Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales (4 page)

… there exists a certain point in the mind at which life and death, real and imaginary, past and future, communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived in terms of contradiction.
³¹

Rejecting any sense of human identity as serious, stable or continuous,
The Lair of the White Worm
is therefore both reflective and progressive in its outlook. Blurring apparent differences between reality and imagination whilst simultaneously acknowledging an adherence to late-nineteenth-century social conventions, the novel is an intriguing amalgamation of avant-garde vision and traditionalist sentiment.

This keen awareness of the artistic atmosphere in which he was writing may well have been a natural consequence of working in theatreland. There, Stoker met a large number of fellow artists, from Mark Twain to W. B. Yeats, Ford Maddox Ford to Walt Whitman. Of all the literary figures with whom Stoker came into contact at the Lyceum, however, he respected none more than the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809– 92), whom he met in March 1879 and whose plays
The Cup
and
Becket
were produced by the Lyceum Company in January 1881 and February 1893 respectively. Stoker’s admiration for Tennyson reveals itself in
The Lair of the White Worm
, where allusion is made to the poet’s
In Memoriam
(1850), Sir Nathaniel’s observation that ‘We are going back to the origin of superstition – to the age when dragons of the prime tore each other in their slime’ (
Chapter XXIV
) being a close citation of:

No more? A monster then, a dream,

A discord. Dragons of the prime,

That tare each other in their slime,

Were mellow music matched with him.
³²

Tennyson’s and Stoker’s consciousness of the potential of unbridled Nature red in both tooth and claw was similarly shared by another of Stoker’s close acquaintances, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lyceum had staged Doyle’s play
Waterloo
to great critical and popular acclaim in September 1894, Doyle in turn praising
Dracula
as ‘the very best story of diablerie which I have read for many years’.
³³
Discreet allusions to Conan Doyle’s works pepper the stories in this collection, from the overarching horroar of strong women that is the hallmark of
The Parasite
(1894), the story of a female mesmerist and her powers of sexual manipulation, to ‘The Terror of the Blue John Gap’ (1910) in which a huge subterranean antediluvian beast terrorizes the inhabitants of the Peak District countryside. ‘It is only the natural process of evolution, ’ Nathaniel de Salis tells Adam Salton (
Chapter XXV
); however, Conan Doyle’s and Stoker’s stories reveal an anxiety about the potentials of evolution, both biological
and
social, which has the equal possibility of undermining their species and their sex. In stating that ‘We are in a quagmire, my boy, as vast and as deep as that in which the monsters of the geologic age found shelter and perhaps advance’, de Salis concertinas the millennial process of evolution, effectively questioning both man and mankind on present, past and future planes (
Chapter XXXVIII
). Conan Doyle was to undertake a very similar approach in his 1912 novel,
The Lost World
, in which the discovery of a colony of dinosaurs and ape-men on a remote plateau in South America leads to a fundamental questioning of both hegemony and humanity.

An anxiety over species transgression and hereditary robustness is further compounded in Stoker’s texts by a central concern over racial autonomy. Throughout these stories, frequent references are made to the might and resilience of Englishness, from the narrator’s exclamation in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ that ‘All my English blood rose’ when challenged by the German coach-driver,
to the self-affirmatory ‘I was an Englishman and would make a fight for it’ by the narrator of ‘The Burial of the Rats’. In
The Lair of the White Worm
, likewise, the whiteness of the white worm, whilst certainly relatable to the beds of valuable china clay that lie beneath Diana’s Grove, also introduce a racial theme to the narrative that makes contact with the many ‘Invasion of England’ novels such as Richard Marsh’s
The Beetle
(1897), Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Lot 249’ (1892) and even Stoker’s own
Dracula
, which were popular during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Written in the wake of Sir George Chesney’s
The Battle of Dorking
(1871), such narratives played with the conjecture of an assault upon the country from a foreign power and the potential colonization of England’s shores that would result. The chief threat against the foundations of England and Englishness in
The Lair of the White Worm
, however, comes from one of its own inhabitants and is manifestly concealed beneath a surface of respectability and assumed propriety: traditional boundaries between native and invading foreigner are thus destabilized whilst, paradoxically, the associations between whiteness and value are reinforced. These opposing (and permeable) worlds of civilization and barbarity are further highlighted by the figure of Edgar Caswall’s African servant, Oolanga. Depicted as belonging to an even more primitive evolutionary system than the white worm, he is a ‘negroid of the lowest type; hideously ugly, with the animal instincts developed as in the lowest brutes… so brutal as to be hardly human’ (Chapter V). Adverse stereotyping of the racial ‘Other’ is similarly prevalent in
Dracula
where the ‘Hebrew of rather the Adelphi Theatre type, with a nose like a sheep, and a fez’,
³⁴
who is responsible for removing the Count’s boxes of earth at Galatz, is but a more defined version of Dracula’s own implied Jewishness: a tall black pillar of a man with a hooked nose and an abundance of curly hair. This portrayal of ‘primitive’ societies as morally under-evolved taps into prevailing anthropological notions about racial and criminological ‘underdevelopment’: the native and the criminal being regarded as retarded in both their moral and physical bearing, and hence evolutionarily closer to
children and the beasts. Dracula is said to have a criminal’s ‘child-brain’,
³⁵
whilst Oolanga is a ‘devil-ridden child of the forest and the swamp’ (
Chapter IV
).

