to those
questions
first
suggested
itself to me
by
a
reading
of Elizabeth Bowen's
family
memoir Bowen's
Court,
entitled
after the Bowens'
Big
House in
County
Cork,
and first
published
in
1942.9
A classic
example
of
Ascendancy (auto)biography,
written
by
a
key figure
of modern
Anglo-Irish
literature,
Bowen's Court will here
be used as a text
against
which Harker's
portrayal
of Dracula in his
journal
can be read in
illuminating ways. My
aim is not to
suggest
a
firm intertextual link between Dracula and Bowen's Court. Bowen
was
certainly
attuned to the finer nuances of
Anglo-Irish
Gothic,
as
her
perceptive
introduction to Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas
demonstrates. She would most
probably
have been familiar with
Raphael Ingelbien
1091
Stoker's
fiction,
although
it
apparently
failed to
captivate
her as did
Le Fanu's work. This can be
explained by
her
preferences among
the
different strains that
compete
within the
Anglo-Irish
Gothic tradi-
tion: Bowen's own sense of the Gothic was
always
closer to the
psychological
terror and the neuroses that Le Fanu
exploited
than to
the more sensational
paraphernalia
on
display
in
Dracula.'l
This is
partly
because Bowen's Gothic was
only
one of the
strategies
that she
used when
exploring Ascendancy
anxieties from the inside of her own
society:
in her
writing,
Gothic undertones often coexist
quite
natu-
rally
with a
quasi-Jamesian
observation of
Anglo-Irish
manners. This
muted,
subtle form of the Gothic not
only
informs
supernatural
elements in some of Bowen's Irish fictions but also
pervades many
a
page
of Bowen's Court. A
comparison
between Dracula and
Bowen's
Court will, therefore,
bring
out those elements of
psychological
Gothic in Stoker's novel that most
definitely
call for an
interpretation
within an
Anglo-Irish
cultural context-so
far,
those elements have
received scant attention. This
comparison
should also be seen as a
step
towards
refining
our
understanding
of what can be meant
by
Anglo-Irish
Gothic.
Reading
Dracula
(1897)
in the
light
of Bowen's Court
(1942)
may
seem anachronistic. But Bowen's text is not
only
a mid-twentieth-
century
record of
Anglo-Irish
tradition;
it stands as one of the most
consummate
expressions
of that tradition. The themes and
strategies
she uses in her chronicle
belong
to that tradition as well. Bowen also
makes extensive use of documents
produced throughout
her
family's
history
and
manages
to
integrate
them
smoothly
into her own
narrative.
Furthermore,
Bowen's Court can be used as a
gateway
into
a certain kind of
Ascendancy biographical writing:
in what
follows,
references to Bowen's memoir will be
accompanied by
considerations
of other
representative
texts written
by key Anglo-Irish figures,
like
Lady Gregory
and
W.
B.
Yeats,
in the decades that
separate
Dracula
from Bowen's Court. The continuities between Harker's
journal
and
those different texts are often
striking,
and
they suggest
that Stoker
was
tapping
into the same
psychological
vein that Bowen later
exploited
in her turn. The heuristic value of
my comparison
is also
based on a
recognition
of this fact: Bowen
speaks
not
only
of her
family
and
class;
she
speaks
also as a
family
and class.
Moreover,
as we
will
see,
she does so
by using
accents that
uncannily
echo the rhetoric
of Stoker's Count.
It is clear that this
comparison
will lend
support
to
analyses
that
identify
Dracula as an
Ascendancy figure,
and that it
can, therefore,
1092
Gothic
Genealogies
be seen as a
way
of
taking
sides in the critical debate sketched out
above.
Bringing
Bowen into the
equation,
however,
will show that
such a
reading
need not be motivated
by
a
contemporary
nationalist
agenda,
or
by
a desire to
play up Ascendancy guilt through simplistic
allegories
(the
fallacious
strategies
of which Stewart accuses
Eagleton
and
Deane).
If the characterization of Dracula can be
fruitfully
compared
to a
family
chronicle
by
one of the
Ascendancy's
most
distinguished
writers,
it would seem that both Stoker and Bowen
were indeed
describing
the same
subject.
Their attitudes towards
that
subject obviously
differed: as I will
argue,
Stoker's and Bowen's
portrayals
were,
respectively,
intended as a
critique
and an
apology.
But their
political
differences do not detract from the
troubling
resemblance between their texts.
Another
possible objection
should be considered before we
pro-
ceed with the
comparison proper.
Can a
reading
that
mainly
focuses
on Harker's
early
account of Dracula offer
representative
evidence
about the Irish dimension of Dracula? I would here counter that
there is no reason to assume that the novel as a whole
possesses
a
single, comprehensive allegorical
intent.
Allegories,
whether
political
or
psychological, certainly
seem to abound in the
novel,
but it is far
from certain that Dracula can function as one
extended,
coherent
allegory
(whatever
the nature of that
allegory
is).
In that
sense,
conflicting readings may
also result from a failure to
recognize
that
Stoker was
ultimately
after
things
other than
allegorical
consis-
tency-a
desire for commercial success
played
at least as
large
a
part
in the
making
of the novel. Some
parts
of Dracula can thus resist
historicist
readings
in terms of Irish
politics."
