Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales (2 page)

Then the beautiful eyes of the fair woman open and look love, and the voluptuous mouth present to a kiss – and man is weak.
¹⁶

Le Fanu’s influence on Stoker can be similarly traced in a number of other stories in this volume. Apparitions and dreams, for example, fuelled the momentum of both authors’ stories,
¹⁷
whilst the tale of the mental breakdown and death of a student under the malign influence of a long-dead judge in Stoker’s ‘The Judge’s House’ (1891) bears more than a passing resemblance to Le Fanu’s own ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ (1872), itself a drastically rewritten version of his ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in the
Dublin University Magazine
in 1853. Both of Le Fanu’s stories climax with the discovery of the cruel judge suspended by his own hanging rope, whilst in ‘The Judge’s House’ it is the innocent lodger who is the victim of the judge’s toxic apparition.

However, it would be misleading to imply that, in displaying similarities with Le Fanu’s work, Stoker was merely plagiarizing his ideas. Many of the plot devices that both authors used were longstanding staples of the Gothic tradition. The pictorial
image that comes to life and steps out of its frame, substituting itself for its original in ‘The Judge’s House’, is a concept that can be traced from Horace Walpole’s
The Castle of Otranto
(1764) to Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1890), via Charles Maturin’s
Melmoth the Wanderer
(1820) and Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Oval Portrait’ (1850). In addition, inclement weather, spooky houses, local superstitions, disturbed dreams, vampires, doubles, second sight and malevolent beasts appeared frequently in the Gothic novels and stories of John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Matthew Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle, among others. Gothic, while imaginative, is certainly not an innovative genre as far as fictional plot mechanisms are concerned. Sets are recycled, plots rehashed and atmosphere remains invariably hyperbolic. Where the very best writers of the Gothic
are
original is in reworking these potentially formulaic devices and indulgence in uncanny excess into relevant, incisive and captivatingly unique tales in their own right. Oscar Wilde’s
The Picture of Dorian Gray
, for example, is not merely a pictorial dramatization of the Faustian pact for the
fin de siècle
audience; it is also a direct challenge to society’s superficiality, revealing the complex duality of the human condition.

Stoker understood the need for this balancing act between high fancy and deep focus, and his ability to weave such seemingly hackneyed elements seamlessly – and vividly – into his fiction without incurring accusations of belaboured cliché stands as evidence of his considerable abilities as a writer of the Gothic story. The weather may be preternaturally rough at times of high drama; pictures may come to life; animals may stalk humans; dreams and visions may foretell doom; and men may fight for, die for, kill for – and kill – women, yet joining these extreme events lies an overarching unease about the transgression of boundaries. Life and death, known and unknown, animal and human, man and woman, dream and reality, good and evil: each duality is in conflict in the stories, and each remains largely unresolved at their closure. For Stoker, life on the boundaries signified intense anxiety, the human spirit displaying itself at its most dangerous, and most resolute.
Transgression of borders socially or morally imposed results in the disruption of the imperceptible balance of power, and descent into chaos. For death to impose itself on life, for animal to impose itself on human, or for woman to impose herself on man meant a fundamental questioning of the divide separating each from the other, and the ultimate need for a reassessment of the ‘acceptable’ status quo.

‘The Squaw’ (1893), for example, reflects the deep unease expressed in much later nineteenth-century popular literature about the need for the reassessment of the boundaries that separate human and animal. The tale of a cat’s revenge upon Elias P. Hutcheson of Nebraska for his accidental killing of her kitten is so effectively chilling precisely because the cat expresses very human emotions. Its initial cry of distress upon the death of its litter, ‘such as a human being might give’, soon gives way to a display of keen intelligence and calculated revenge that results in the American’s gruesome death in the Iron Virgin, a formidable cabinet inlaid with sharp spikes that, when closed, pierced the eyes, heart and vitals of the victim enclosed within. The cat’s calm satisfaction in its act and the narrator’s choice of weapon – a sword for the execution of
humans
– enforces this confusion of the boundaries between man and animal:

And sitting on the head of the poor American was the cat, purring loudly as she licked the blood which trickled through the gashed socket of his eyes. I think no one will call me cruel because I seized one of the old executioner’s swords and shore her in two as she sat.