The consequences of this less-than-fully-evolved status would, it was believed, manifest themselves physically.
L’Uomo Delinquente
(1876), by Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), argued that crime was caused almost entirely by the anthropological characteristics of the criminal who was essentially ‘an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals’.
³⁶
The criminal type was thus in effect a ‘throwback’ to humanity’s savage past and displayed moral degeneracy through concurrent physical symptoms. Heavily influencing the late nineteenth-century exponents of Degeneration theory such as Max Nordau (1849– 1923) and Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), physiological evaluation effectively achieved the deliberate marginalization of certain strata of society, objectifying and – riding on the crest of the evolutionary-degeneration wave – bestializing their ‘otherness’.
³⁷
Stoker himself regarded physiognomy as an eminently practical form of knowledge, and there are countless references to it scattered throughout his work.
³⁸
At its most basic, good men are handsome, wicked men hideous: the face of the judge in ‘The Judge’s House’, for example, is ‘strong and merciless, evil, crafty, and vindictive, with a sensual mouth, hooked nose of ruddy colour, and shaped like the beak of a bird of prey’. In this collection, physiognomical judgement is also taken one step further, corporeal features often being heralded as connoting origin, whilst characters’ temperaments personify the perceived characteristics of their ethnicity. Thus the African Oolanga displays the ‘grossest animal passions’ that he himself physically embodies (
Chapter XV
), whilst Edgar Caswall typifies his Roman ancestry:

The aquiline features which masked them seemed to justify every personal harshness. The pictures and effigies of them all show their adherence to the early Roman type. Their eyes were full; their hair, of raven blackness, grew thick and close and curly. Their figures were massive and typical of strength. (
Chapter II
)

Similar judgements are also made about Mimi and Lilla Watford, and Abel Behenna and Eric Sanson in ‘The Coming of Abel Behenna’.

Aside from concerns raised over the potential destabilization of the physical self, Stoker’s stories also display an intense anxiety about the capitulation of mental autonomy. Count Dracula, for example, launches a two-fold attack upon his victims, subjecting them to both a corporeal and psychological transformation. Hypnotism as a means of control likewise infuses
The Lair of the White Worm
in both Edgar Caswall’s attempts to overpower Lilla through mesmeric manipulation and, ironically, in his own surrender to insanity following the discovery of Mesmer’s chest. Overawed by this assault on multiple levels, at one point in the novel Adam Salton asks, ‘of what sort is the mystery – physical, mental, moral, historical, scientific, occult?’ (
Chapter XIX
). Dramatizing the vulnerability of the mind as well as the body, Stoker’s narratives highlight the potential transgression of
all
barriers of perception. What Stoker himself called the ‘strife of living’
³⁹
necessitated a precarious negotiation through those malignant forces which seek to overwhelm life itself, and the durability of his stories’ popularity may be attributed to this very awareness of the fundamental anxieties of human existence.

1
.   Maud Ellmann, ‘Introduction’. Bram Stoker,
Dracula
, ed. Maud Ellmann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. viii, xiii.