But the
early parts
of
Harker's
journal
are
definitely
a
goldmine
for critics who
adopt
that
approach.
For one
thing,
Harker's accounts of
Transylvania
draw on a
source which
provides
an
explicit
link with Ireland: Stoker found
inspiration
in
Major
E. C.
Johnson's
On the Track
of
the
Crescent,
where
Transylvanian peasants
were
repeatedly
likened to Irish ones.
Harker's insistence on the
peasants' superstition
and devotional
fervor
clearly
reminds one of a Protestant's attitude towards Irish
Catholics-this is a link on which most critics
agree.'"
Other elements
of the
setting
can also
point
to
Ireland,
although
one should be
wary
of
reading
Irish references into
every
detail that lends itself to this
strategy. Admittedly,
Dracula's current status has much to do with
"critical plurality,
a discursive
pattern
of
multiple signification
and re-
signification
that
presents
in itself a marked
parallel
to the
psycho-
analytical trope
of overdetermination."" But overdetermination re-
Raphael Ingelbien
1093
mains a
cop-out
if it allows different
interpretations
to be
juxtaposed
without
any
examination of the conflicts
they generate.
What can be
an Irish reference in Dracula can also be
part
and
parcel
of the
conventions of
vampire
literature: to what extent can such an element
then be used in a historicist
reading?
To take but one
example:
how
justified
is a critic in
speculating
that Dracula's
powers
of seduction
may
be a reference to
Parnell,
given
that Dracula was
hardly
the first
womanizing vampire
in literature?14 Harker's
journal
can confront the
critic with similar
problems.
On the other
hand,
Stoker
may
have
chosen to stress or
adapt specific
conventions of
vampiric writing,
because
they
could then function within an Irish
allegory.
Stoker's own
additions to those conventions
(sometimes
based on his research into
Transylvanian
folklore)
are even more
likely
to constitute references
to Irish
politics, although generalizations
are
clearly
unwise. It is
mostly
with such
emphases, adaptations,
or additions that
my comparison
with
Bowen's
Court and other
Ascendancy
texts will be concerned.
On one
level,
Stoker's view of
Transylvania
as a land of
superstition
reflects what he found in his
reading
of local
sources,
but those
sources were
important
to him
partly
because
they
facilitated a
parallel
with Ireland.
Among
the
superstitions
to which Stoker
alludes are
legends concerning
hidden treasures. After his eerie
coach
journey
to the
castle,
Harker asks the Count
"why
the
coachman went to the
places
where we had seen the blue flames. Was
it indeed true that
they
showed where
gold
was hidden?"
(46).
Stoker
was here
drawing
on an account of
Transylvanian superstitions,
according
to which "in the
night preceding
Easter
Sunday
... hidden
treasures are said to
betray
their site
by
a
glowing
flame."15
Dracula's
confirmation is almost a
quotation
from Stoker's
source;
the Count
goes
on to
explain
that the treasures were buried
during
the numerous
invasions to which the
region
was
subjected.
Stoker was
probably
struck
by
the
similarity
between his source and Irish tales of riches
hurriedly
hidden
underground
in time of trouble. Bowen's Court includes such
an
episode:
one of Bowen's ancestors was made
privy
to the where-
abouts of
gold
and silver buried near Kilbolane
during
the 1689
rebellion,
but failed to disclose the location before his death
(96-97).
Buried treasures were
part
of Irish as well as
Transylvanian
folklore;
what makes Stoker's version
interesting
here is that
only
the Count
(disguised
as a
coachman)
ventured near the blue
flames,
in order to
mark the
place
with a few stones
(38).
Dracula here asserts his
ownership,
secure in the
knowledge
that the
peasants
will never dare
to come near the
place:
"[Y]our
average peasant
is at heart a coward
1094
Gothic
Genealogies
and a
fool"; "[O]n
that
night
no man of this land
will,
if he can
help
it,
stir without his doors"
(46, 47).
On the
whole,
Stoker sticks
closely
to
his source
(according
to which the
night
in
question
was
eminently
dangerous),
but his one transformation
explicitly
sets Dracula
apart
from the local
peasantry by giving
him the
knowledge possessed by
dead
Ascendancy patriarchs.
In
Lady Gregory's
memoir
Coole (1931),
a local
legend
also makes it clear that the
ghosts
of the
Ascendancy
protect
their buried treasures:
I often heard that
long ago
in the
garden
at
Coole,
at the
cross,
a man
that was
digging
found a
pot
of
gold.
But
just
as he had the cover took
off,
he saw old Richard
Gregory coming,
and he covered it
up,
and
was never
able
again
to find the
spot
where it was.'6
In
Dracula,
the Count
grants
that some
peasant might
be bold
enough
to
go
treasure
hunting
after the blue
flames,
but he then tells
his
guest:
"[E]ven
if he did he would not know what to do. . . . You
would
not,
I dare be
sworn,
be able to find these
places again?"
(47).
Stoker's
adaptation
of
Transylvanian
folklore, here,
seems meant to
bring
out
Dracula's
resemblance to an
Ascendancy
landlord.