The certainties of what it meant to be human became increasingly unstable as the nineteenth century drew to a close, as man was forced to re-identify himself in animal rather than divine terms. Following evolution theory’s unwelcome suggestion that both man and ape had evolved from a single lineage, and Darwin’s later contention, in
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals
(1872), for the essential cross-species universality of emotional expression, a definable body of fiction emerged which confronted the potentials of this narrowing gap
between man and beast. When Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll creates an alter ego for himself in order that he may indulge his baser desires undetected, his creation, the troglodytic Mr Hyde, is similarly ‘ape-like’.
¹⁸
H. G. Wells’s
The Time Machine
(1895), meanwhile, depicts a future world in which the human species has diverged into two distinct races: the delicate human-like yet mentally degenerate Eloi and their masters, the subterranean Morlocks, who have evolved
back
into ‘ape-like’ creatures and breed the human Eloi as ‘fatted cattle’
¹⁹
for their consumption.

Stoker returned to this theme of the humanized animal in a number of his stories and novels. ‘The Burial of the Rats’ (1914) makes indistinct the line that separates the rats that infest the rubbish heaps, picking clean the bones of the dead, and the human rats, ‘more animals than men’, who hunt the story’s narrator through the streets of Paris. A malevolent rat also terrorizes the doomed student in ‘The Judge’s House’, the inference being that the creature is in some way the transmogrified soul of the judge himself, whilst in
Dracula
the Count displays the ability not only to command rats and wolves, but also to morph into a bat, a large dog and, in ‘Dracula’s Guest’, a werewolf.

This apprehension about the transgression of
physical
boundaries is compounded in Stoker’s stories by an overarching concern about the permeability of the boundaries between the rational and the irrational, the known and the unknown. ‘The Gipsy Prophecy’ (1914) overthrows the comfortable, safe world of middle class self-assurance, symbolized by fat cigars and college chums, with the Gipsy Queen’s visionary warning that Joshua Considine will murder his wife. Although ridiculed, her prophecies nevertheless disturb their recipients. At the story’s close the prediction of blood flowing ‘through the broken circle of a severed ring’ certainly comes true, and although Mary Considine takes comfort in the logical rationalization that ‘The gipsy was wonderfully near the truth; too near for the real thing ever to occur now, dear’, the reader is left wondering whether a worse fate awaits the young bride.

The defiance of logic by the uncanny is particularly palpable
in ‘The Judge’s House’, where a student of the reasoned science of mathematics is overwhelmed by the mysterious transmogrification of a portrait, despite his avowed protestations to the contrary:

A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious ‘somethings, ’ and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind.

Exemplifying this overturning of the world of sense, the giant rat with baleful eyes is unperturbed by a book of logarithms that is used as a missile against it, yet baulks at the Bible – a symbolic triumph of faith over logic. There indeed turn out to be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in Malcolmson’s philosophy, the cultured and reasoned scientific defences of his mathematical library proving useless against the uncanny forces which threaten the fundamentals of reason itself.

In deference to the Gothic tradition, Malcolmson’s attempt to shore up the fragments of logic against rationality’s ruination is strongly reminiscent of the third chapter of Emily Brontë’s
Wuthering Heights
(1848), where Lockwood piles a pyramid of books in front of his window in order to prevent Catherine Linton’s apparition from entering the room. Himself a town-dweller and therefore a stranger to the elemental effects of the wilderness, Lockwood cannot – and will not – comprehend an explanation for his ‘dream’ as anything other than the ‘effects of bad tea and bad temper’.
²⁰
In like manner, the ideological deconstruction of rigid confines between good and evil that takes place in ‘The Judge’s House’ (a supposedly righteous judge is in fact an envoy of evil) connects the story with the Gothic genre’s long-established subversion of ‘conventional’ powers of right and wrong, for instance in William Godwin’s
Caleb Williams
(1794) and Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein
(1818; 1831).

