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Chapter Three The Vampire as Gothic Villain Dracula. As Chapter One suggests, the name has practically become a synonym for vampire in the twentieth century. However, Bram Stoker's original character is a transitional figure that has links to both the hideous creature from folklore and the more appealing modern version in Love At First Bite, John Badham's Dracula, and the novels of Fred Saberhagen and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro. Similarly the novel in which he is the title character is a transitional work that looks back to its predecessors in Gothic literature and forward to twentieth-century popular culture. Stoker is careful to reveal the truth about Dracula slowly. To create this suspense, he narrates the first sections of the novel through Jonathan Harker, a young English lawyer who has gone to Transylvania to handle some real estate transactions for Count Dracula, who has purchased property in London. It takes Harker, who-like most of the other characters in the novel-is a rationalist and a sceptic, some time to realize the truth about Dracula. However, even before he realizes that Dracula is a supernatural being, Harker recognizes that the Count wields considerable economic and physical power. Count Dracula is, first of all, a nobleman who is accustomed to having power over others; and he announces proudly: "Here I am noble; I am boyar; the common people know me, and I am master...I have been so long master that I would be master still-or at least that none other should be master of me" (Ch. II). In addition to social and political power, Harker learns that his host also has a great deal of erotic power over women. Not only does he live in a castle with three women (These are women with whom he had evidently had sexual relationships at one time though the centuries have altered that relationship to something from which all passion has disappeared), but he easily seduces both Lucy Westenra and Mina Harker. Lucy, for example, positively blooms after her first encounter with the vampire; and even the newlywed Mina confesses that she did not want to prevent his advances. Furthermore, he announces enigmatically that Lucy and Mina may not be his only English conquests: "Your girls that you all love are mine already; and through them you and others shall yet be mine-my creatures to do my bidding and to be my jackals when I want to feed" (Ch. XXIII). Thus, even without the vampire's 31 32 The Vampire in Nineteenth-Century English Literature supernatural ability to conquer death or to change shape at will, Dracula is a character of considerable power. Stoker, however, is careful to mention Dracula's supernatural characteristics as well. For example, Harker first realizes that Dracula is a being unlike himself when he discovers that Dracula has no mirror reflection. In addition, Stoker creates Van Helsing-a doctor, lawyer, and scholar-who relates the traditions and superstitions associated with the vampire. Describing Dracula as a being who can not be destroyed "by mere passing of the time" and who flourishes by drinking the blood of his living victims, he cites other supernatural abilities: Even more, we have seen amongst us that he can even grow younger; that his vital faculties grow strenuous, and seem as though they refresh themselves when his special pabulum is plenty.. .. He throws no shadow; he make in the mirror no reflect.... He can transform himself to wolf.. .. He can come in mist which he create. (Ch. XVIII) Moreover Van Helsing also informs his young companions that they must destroy Dracula or risk becoming vampires like him: "But to fail here, is not mere life or death. It is that we become as him; that we henceforward become foul things of the night like him-without heart or conscience, preying on the bodies and the souls of those we love best" (Ch. XVIII). Thus Van Helsing both reinforces Dracula's supernatural abilities and links those abilities with evil. Very different from his twentieth-century offspring, Stoker's character is clearly a creature of supernatural evil and immense power, a Gothic figure in a work where all the characters (even the scientists and skeptics for whom acceptance of the irrational and mysterious is initially difficult) come to accept him as an actual and threatening presence. However, if Dracula's power is modeled on that of the vampire from folklore and from earlier literature, other characteristics anticipate the more appealing modern vampire...

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