The association of Dracula with
Ascendancy
habits, obsessions,
and values is also invited
by descriptions
of his castle. His deserted
and
draughty dwelling
calls to mind the condition of an
aristocracy
which had
already
fallen on hard times
by
the
1890s,
when Ascen-
dancy
land
ownership
and the income landlords could derive from rents
were
being
reduced
by legal
reforms."' A closer look at Dracula's
behavior in and towards his house will
only
reinforce this
parallel.
"Welcome to
my
house!":
Dracula's twice
repeated
words of
greeting
to Harker are remarkable for their insistence on
hospitality
(41).
Although impoverished,
this aristocrat still cultivates a
hospitality
on
which
many Ascendancy
families
(including
the
Bowens)
continued
to
pride
themselves. Harker is
immediately
asked to make himself at
home. This is a tall order in such
gaunt surroundings,
but his task is
made somewhat easier
by
the Count's
library,
filled as it is with
English
books. Dracula himself is observed
reading
"of
all
things,
an
English
Bradshaw's Guide"
(47),
while his atlas lies
"opened naturally
at
England,
as if that
map
had been used much"
(48-49).
According
to
Eagleton,
this
exposes
Dracula as an
Anglophile Ascendancy
aristocrat,
"given
to
poring
over
maps
of the
metropolis,"
and about
to become a
long-term
absentee
through
his move to
London.'
But
Dracula's
library
is also worth
exploring
in more detail.
Indeed,
Raphael Ingelbien
1095
family
libraries often
occupy
a
prominent place
in
Ascendancy
memoirs.
Lady Gregory
devotes the first
twenty pages
of her short
book Coole to "The
Library."
Books were almost human
presences
to
her:
"I
shall feel
sorry
to leave all these volumes
among
which I have
lived.
They
have felt the
pressure
of
my fingers. They
have been
my
friends."'19
Dracula uses similar terms when he refers to his
library:
"'These friends'-and he laid his hands on some of the books-'have
been
good
friends to me"'
(45).
Given the isolation of the
Anglo-Irish
Big
Houses,
such
intimacy
is
hardly surprising.
The contents of Dracula's shelves are also
telling,
as is the
very
fact
that Harker devotes a whole
paragraph
to an enumeration of his
host's books. These include
a vast number of
English
books,
whole shelves full of
them,
and bound
volumes of
magazines
and
newspapers.
A table in the centre was littered
with
English magazines
and
newspapers, though
none of them of
very
recent date. The books were
of
the most varied
kind-history, geography,
politics, political economy, botany, geology,
law-all
relating
to
England
and
English
life and customs and manners. There were
even such books of reference as the London
directory,
the "Red" and
"Blue" books,
Whitaker's
Almanack,
the
Army
and
Navy
Lists,
and-
it somehow
gladdened my
heart to see it-the Law List.
(44)
Dracula's interest in
England
is understandable
enough, given
his
plan
for a
prolonged stay
in London. But the
diversity
of the books is
quite
remarkable in
itself,
and it
clearly
strikes Harker as much as the
fact that all the items are about
England.
The eclectic bric-a-brac on
the Count's shelves
appears
more familiar when
compared
with the
somewhat frantic universalism of some
Big
House libraries. These
reflected their owners'
aspiration
to a Classical ideal of humanist
knowledge
as well as an attachment to
English
culture. The
library
at
Bowen's Court was less
exclusively English
and more
literary
than
Dracula's,
but it was
equally
varied. Bowen's list of its contents is a
tribute to a certain cultural
ideal,
although
one
suspects
some
tongue
in cheek
irony
at the
range
of interests
represented:
The
(now)
more or less
complete
works of
Pope, Gay, Dryden,
an
eight-volume
set of The
Spectator,
The
Guardian,
Addison's
Poems,
Young's
Works
(the
Young
of the
Night Thoughts)
dedicated to Mr.
Voltaire,
The Faerie
Queene,
written
by
Edmund
Spenser,
with a
Glossary explaining
Old and Obscure
Words,
Lord
Chesterfield's
Letters to his
Son,
translations of Madame de
Sevigne"'s
Letters and of
Sully's
Memoirs,
Johnson's Dictionary,
A
Description of England
(in
1096 Gothic
Genealogies
eight
volumes with
plates
of
religious
ruins and notable
country
seats),
A Tour
Through
France
(Anon.),
Goldsmith's Animated
Nature,
a Nouveau
Traitd
de
Vinerie,
Smollett's
History of England,
Robertson's
History of
Scotland,
six volumes of
Dodsley's
Collections
(Poems
by
Several
Hands),
Manners in
Portugal,
Vertot's Revolution
in
Sweden,
Crevier's Roman
Emperors,
Memoirs
of
the
Portuguese
Inquisition,
with
Reflections
on Ancient and Modern
Popery,
Essex's
Letters
(from Ireland),
Observations on the
Turks,
Tissot on
Health,
a
Life of
Gustavus
Adolphus,
Arthur
Young's
Tour
Through
the
North
of England,
Collins's
Peerage (eight
volumes, 1779),
and a
Peerage of
Ireland
(1768). (BC, 192)
What is also
typical
of the
Ascendancy
is the
place
of this humanist
taste,
within a cultural ideal that included
soldierly
virtues as well as
intellectual ones. Over
time,
Bowen's Court became a
repository
of
both. The
library
was an addition to a
family history
that had started
out with more Philistine
figures:
the first Irish Bowens were "tem-
peramental fighters,
malcontents, firebrands,
actuated
by
love of
movement,"
but with little time for other
pursuits
(BC, 39);
the
synthesis
was achieved
by
later Bowens
and,
ultimately, through
Bowen's
all-embracing
chronicle. That
synthesis
is
probably
best
known
through
Yeats's
poetic eulogies
of an
Ascendancy
of
soldiers,
scholars,
and horsemen-a
retrospectively
idealized mixture of ele-
ments that
may
have coexisted in
only
a few individuals. This
appetite
for
fighting
was,
of
course,
all the more remarkable in that it seemed
to transcend
specific political
interests or
allegiances.
