Bram Stoker

Bram Stoker was a lucky man. Blessed with only a modicum of literary talent, Stoker made up in sheer energy, will, and drive what he lacked in artistic skill and with a heroic diligence and work ethic found time amid the pressures of a demanding career and a problematic homelife to create Dracula, one of the most enduring literary myths the Gothic has ever known.

His most famous novel powerfully articulates what is in fact an overriding concern in much if not all of Bram Stoker's fiction: boundaries and their transgression. Most obviously this involves the life/death boundary and its violation by the vampire in Dracula, the mummy or its spirit, anyway, as in The Jewel of Seven Stars, the visionary seeker in "The Castle of the King," or the ghost in "The Judge's House," most famously. Often this life/death transgression is intimately connected to another of Stoker's "boundary" concerns: those boundaries and barriers that define and delimit acceptable female sexuality and female cultural power. The female vampires in Dracula's castle are the expression of unrestrained female sexuality, unleashed libido, a suggestion also evident in the "Dracula's Guest" section of the novel, excised for reasons of length but published separately.

Are these endings expressions of Stoker's personal demons? Perhaps. His own early childhood was problematic in its physicality; Bram Stoker himself records that a mysterious childhood illness (some now believe it to be psychosomatic) kept him so bedridden that until he was seven years old he did not know what it was to stand upright, and in those years he was cared for by a hovering mother who helped pass the time with tales of banshees and cholera epidemics. Yet in college he distinguished himself as an athlete, and every report of him notes his powerful physical presence, his large size, and his considerable strength and energy. There has even been some suggestion, although the evidence is slender in the extreme, that Stoker's marriage to the beautiful and somewhat self-absorbed Florence turned sour, and that his wife, after the birth of their son Noel, became frigid, forcing Bram Stoker to a celibacy that may have lasted for years until, finally succumbing, he eventually contracted the syphilis that killed him.

Bram Stoker's struggles to keep the balance of this dynamic are evident also in the various sentimental romances he authored (such as the nonsupernatural novel The Man, which flirts with convention-defying gender roles only to conclude by reasserting them, "taming" the boundary-testing woman) and in the "fairy tales" he wrote for his only child, Under the Sunset. Many of these pieces feature the dark violence of the Grimm fairy tales, though Stoker often merges that violence with the Dunsany-like atmospherics of dream and portentousness. "The Invisible Giant," an allegory of cholera, and "The Castle of the King," a retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, are representative examples, with their mood of dark horror proving triumphant in the end.