Dracula and Conscious Authorship

he never lost his interest in the science of building. Once out of the profession he was able to contemplate architecture in quite a new way. Instead of being bound with all the details of the building trade he had the leisure to speculate on the significance of architectural form in human life and there is not one of his novels in which buildings do not play some major role. Sometimes they act as the repositories of memories and ancient ways of life; sometimes they are emblems of certain kinds of social or cultural cohesiveness. The missed opportunity in the instance of Max Gate was the failure to register this era in Hardy's life with his writing, for it will be remembered that even as he was drawing up the plans for his own house he was simultaneously creating the imaginative bricks and mortar of Casterbridge. In common with the other novels the buildings which make up the old Wessex town are not just a backdrop for the action. High Place Hall, Henchard's house, and The Three Mariners are intimately bound up with their occupiers and their lives and Hardy's own experience has fed directly into the creation of each location. If Professor Millgate had allowed himself the leisure of using some of the information which C. J. P. Beatty has provided us about Hardy's obsession with architectural form and linked the building of Max Gate with the writing of The Mayor of Casterbridge we would have learned much more about the development of Hardy's imagination at this crucial point in his life. Perhaps it is a little unfair to lay the blame for the feeling of dissatisfaction with the biography at the feet of Professor Millgate. The form that he has chosen has forced upon him a certain kind of mental promiscuousness where he darts from idea to idea but develops none. Taken together these two biographies provide a rich source of factual Information about Hardy's life and perhaps it is a good thing that they raise more questions than they answer. Together they have laid the foundation for work of a rather more specialised kind; what we now want are individual studies of equal density which deal with some of the issues only touched upon in these volumes. We are now in a position to see Hardy more clearly and the time is ripe for new works on Hardy's intellectual and aesthetic development within his Victorian context. J. B. Bullen University of Reading 2. DRACULA AND CONSCIOUS AUTHORSHIP Phyllis A. Roth. Bram Stoker. Boston: Twayne, 1982. $13.95 The need for such a study as Phyllis Roth's Bram Stoker is shown by the academic criticism of Stoker's Dracula (1897) which has burgeoned in the past ten years after Maurice Richardson established a Freudian description of the novel in "The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories" in Twentieth Century, 166 (1959), 419-31. To Richardson, Stoker's story of Dracula's invasion of England, his victimization of Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker, and his eventual destruction by their friends was "a quite blantant demonstration of the Oedipus complex . . . with the brothers banding together against the father who has tried to keep all the females to himself " (pp. 427, 428). Following this line are, for example, Joseph Bierman, C. F. Bentley, Royce Macgillivray, and Richard Astle. Phyllis Roth pioneered the feminist attack on the novel with an argument in Literature and Psychology, 27 (1977) , 113-21, that its essential theme is not Oedipal but "pre-Oedipal": "the central 135 anxiety of the novel is the fear of the devouring woman . . . the vagina dentata," and thus "central to the structure and unconscious theme of Dracula is . . . the desire to destroy the threatening mother, she who threatens by being desirable" (pp. 119-20). In this reading Dracula Is a wish-fulfilling projection of the fearful male ego, and his victimization of Lucy and Mina is secretly sanctioned by the novel's men. This line has been continued by Judith Weissman and Gail Griffin. Mark M. Hennelly, Jr., however, has argued in ELT, 20 (1977), 13-26, that "Dracula is a kind of primitive Corn God...