Yeats's ances-
tors,
though
not
aristocratic,
were "soldiers that
gave,
whatever die
was
cast":
Yeats himself was not
always
too sure about whose side his
forefathers
fought
on,
but that
uncertainty
was no obstacle to a
celebration of their
military
virtue. In Yeats's
version,
the Ascen-
dancy,
"Bound neither to Cause nor to
State,"
was admirable in and
for
itself.20
Bowen's
ancestors also
belonged
to the kind of
"men
of
whom it is hard to
say
whether their ideas breed their
passions
or
their
passions
breed their ideas."
Henry
Bowen I thus switched sides
during
the Civil War as a matter of course: "I doubt whether
Henry
Bowen ever cared much for either
King
or Parliament: he
may
have
hardly distinguished
between the two"
(BC, 39).
Both Yeats's and Bowen's
writings give
concrete
shape
to this
Anglo-Irish
ideal of humanist
culture,
military prowess,
and
political
versatility by collapsing
several individuals into a
collective,
transgenerational subject.
To Stoker's
readers,
there is little new
here. The
strategy
was
already
evident in the
long,
trance-like
Raphael Ingelbien
1097
monologues
where Dracula entertained Harker with a confused but
passionate
account of his
family's history:
"for in our veins flows the
blood of
many
races who
fought
as the lion
fights:
for
lordship"
(52).
It is worth
noting
here
that,
by drawing
on the bellicose
figure
of Vlad
the
Impaler,
Stoker was
adding
a new feature to the
make-up
of the
vampire
of
literary tradition.2
One reason for
Stoker's
interest in Vlad
is that his
qualities
as a
military
leader made him an
appropriate
source for the
portrayal
of a certain
type
of
Anglo-Irish
aristocrat.
The crash course in
Transylvanian history
that Harker receives from
Dracula
gives pride
of
place
to his ancestors' heroism on the
battlefield,
but it also leaves one with an
extremely
confused
picture
of
political changes.
What is
more,
the Count's
lengthy
tale,
filled
though
it is with the distant sound of old
battles,
does not
really
make
riveting reading;
nor does it
prepare
for
subsequent developments
in
the
plot
of Dracula. If it
actually
detracts from the narrative
economy
of this novel of
sensation,
one
may
surmise that Stoker included it
because of the
allegorical
clues it
gave
about
Dracula's
identity.
Dracula
presents
his tribe
(the
Szekelys)
as an
independent
minded
race of natural
warriors,
whose
allegiances
were as
shifting
as those of
Bowen's or Yeats's ancestors. The
Szekelys
were
eminently adaptable
to circumstance: "When the
Hungarian
flood
swept
eastward,
the
Szekelys
were claimed as kindred
by
the victorious
Magyars"
(53);
later
though,
"when after the battle of
Mohacs,
we threw off the
Hungarian yoke,
we of the Dracula blood were
among
their
leaders,
for our
spirit
would not brook that we were not free"
(54).
Like the
early
Bowens,
the
Szekelys
were
essentially
lone
operators,
who laid
themselves
open
to
charges
of
pure egoism
and
opportunism.22
Dracula's rebuttal
justifies
their attitude
by stressing
its
strategic
value in
Transylvanian society.
Of an earlier
Dracula,
he observes:
"They
said that he
thought only
of himself. Bah! what
good
are
peasants
without a leader?"
(54). While
the idea that
peasants
need a
leader
may provide
a connection with the Land
League
in the
eyes
of
some,
the fact that these words are
spoken by
a
nostalgic
aristocrat
means rather that Dracula is
trying
to
justify
aristocratic
leadership
in
a
society
that was both rural and unstable. This
justification,
however,
is
coupled
with an admission that the old aristocratic
power
and the
virtues that sustained it have
passed:
"[T]he
warlike
days
are over
...
the
glories
of the
great
races are as a tale that is told"
(54).
The Count's tales about his
family's past
are also remarkable for
their narrative
quirks.
Harker's comments on the
strange quality
of
those tales deserve our attention here:
1098
Gothic
Genealogies
In his
speaking
of
things
and
people,
and
especially
of
battles,
he
spoke
as if he had been
present
at them all. This he afterwards
explained by saying
that to a
boyar
the
pride
of his house and name
are his own
pride,
that their
glory
is his
glory,
that their fate is his
fate. Whenever he
spoke
of his house he
always
said
"we,"
like a
king
speaking.