The last two stories in
Dracula’s Guest and Other Weird Stories
have a rather different tone to the rest of the collection.
The pietism of the Christian morality tale ‘A Dream of Red Hands’ (1894) and the acerbic ridiculing of Celtic sentimentality in ‘Crooken Sands’ (1894) initially seem at odds with the other, dourer, Gothic tales. However, the stories’ concerns about Jacob Settle’s immortal soul or the comic lingering over the absurdity of Arthur Markam’s tartan costume do not irrevocably set them apart. Prophecy, nightmares and the recurrent Gothic motif of the doppelgänger soon offset the reverence and humour with darker revelations about the ability of the mind to react forcibly to the power of suggestion. Furthermore, whilst absolution certainly marks the apogee of each – Settle’s hands are wiped clean and Markam learns the ‘fatal force’ of his vanity – as with the other stories, resolution and satisfaction remain at variance. For Settle to conquer eternal damnation, he must paradoxically give up his life. Markam, meanwhile, learns ‘what a vain old fool I was’ at the expense of the drowned haberdasher Mr Roderick MacDhu who, it is ultimately revealed, is the apparition that has haunted the London merchant. Contradiction once more dominates the tales of this most enigmatic of writers.

‘So much for the fortified heights; but the hollows
too have their own story’: History, Myth and Stoker’s
Evil Women

This notion of contradiction is especially pertinent to
The Lair of the White Worm
, originally published by William Rider and Son Ltd in 1911. Often dismissed as the confused ramblings of a dying man, the novel’s critical place as the culmination of Stoker’s output has been unfairly overshadowed by the assumption that its conception and construction was undertaken in a haze of opium and syphilis.
²¹
A bizarre novel, certainly, which seems defined more by its collection of inconsistent subplots than by any coherent driving narrative,
The Lair of the White Worm
has languished in obscurity, heavily abridged, since its initial publication. Indeed, subsequent editions were significantly edited or amended in an attempt to extract a degree of coherence from its pages.

Although this story was written between 3 March and 12 June 1911, its hasty composition belies a text that embodies all the concerns and contradictions of Stoker’s work. In thrall to the abiding power of myth and legend, yet also attuned to contemporary scientific ideas, the novel crosses borders between the logical and the illogical, the old and the new, the impulsive and the considered, whilst also being thematically engaged in the transgression of boundaries between male and female, human and animal, right and wrong. Simultaneously displaying both irrational flights of imagination and careful research, unconscious impulses and measured ideas, it is Stoker’s most inaccessible yet his most revealing work. Like the man himself,
The Lair of the White Worm
is a complex amalgam of self-possession and passion that defies any ready definition.

Set in the ancient lands of Mercia, a kingdom dominant in Anglo-Saxon England from the seventh to the ninth centuries which, at its height, stretched from the River Thames to Yorkshire and from Lincolnshire to Wales, as Seed maintains, ‘the action of [
The Lair of the White Worm
] is constantly being displaced from turn-of-the-century England into a legendary past which, Stoker implies, is not anywhere near as remote as we imagined’.
²²
Early twentieth-century concerns are framed within a context of historical fact and legendary fable and within the traditional narrative format of a central battle leading to a victorious hero and a displaced villain. As such the heroes and villains of the novel transcend their temporal location and attain a mythic status of universality – ‘the history of the Caswall family is coeval with that of England’ says Sir Nathaniel (
Chapter II
). The moral judgements that are made are therefore simultaneously accorded the weight of universal Truth: and in
The Lair of the White Worm
the strongest moral judgement is that held against women.

Bram Stoker’s uneasy relationship with the women of his texts has been a matter of considerable debate. In depicting a world of male camaraderie and homosocial salvation, his stories consistently work to demonize the oversexed independent female, whilst praising and advancing the meek woman
who displays deference to her male overlords. In
Dracula
, the ultimately biddable Mina Harker is saved from the vampire’s kiss whilst Lucy Westenra, desirous of three husbands in life, is transformed into a noxious sexual predator in death, finally finding ‘salvation’ through the phallic penetration of a wooden stake through her heart. In
The Man
(1905) the female protagonist Stephen Norman, who has been given a man’s name, recognizes what she regards as the ‘defects’ of her femininity and decides that she will base her life, not on ‘woman’s weakness’ but on ‘man’s strength’.
²³
Having taken it upon herself to propose marriage to a man, Stephen is brutally rejected by him, and experiences loneliness and despair, her decline ending happily when she accepts a proposal from the man she herself initially spurned for his assumptions of masculine superiority: ‘She was all woman now; all-patient, and all-submissive. She waited for the man; and the man was coming!’
²⁴