Dracula [book review]

As I was waiting for my plane to Bangalore a week ago, I spotted a cheap English edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in De Gaulle airport. I had not re-read the book since my teenage years (quite a while ago, even by wampyr’s standards!), so I bought it for the trip ahead. I remembered very little of the style of the [French translation of the] book if the story itself was still rather fresh on my mind (as were the uneasy nights after reading the novel!).

“I can hazard no opinion. I do not know what to think and I have no data on which to found a conjecture.”

Dracula is definitely a Victorian gothic novel in the same spirit as Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho I read last year, if of a late and lighter style… Characters do not feel very realistic (!), maybe because the novel is written in the epistolary style, which makes those characters only express noble or proper sentiments and praise virtues in their companions. (The book could obviously be re-read with this filter, attempting at guessing the true feelings of those poor characters forced into a mental straitjacket by the Victorian moral codes.) However, even without this deconstructive approach, the book is quite fascinating as a representation of the codes of the time. More than for a rather unconvincing plot which leaves the main protagonist mostly in the dark [of a coffin, obviously!]. The small band of wampyr-hunters pursuing Dracula seems bound to commit every mistake in the book and miss clues about his local victims and opportunities to end up Dracula’s taste of England earlier… And the progress of Dracula in his invasion is too slow to be frightening.  Anyway, what I found highly interesting in Dracula is the position and treatment of women in this novel, from innocent vaporous victims to wanton seductresses once un-dead, from saintly and devoted wives to unusually bright women “more clever than men” but still prone to hysteria… Once again, many filters of (modern) societal and sociological constraints could be lifted from this presentation. I also noticed that no legal authority ever appears in the novel: the few policemen therein lift rescued children from cemeteries or nod at the heroes breaking into Dracula’s house in London. This absence may point out issues with Victorian society that may prove impossible to solve with out radical changes. (Or I may be reading too much!)