(52)
Dracula is not
being overly
rhetorical
here,
of course: as an almost
timeless
creature,
he
actually
is a
collective,
transhistorical
subject,
the
living
(or undead)
embodiment of several
generations.
His
systematic
use of
"we"
eerily prefigures
Bowen's own
lapses
into
plural pronouns
in Bowen's Court. Bowen's
family
chronicle shows
such a
degree
of
empathy
that her
identity
as a narrator
repeatedly
blends with that of her
subjects.
Like
Dracula,
she can
speak
of
"we"
as if she and her
family
were one timeless
subject.
This can
happen
even when Bowen herself was
clearly
not involved in the
episodes
that she is
recounting.
Bowen's use of the
plural
"we"
becomes even
more
striking
when one remembers that Bowen's Court was written in
the
early
1940s,
when Bowen was
already
the
last,
childless
represen-
tative of her line. Here are some
examples
(all
emphases
are
mine):
We north-east
County
Cork
gentry began
rather
roughly,
as settlers.
(BC, 17)
The
story
[runs that]
King
William III ...
paid
a visit to the Bowens
at Kilbolane ... and
presented
them with a communion set. The
only
communion
plate
now in our
possession
is, however,
Victorian
style.
But
King
William's
portrait,
framed to match Oliver
Cromwell's,
hangs
beside Cromwell's at the
top
of Bowen's Court stairs. If he
never did
stay
with
us,
he no doubt wished that he could.
(BC, 104-5)
I think the loss of the law suit-for we did lose it in the end-
determined and hardened
[Henry
III's]
nature in
many ways.
(BC, 152)
He
did,
it is
true,
lose our
part
of a mountain
(Quitrent)
at cards
...
but it was his
father,
dear
Henry
III,
who
bequeathed
us our
lasting
embarrassments.
(BC, 205)
At other
times, Bowen's "we"
seems to
encompass
both her
family
and the class to which it
belonged.
Her identification with the
Ascendancy
is
perhaps
at its
strongest
and most
eloquent
in
passages
that record
periods
of trouble or
decay.
Her
portrayal
of
George
Bowen in the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion is a case in
point:
Raphael Ingelbien
1099
[Big George] epitomizes
that rule
by
force of sheer
fantasy
that
had,
in
great
or small
ways,
become for his class the
only possible
one.
From the
big
lord to the small
country gentleman
we
were,
about
this
time,
being edged
back
upon
a tract of clouds and obsessions
that could
each,
from its
nature,
be
only solitary.
(BC, 258,
my emphasis)
In the
following example,
Bowen's
parenthetical
remark
suggests
that
a sense of decline could sometimes be almost too close for comfort:
Such a
society
had its
roughnesses,
but it had not that
vulgarity
of
assertion
only necessary
when there is decline
(that
is
why
to detect
a
vulgarity,
in
ourselves,
in a friend or
associate,
worries
us:
it is the
morbid
symptom
we
recognize).
(BC, 131,
my emphasis)
In both Dracula and Bowen's
Court,
the
plural
"we"
is used
by
a
consciously
aristocratic voice that traces and identifies with a
lineage
which is now under threat. If that
"we"
sounds assertive or
royal
to
Harker,
as he listens to his
host,
it is
perhaps
also-and
ironically
enough,
for Bowen-an
elegiac symptom
of decline.
By letting
us hear Count Dracula's tales of
past glory,
Stoker well
may
have
caught
the essential tone of the
declining society
of the
Big
House. The
very
word "house" is used
repeatedly
(and
sometimes
almost
ambiguously)
in the conversations between Dracula and
Harker;
its
meaning
oscillates between
"dwelling"
and
"family."
Dracula
insistently
welcomes the
young lawyer
to his "house"
(twice
on
41)
and tells him that "to a
boyar
the
pride
of his house and name
is his own
pride"
(52,
my emphasis);
the
"we"
that
intrigues
Harker is
used when Dracula
speaks
"of
his house"
(52).
After
hearing
Harker's
description
of the house that the
young
clerk has
bought
for him in
London,
Dracula
expresses
his satisfaction thus:
I am
glad
that it is old and
big.
I
myself
am of an old
family,
and to
live in a new house would kill me. A house cannot be made habitable
in one
day;
and after
all,
how few
days go
to make
up
a
century ...
the walls of
my
castle are
broken;
the shadows are
many,
and the
wind breathes cold
through
the broken battlements and casements. I
love the shade and the
shadow,
and would be alone with
my thoughts
when I
may.
(48)
Although
Bowen's Court was not as
dilapidated
or
melancholy,
Bowen would
certainly
have
recognized
this state of mind where
individual,
family,
and house
merge
into a
composite, atemporal
being.
Bowen's Court
itself,
in her
memoir,
becomes
precisely
such
1100 Gothic
Genealogies
an
entity;
her
writing
is
pervaded by
an almost
mystical
sense of
dwelling,
increased
by
the awareness that she is the last Bowen to
inherit the house. The
personal
and cultural
mystique
that sur-
rounded
Big
Houses
only
intensified with the decline of the
society
that owned them.
