Editor’s note: This article references chapter 21 of Dracula, though no major spoilers are included for the book.
Having spent my formative years watching Mystery Science Theater 3000, I found the tropes and patterns of Dracula laughably predictable along the truisms of the horror genre.
Except, of course, that this was the first one. This is one of the books that begot the Horror truths that the mad are usually in league with Evil, the madhouse next to the abandoned mansion is probably psychically connected, that you shouldn’t go into the dark crypt with bats flapping and rats scrabbling unless you want Hell to literally break loose, and, most importantly, do not ever leave the girl behind.
Reading along, I was exasperated with characters’ rookie mistakes. “Seriously, Van Helsing?!?!” says me, “you’re leaving a woman alone in the madhouse apartment while you boys go play in the crypt next door? Never mind the misogyny, but do you actually know anything about fighting vampires? You do not leave girls alone when vampires prowl. It’s even more basic than garlic and roses, dude. Read ‘Salem’s Lot.”
To be sure, Dracula is wild and weird and wonderful and gripping and everything that I could hope for as a stormy winter read—perhaps the only thing better would be to read it aloud at night, night by night, on the appropriate dates from the compiled journal. But, even as the origin of all the pop culture derivations of its Platonic form of horror—as if Dracula the book bit and infected our cultural imagination and all else rises up like Count Dracula’s victim-wife-children—I couldn’t read it as anything other than a shining example of the genre. It was just an enjoyably frightening fantasy merging violent spirituality and steampunk technologies in a gripping narrative style.
Until Chapter XXI, the night of 3 October, and a spark of reality lit. Count Dracula, younger seeming and fuller of blood than when Jonathan Harker first knew him, is discovered in flagrante delicto in a lady’s boudoir. We barely see Dracula take Lucy, although everyone (except the characters) knows what is going on. Seeing Dracula in the act with his second victim, and that “the attitude of the two had a terrible resemblance to a child forcing a kitten’s nose into a saucer of milk to compel it to drink,” is viscerally different.
In a single image, Dracula becomes not a myth and monster, but a man snapping a kitten’s neck. Anyone who has been physically pushed or pulled or restrained by someone stronger will understand the feeling of frustrated teary powerlessness of being a victim and the utter cruelty of Dracula.
Vampires are not real. Bullies—from Attila the Hun to Hitler to the fossil fuel industry to culturally entrenched ideas of beauty—are. And to see Dracula not as a blood-sucking ageless Transylvanian demon but instead as a powerful bully forcing the weaker to his will changed my entire reading of the book.
Looking at it from that light, this world is over-rich with vampires, holding our hands behind our backs with steely fingers and pushing our pursed lips to their bloody wounds until, we must “either suffocate or swallow” and submit to the bully’s way of being.
Outside of vampire stories and in the real world, we swallow and suffocate and fall into patterns of living that beget systemic sexism and racism, violence and climate change, classism and economic inequity, and do not think even think we are being coerced into these destructive ways of being by bullying forces larger than our individual selves. We do not want to speak up and act out against bullies, often, because we are led to distrust and dislike anything other than what we know. As a Dracula’s kitten reports, after the encounter, “strangely enough, I did not want to hinder him. I suppose it is a part of the horrible curse that this happens when his touch is on his victim.” (The edition I read—Pocket Books Enriched Classic, 2003, with introduction and enrichment by Professor Dr. Joseph Valente—noted that line as evidence that the vampire’s kiss, as a sexual metaphor, implied some sort of consent. Given the force involved—the strength of a timeless hell-monster versus a weakened and bloodless woman—it sounds a lot less a sexy-consensual event and a lot more like rape, by a bully.)
I don’t believe that Stoker wrote Dracula as a manual for resisting bullies, for rising up against violently oppressive cultural forces, for fighting for a greener, kinder, queerer, acceptingly diverse and peaceful society. That would be absurd, and I won’t do the untrained Academic thing of mining the text for evidence to support my claims of understanding the long-dead author’s motivations. I will say, though, that in terms of learning how to put together a fantastic and successful struggle against bullies and infectiously violent patterns, the story of Dracula contains some timeless strategies.
Specifically:
1. Believe in the evidence you have, even if it flies in the face of everything you have been taught is true.
2. Share and compile your observations and experiences with others. Chances are, you are not alone in thinking something is off.
3. Include everyone and equally. Seriously.
4. Let everyone utilize their individual strengths—go for the rag-tag band of complimentarily talented misfits versus a militia of identical doppelgangers. Mina memorizes train schedules, Jonathan escapes better than Houdini, Morris knows Winchester rifles, Arthur knows steamships, and their variety works better than an army of Van Helsings.
5. Even the evildoers and bullies are trapped in the system themselves. Practice empathy—ending the cycle of violence frees the bully too.
6. Use the system against itself. If, say, the vampire controls you, that is a connection to subvert. If, in another universe, the economy or government controls you, that is a connection to subvert.
7. Keep roses and garlic on hand—one is beautiful and the other delicious, and either can come in handy.
8. Love is stronger than fear. Everyone knows this, but it doesn’t ever hurt to hear it again. Love—from Dracula to A Wrinkle in Time to V for Vendetta to Harry Potter—is the best thing we’ve got against the soul-suckingly powerful.
Bethany Taylor lives in New England, blogs and blogs at Granite Bunny and Hothouse Magazine, works as a farmer and a librarian, and generally tries to have a good time saving the world and writing about it.
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