2
.   A. N. Wilson, ‘Introduction’. Bram Stoker,
Dracula
, ed. A. N. Wilson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. xiv.

3
.   From letter to Walt Whitman. Barbara Belford,
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula
(London: Phoenix; Orion Books Ltd, 1997), p. 43.

4
.   Daniel Farson,
The Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’. A Biography of Bram Stoker
(London: Michael Joseph, 1975), pp. 212, 233–5.

5
.   Peter Haining and Peter Tremayne,
The Undead: The Legend of Bram Stoker and ‘Dracula’
(London: Constable & Company Ltd, 1997), p. 182.

6
.   Paul Murray,
From the Shadow of ‘Dracula’: A Life of Bram Stoker
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), pp. 254, 267–9.

7
.   William Hughes and Andrew Smith, ‘Bram Stoker, the Gothic and the Development of Cultural Studies’. William Hughes and Andrew Smith (ed.),
Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic
(London: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1998), p. 3.

8
.   Harry Ludlum claimed that
The Lair of the White Worm
is Stoker’s least successful novel because of the speed at which it was written, ‘the writing terse, bare, jerky, hurrying on to the next contrived scene, compressing great strides into sentences of convenience’. Harry Ludlum,
A Biography of Dracula. The Life of Bram Stoker
(London: W. Foulsham & Co. Ltd, 1962), p. 148.

9
.   Clive Leatherdale,
Dracula the Novel & the Legend. A Study of Bram Stoker’s Gothic Masterpiece
. Revised edition (Brighton: Desert Island Books, 1993), p. 72.

10
.  The tale of a young man who encounters both werewolves and the living dead on Walpurgis Nacht (30 April) whilst in Munich, en route to visiting Count Dracula, would certainly tend to suggest a strong link with
Dracula
, which opens with Jonathan Harker’s first diary entry three days later on 3 May, noting that he ‘Left Munich at 8.35 p.m.’ Furthermore, during Harker’s later encounter with the three female vampires in Dracula’s castle, he recalls of the fair-haired one, ‘I seemed somehow to know her face, and to know it in connection with some dreamy fear’: he recognizes her because she was originally intended as the Countess Dolingen. This irregularity was never caught by the original editors, although a subsequently deleted line makes it clear. ‘As she spoke I was looking at the fair woman and it suddenly dawned on me that she was the woman – or the image – that I had seen in the tomb on Walpurgis Night.’ Cited in Belford,
Bram Stoker
, p. 265.

11
.  Stoker,
Dracula
(London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003), pp. 89, 24, 101. The connection between the vampire and the werewolf is certainly one that Stoker would have known about in researching
Dracula
, through his reading of Sabine Baring-Gould’s
The Book of Were-Wolves
(1865), which detailed the belief that ‘After death lycanthropists become vampires.’ Sabine Baring-Gould,
The Book of Were-Wolves: Being an Account of a Terrible Superstition
(London: Senate; Studio Editions Ltd, 1995), 115.

12
.  Stoker,
Dracula
, p. 25.

13
.  For a complete rundown of
Dracula
-inspired films and plays, see
David J. Skal,
Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Stage to Screen
(London: Andre Deutsch, 1990).

14
.  Stoker,
Dracula
, p. 46. In his first brief outline of the scene in March 1890 Stoker jotted ‘This man belongs to me. I want him’; this was later emended into the final version now published. Maurice Hindle, ‘Introduction’, Stoker,
Dracula
, p. xxxiv.

15
.  Sheridan Le Fanu,
Carmilla
, in
In a Glass Darkly
, ed. Robert Tracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 264.

16
.  Stoker,
Dracula
, p. 393.

17
.  In Le Fanu’s
Carmilla
, for example, Laura claims to have ‘seen’ her mysterious guest in a dream many years before their meeting, while Carmilla avers to having experienced a similar epiphany. Jacob Settle is haunted by dreams of being barred from heaven in Stoker’s ‘A Dream of Red Hands’, whilst Arthur Markam is similarly disturbed by dreams of seeing his own death in ‘Crooken Sands’; and in
The Lady of the Shroud
(1909) Rupert Sent Leger’s adventures in the Blue Mountains are dreamt about, weeks beforehand, by his aunt in Scotland.