W. J.
McCormack has
argued
that,
although
the
Big
House as a
reality
is as old as the
Ascendancy
itself,
the
concept
and name of
"Big
House"
emerged
in
Anglo-Irish
literature
only
when its referent was
already
in
decline.23
The date of that semantic
shift remains to be
investigated,
but one
suspects
that Dracula's
delight
at the
prospect
of
staying
in a
"house"
which is "old and
big"
is a
revealing
choice of words. In that
respect,
as in
many
others,
Harker's
diary
can be read as a
portrait
of
Big
House
society.24
If Stoker
managed
to
convey
the tone and moods of an
Anglo-Irish
aristocracy
in
decline,
his association of that class with
vampirism
is,
of
course,
eminently
critical;
it is the
gesture
of a
modern,
forward-
looking
Dublin
Protestant,
who had little
patience
with the more
conservative sections of
Anglo-Ireland. By comparison,
Bowen's
family
chronicle
definitely
reads like an
apology, although
she
does,
at
times,
infuse her record with admissions of failure and of historical
injustice.25
Bowen can also
pass
a
benign
form of criticism on the
foibles and obsessions of her
ancestors;
when this
occurs,
her
portrayals
tend to assume more
obviously
Gothic features that would
not have been out of
place
in Dracula. Towards the end of his
life,
John
Bowen I thus withdrew into the kind of isolation and behavior
that befits the undead:
He took
up
his
quarters
in the small semi-ruinous castle
just
across
the
Fahary
stream. ... Into this dark
doorway
he turned at the close
of the
long
dusks. In these
chambers
he muttered and walked at
nights.
(BC, 75)
The
daughter
of a Catholic landlord who was
expropriated
in
favor
of
the Bowens is also described in terms that could be
applied
to some
of Dracula's
victims,
although
Bowen's
descriptions perhaps
recall
the
ghost
of Catherine Heathcliff in
Wuthering Heights
more than
the undead
Lucy
Westenra
roaming
her
Whitby churchyard:
Was
Elizabeth Cushin,
child of the
dispossessed
Garrett,
as
lovely
as
she was unfortunate? Did she walk like a
living ghost
the lands her
father had
owned,
and was
John-in
the
wood,
up
the
stream,
on the
side of the
mountain-constantly meeting
her?
(BC, 77)
Raphael Ingelbien
1101
These hints of a more sensational Gothic of
walking ghosts
and
crumbling
castles remain few and far between in Bowen's Court.
Stoker,
on the other
hand,
liberally
uses such
ingredients alongside
the more
psychological
Gothic that
pervades
the characterization of
Dracula in Harker's
journal.
The
proliferation
of Gothic horrors in
Dracula
partly
answers Stoker's wish to debunk a class that he could
also
portray
with
subtlety.
Some of the Gothic atrocities that Dracula's
castle conceals are not
just stage properties
borrowed from
European
horror fiction. Closed doors and lascivious female
vampires belong
to
that
tradition,
but one element also
points
back to a
famous,
earlier
critique
of the
Anglo-Irish aristocracy
written
by
a Dublin Protestant.
After his narrow
escape
from the bites of Dracula's
women,
Harker
realizes with horror that Dracula has stolen a child and fed him to his
aggressors.
Later
on,
he observes a
peasant
woman
walking
round the
castle in her
distress,
looking
for her child.
Childbiting vampires may
not have been a
novelty
in
literature,
but
Jonathan
Swift's "A Modest
Proposal" surely
looms
large
behind this
savage
Gothic caricature of
an
aristocracy literally feeding
on the infants of a
helpless peasantry.
Stoker
gave
Count Dracula
enough
of a
psychology
to
paint
him as
an
Anglo-Irish
aristocrat
pining
for the
heyday
of the
Ascendancy
and
expressing
its
values,
moods,
and isolation with the subtle touches
that one finds in
Ascendancy
memoirs like Bowen's. But his use of
vampirism
constitutes a
damning
assessment that remains closer to
Swift's sarcasm than to Bowen's
painstaking
and defensive
introspec-
tion. In that
sense,
the Gothic excess of Dracula both continues and
supplants
the
muted,
psychological
Gothic that Stoker's characteriza-
tion shares with Bowen's chronicle of
Ascendancy
life.
However,
political
differences between both authors should not obscure their
common use of
tropes
and rhetorical
strategies
that
belong
to this
second,
recognizable Anglo-Irish
form of Gothic. I
hope
to have
shown that a
proper understanding
of that Gothic
vein,
and of its
links to
Ascendancy psychology,
as well as an awareness of its
presence
in Stoker's
novel,
are essential to the
placing
of Dracula in
the mined context of Irish
history.
Katholieke Universiteit
Leuven,
Belgium
NOTES
'See the Norton Critical Edition of
Dracula,
ed. Nina Auerbach and David
J.
Skal
(New
York:
Norton, 1997),
and
Dracula,
ed.
John
Paul
Riquelme
(Boston: Bedford/
St
Martin's, 2002).
Riquelme's
edition hereafter cited
parenthetically by page
number.
1102
Gothic
Genealogies
2
For analyses
of Dracula as an
Ascendancy
landlord,
see Seamus
Deane, Strange
Country: Modernity
and Nationhood in Irish
Writing
since 1790
(Oxford:
Clarendon
Press, 1997), 89-90,
and
Terry Eagleton, Heathcliff
and the Great
Hunger
(London:
Verso, 1995),
215-16. Bruce Stewart takes issue with them in
"Bram
Stoker's
Dracula: Possessed
by
the
Spirit
of the
Nation?,"
Irish
University
Review 29.2
(1999):
238-55. Stewart
regrets
that "in Irish critical
commentary
on Dracula there
are current
signs
of more than an element of
political
animus
against
the erstwhile
ascendancy
class in Ireland"
(255).
The
alternative,
revisionist
readings
he considers
present
Dracula as a Fenian
leader,
while the
Szganys
are
"patently
his Land
League
henchmen"
(242-43).
Like
Stewart,
Cannon Schmitt also
aligns
Dracula with
nationalist elements in "Mother Dracula:
Orientalism,
Degeneration,
and
Anglo-
Irish National
Subjectivity
at the Fin de
Siacle,"
in Irishness and
(Post)modernism,
ed.
John
S. Rickard
(Lewisburg,
PA: Bucknell Univ.
Press, 1994), 25-43,
esp.
34.
Michael Valdez Moses's
essay
"Dracula,
Parnell and the Troubled Dreams of
Nationhood," appeared
in
Journal
X: A
Journal
in Culture and Criticism 2
(1997):
66-112.
3
Stewart,
243.
4
See
Joseph
Valente, "'Double
Born': Bram Stoker and the Metrocolonial
Gothic,"
Modern Fiction Studies 46
(2000):
632.
5 See
Chris
Morash,
"'Even Under Some Unnatural Condition': Bram Stoker and
the Colonial
Fantastic,"
in Literature and the
Supernatural,
ed. Brian
Cosgrove
(Dublin:
The Columba
Press, 1995), 112,
100.
6 This is
perhaps
more true of American
readings
than of Irish ones. The
difference
may
reflect the closer links between Irish
literary
criticism and traditional
history,
or the fact that
postcolonial theory
has had a
bigger impact
in Ireland than
has New Historicism. The latter has been more dominant
among
American critics.
Nevertheless,
the
tendency
to rash
allegorizing
that Stewart detects in Irish
commentary
on Stoker can also derive from a narrow focus on Dracula's
physical
features.
7 See
Dracula,
ed.
Riquelme,
370-71, 376-79.
8 Moses, "Dracula," 69,
my emphasis.
9 Elizabeth Bowen,
Bowen's
Court,
ed. Hermione Lee
(London:
Vintage,
1999).
Hereafter cited
parenthetically by page
number and abbreviated BC.
"0
Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas is
ostensibly
set in
Derbyshire,
but Bowen
observed that its focus on
physical
isolation, inheritance,
and
supernatural oppres-
sion was
very
much the
product
of Le Fanu's
Anglo-Irish
concerns. See "Uncle Silas
by
Sheridan Le
Fanu,"
in The
Mulberry
Tree:
Writings of
Elizabeth
Bowen,
ed. Lee
(London:
Vintage,
1999),
100-13. The
concept
of an
Anglo-Irish
Gothic tradition
that includes both Le Fanu and Stoker is still
disputed.
Alison Millbank likens Stoker
to Le Fanu and other Irish Protestant writers in "'Powers Old and New': Stoker's
Alliances with
Anglo-Irish Gothic,"
in Bram Stoker:
History, Psychoanalysis
and the
Gothic,
ed. William
Hughes
and Andrew Smith
(London: Macmillan, 1998),
12-28.
W.
J.
McCormack has tried to wrest Le Fanu from what he
regards
as a "doubtful
tradition"
(Dissolute
Characters: Irish
Literary History through
Balzac,
Sheridan Le
Fanu,
Yeats and Bowen
[Manchester:
Manchester Univ.
Press, 1993], 3).
If Charles
Maturin,
Le
Fanu,
and Stoker are
regularly
"invoked in the
name
of a more
substantial Irish
gothic
tradition,"
McCormack
argues
that "the
description 'gothic'
can be
applied
to
[Le Fanu's]
work
only
in a
general
and
unsatisfactory way."
McCormack's
championing
of Le Fanu
goes together
with an overt irritation at the
Raphael Ingelbien
1103
Stoker's
"unrelenting
narration of
supernatural
and horrific
agencies"
and Dracula's
tendency
to "overkill." See his
introductory essay,
"Irish
Gothic and
After,"
in vol. 2
of the Field
Day Anthology of
Irish
Writing,
ed. Deane
(Derry,
Ireland: Field
Day
Publications, 1992),
832
("the
description"),
842
("unrelenting";
"overkill").
"Joseph
Valente's recent Dracula's
Crypt.
Bram
Stoker, Irishness,
and the
Question of
Blood
(Urbana:
Univ. of Illinois
Press, 2002),
is an often brilliant and
thought-provoking attempt
at
reading
the whole novel in the
light
of Stoker's
complex position
as an
"Anglo-Celtic"
writer. To
engage
with all of Valente's
points
would
be
beyond
the
scope
of the
present essay.