18
.  Robert Louis Stevenson,
The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Tales of Terror
, ed. Robert Mighall (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2002), p. 22.

19
.  H. G. Wells,
The Time Machine
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1999), pp. 45, 63.

20
.  Emily Brontë,
Wuthering Heights
, ed. Pauline Nestor (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 2003), p. 22.

21
.  See Daniel Farson,
The Man Who Wrote ‘Dracula’
, p. 217.

22
.  David Seed, ‘Eruptions of the Primitive into the Present:
The Jewel of Seven Stars
and
The Lair of the White Worm
’, in
Bram Stoker
, eds. Hughes and Smith, p. 197.

23
.  Stoker,
The Man
(London: William Heinemann, 1905), pp. 79–80.

24
.  Ibid., p. 434.

25
.  Concern over a transient, easily displaced masculinity is evident throughout Stoker’s works. The necessity for multiple men to counteract the threat of a single woman is manifest in ‘Dracula’s Guest’ where a male wolf and a entire brigade of dragoons come to the rescue of the narrator who himself admits to feeling ‘unmanned’ (
Chapter II
) in the presence of the Countess’s tomb. Similarly, in
Dracula
it takes the four-strong ‘Crew of Light’ to overcome the Count and his group of female revenants.

26
.  For example: Drakelow (‘the dragon’s mound’), three miles north of Kidderminster; ‘Drakeholes’ (‘dragon’s valley’), four miles
south-east of Bawtry in Nottinghamshire; Wormwood Hill in Stapleford, south-east of Cambridge; and Wormhill and Wormsley, respectively about five miles west and six miles northwest of Hereford. Sarah Zaluckyj,
Mercia: The Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Central England
(Almley: Logaston Press, 2001), P 57.

27
.  Bram Dijkstra,
Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 305–15.

28
.  Ian W. Walker,
Mercia and the Making of England
(Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000), pp. 113–21.

29
.  Cited in Waldberg,
Surrealism
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1965), p. 66.

30
.  Bram Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’. Cited in
A Glimpse of America and Other Lectures, Interviews and Essays
, ed. Richard Dalby (Essex: Desert Island Books Ltd, 2002), p. 157.

31
.  From
Le Second Manifeste du Surréalisme
(1929). Cited in Waldberg,
Surrealism
, p. 76.

32
.  Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
In Memoriam
, 2nd edition, ed. Erik Gray (New York: W. W. Norton & Company Inc., 2004), p. 41.

33
.  Cited in Murray,
From the Shadow of Dracula
, p. 204.

34
.  Stoker,
Dracula
, p. 371.

35
.  Ibid., p. 362.

36
.  Gina Lombroso-Ferrero,
Criminal Man According to the Classifications of Cesare Lombroso
(London and New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911), p. xv.

37
.  In the last decades of the nineteenth century the prospect of what H. G. Wells called ‘downward modification’ haunted the European imagination. Degeneration theory essentially reversed and compressed the narrative of evolutionary progress, arguing for the latent potential of mankind to physically and morally regress. The works of men such as Benedict Augustin Morel, Cesare Lombroso, Max Nordau and Henry Maudsley proposed a theory of retrograde evolution which appeared to provide a scientific explanation for the ills of society, attributing them to individuals who had been born with mental, moral or physical degenerative symptoms. Indeed, as both a branch of biology and a form of cultural criticism, ‘degeneration’ became a highly portable term to apply to anything that appeared to deviate from the status quo, from physics to social science to literature and art. As Daniel Pick argues, ‘Degeneration involved at once a scenario of racial decline (potentially implicating everyone in the
society) and an explanation of “otherness”, securing the identity of, variously, the scientist, (white) man, bourgeoisie against superstition, fiction, darkness, femininity, the masses, effete aristocracy.’ Daniel Pick,
Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder 1848–1918
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 230–31.

38
.  At the time of his death Stoker owned a five-volume quarto edition of Johann Caspar Lavater’s
Essays on Physiognomy
(1789). David Glover,
Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 72.

39
.  Stoker, ‘The Censorship of Fiction’, p. 156.