Valente sees Dracula as both
landlord and nationalist
agitator
(55-59)-in fact,
he
argues
that Dracula's funda-
mental ambivalence stems from the fact that he is
nothing
but
a
hallucinatory
projection
of the other characters' racial anxieties.
Tantalizing though
it
is,
Valente's
emphasis
on Dracula's ambivalence is not
always justified
(see
note
22, below).
12
A relevant section from
Major Johnson's
book
is
reprinted
in
Riquelme's
edition,
383-85. See also
Christopher Frayling's Vampyres:
Lord
Byron
to Count Dracula
(London: Faber, 1991).
Frayling
notes
Johnson's "many comparisons
between
Wallachian
peasants
and 'our friend
Paddy"'
(335).
For a
summing up
of the current
critical view of Stoker's use of
Johnson,
see
Gregory
Castle's
essay
"Ambivalence and
Ascendancy
in
Bram
Stoker's
Dracula,"
in
Riquelme's
edition,
527.
13 See
Hughes's
and Smith's introduction to
Brain
Stoker,
4.
14 Morash,
110.
15
See
Frayling,
321.
16
Lady Gregory,
Coole
(Dublin:
Cuala
Press, 1931),
41.
17 "His decrepit castle,
the lack of
servants,
the
mingling
of fear and
respect
accorded to him
by
Catholic
peasants
who seem to stand to him in a relation of
subservience-all of this
suggests
the social milieu of the
Ascendancy Big
House."
See
Castle,
529. The decline of the
Ascendancy's political
and economic
power
accelerated
during
the second half of the nineteenth
century;
its landmarks were the
disestablishment of the Church of Ireland
(1869)
and the Land Acts
passed
in the
1880s. See R. F.
Foster,
Modern Ireland 1600-1972
(London:
Penguin,
1989), 396,
412-15.
18 Eagleton,
215.
19
Lady Gregory,
21.
20W. B.
Yeats,
The
Poems,
ed. Daniel
Albright
(London:
Everyman,
1990), 148,
244. The lines from
"Responsibilities,"
about the ancestors who "withstood ...
James
and Irish when the Dutchman crossed"
(148),
are the eventual result of a
long
revision:
"[T]his
passage
had to
be rewritten,
for Yeats once
thought mistakenly
that
his Butler ancestors had
fought
on the side of the
Englishman James
II,
not the
Dutchman William of
Orange"
(519).
21"Dracula differs from the
previous vampire
Counts of literature
[in that]
he is a
military figure
as
well,
who
periodically
reminisces
about
his
military
successes in
the distant
past,
in
campaigns
to drive the Turks out of his
territory" (Frayling,
76).
22Valente
reads those
shifting
alliances as
yet
another
sign
of Dracula's fundamen-
tal ambivalence:
"Just
as the Draculas seem to have allied themselves with all
manner of
opposing parties
in the Balkan
wars,
so Dracula's own
subject position
aligns
him with various constituencies in the
debate
and
struggle
over Ireland"
(59).
However,
the
Szekelys's political mutability
can also
bring
to mind the confused
allegiances
of
Ascendancy
families,
and the tone of Dracula's tale is
definitely
closer
to
Ascendancy nostalgia
than to nationalist rhetoric.
1104
Gothic
Genealogies
23
"The
establishment of the
Big
House as a central
trope
in modern Irish
writing
is
closely
linked to its
elegiac
and
compensatory qualities."
See
McCormack,
"Setting
and
Ideology:
with Reference to the Fiction of Maria
Edgeworth,"
in Ancestral
Voices: The
Big
House in
Anglo-Irish
Literature,
ed. Otto Rauchbauer
(Hildesheim,
Germany:
Olms, 1992),
51.
24
Big
House
society
was not
exclusively
Protestant;
some old Catholic families also
owned
Big
Houses.
Although they
were
long technically
excluded from the Ascen-
dancy
on
religious grounds,
the distinction between those families and their
Protestant
counterparts
became
increasingly
blurred after Catholic
emancipation
and the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland.
By
the time Dracula was
written,
Big
House Catholics were in
many ways
closer to the Protestant
aristocracy
than to
urban middle-class Protestants like Stoker. This means that Dracula's
long-debated
religious identity
does not affect his status as a
Big
House aristocrat. In the
controversies
surrounding
the
novel,
Dracula has been
variously painted
as a
Catholic
(see,
for
instance, Schmitt, 34),
and as an Irish Protestant
dabbling
in the
occult and drawn to the sacramental side of Catholicism
(see Castle, 533-34).
The
classic account of the Protestant
Ascendancy's
fascination with the occult is Foster's
"Protestant
Magic:
W. B. Yeats and the
Spell
of Irish
History,"
in Yeats's Political
Identities,
ed.
Jonathan
Allison
(Ann
Arbor: Univ. of
Michigan
Press, 1996),
83-105.
Foster makes
suggestive
remarks on Stoker but does not discuss Dracula at
length.
25
Bowen wrote in her afterword:
"[M]y family.
. . drew their
power
from a
situation that shows an inherent
wrong
(BC, 453).
Raphael Ingelbien
1105