Something in the Blood: the untold story of Bram Stoker, the man who wrote Dracula by David J. Skal - W.W. Norton & Co. (2016)
When I chose to study abroad at the University of Westminster, my feelings towards education were fairly tepid. Two years of sleep deprivation and tear-stained essays on such disparate subjects as conflict resolution and nanotechnology left me drained and apathetic. To be fair, a liberal arts approach is wonderful for people who don’t really know where they want to spend their precious time and energy. My problem was that I simply wasn’t ballsy enough to admit that I already knew what I wanted to do with my life. So I ended up spending most of my first two undergraduate years feeling like I was wasting my time (and my parent’s money) studying topics that didn’t even occupy the same galaxy as my interests and dreams.
Then I flew to London and everything changed. I enrolled myself in four English literature classes and nothing else. I spent most of my free time reading and debating the merits of various authors with my classmates. I rediscovered what it felt like to look forward to a seminar—to have strong feelings about assigned texts. This experience convinced me to uproot my life and enroll as a full-time student in the United Kingdom. The decision to move across the world, start over at a new institution, and push back my expected graduation date was not an easy one to make. Now I feel certain that it was the best choice for me, and ultimately helped to reintroduce me to myself. I don’t recognize the person I was in New York; there are entire months I can’t remember—almost as if I slept through them. I was lost and confused and unhappy and I didn’t feel strongly or passionately about anything. I didn’t know how to elevate myself above the baseline of depression because I couldn’t remember what it was that made me feel happy and inspired as a kid. Turns out the simple answer was books.
One of the courses I signed up for at Westminster was Victorian Era Gothic fiction. I had no idea what to expect. Now, I don’t know who I would be without such prolific authors as Edgar Allan Poe, Sheridan Le Fanu, and Bram Stoker to call upon. Their twisted world—to which more mainstream authors like Charles Dickens and the Brontë sisters frequently travelled—was a damp, foggy alley, lit by guttering gaslights and peopled by shapeshifting phantoms.
This is the dark kingdom to which David J. Skal takes readers in his fantastic biography Something in the Blood: the untold story of Bram Stoker, the man who wrote Dracula. Skal’s previous experience includes managing publicity for theatres in San Francisco and New York and writing three science fiction novels. He has also written numerous nonfiction books on horror as a genre, science fiction, and the cultural obsession with certain monsters. His enthusiasm for supernatural creatures and theatrical flair is obvious in his manner of writing. Not only is Something in the Blood one of the most thrilling, absorbing biographies I have ever read, it is also a veritable mine of information. Skal somehow manages to elaborate upon every macabre aspect of Victorian society—from those haunting ‘portraits’ of newly dead children, to frightening epidemics of syphilis, to the mania surrounding Jack the Ripper, to the public display of corpses and severed limbs for purposes of identification—without straying too far from the framing narrative of Bram Stoker’s life. Skal also shrewdly identifies the Victorian obsession with theatricality and spectacle, taking pains to examine Stoker’s lifelong tie to the Lyceum Theatre and his connection to Oscar Wilde. At times, Skal seems to inhabit the world he writes about, and beckons to the reader from within. Thus, the vocabulary he employs ends up sounding an awful lot like Bram Stoker’s famous tale:
…there is nothing final about Dracula at all, nor can there be, Dracula never ends. Not in my life, or in yours. His immortality and cultural omnipresence have everything to do with the magic of blood, the oldest and deepest and most paradoxical human symbol. As shapeshifting as Dracula himself, with the uncanny power to assume endless metaphorical forms, blood is the all-enveloping essence and measure of everything: life and death, sickness and health, anger, passion, and lust—all are blood driven and blood conceptualized. Blood ties bind us to our families. Bloodlines provide a link to our atavistic past, while serving as our primary connection to the future. The sight of blood terrifies some, is eroticized by others, and never fails to draw attention. We are thinking about blood all the time, whether or not we think we are.
The world of Gothic fiction is only a slight distortion of the Victorian world in general. It is the same scene viewed through a different lens. In both settings, disease and intoxication fester within swelling urban populations. Mysterious foreigners flock to London like flies to a corpse. Decadence and excess are the visible signs of a widespread moral degeneration. It is important to note that the most memorable monsters of Gothic fiction are all ordinary human beings who make some kind of Faustian bargain based on greed and vanity. What is fascinating about Gothic literature from this period is that it pokes and scratches at Victorian anxieties—social, sexual, political—with the same deranged pleasure we derive from picking at scabs and seeing ourselves bleed. Why do we love to watch Dorian Gray saunter towards his inevitable demise? Why does the transformation of Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde make us so delightfully uncomfortable? Perhaps in these doomed characters we catch a glimpse of our own fragility and the ease with which we might sell our souls to the Devil. Gothic fiction is one of those genres with so many motifs and recurrent themes that one would think it a short-lived trend. But these repetitions only seem to emphasize the strength of our deeply-rooted fears. The first thing you learn when studying this genre is how to identify the typical elements. Below is an abbreviated list of the most common:
- The decay of beautiful things—castles, churches, the human body. In the third example, a deeper layer of fear can be accessed if the process of natural decay has been thwarted by means of dark magic or science. i.e. Dracula is even more terrifying because of his impossible youth. Gothic fiction is often a close and graphic examination of grand-scale ruin.
- Curses and prophecies—every flickering candle and oblong shadow becomes laden with portentous meaning. This helps create a sense of continuity between past and present.
- Immortality—another form of perverse excess, in this case, the excess of life. In contrast to earlier celebrations of immortality as a signal of divine favour, Gothic literature suggests that death is a necessary cap on human greed and depravity. The longer you exist, the more likely you are to flout laws you will probably outlive.
- Invasion by a foreign enemy—strange customs and manners often threaten the purity of the host. Broken down to its narrative skeleton, Dracula is about a man determined to relocate to England.
- Somnambulism and intoxication—lots of sleepwalking, tinctures, and opium-induced visions. Female characters especially are often ‘taken over’ and controlled by parasitic supernatural beings.
- Catholicism vs. Pagan superstition—the thrust of a crucifix might save one from becoming a human sacrifice. On the other hand, churches and graveyards are prime murder sites, so the Gothic stance on Catholicism is decidedly ambivalent.
- The ‘Uncanny’—this is a crucial concept to understand before delving into Gothic literature. It is a psychological state of fear and anxiety produced by something that is strangely familiar. Something that is recognizable but somehow twisted or contaminated. To learn more about this, read Sigmund Freud’s essay on the subject or Julia Kristeva’s essay on the related concept of abjection.
Bram Stoker understood the lucrative potential of Victorian anxieties. He recognized the gruesome thrill with which we are all drawn to disease and destruction. Skal utilizes his admirable talents as a researcher to align Dracula with other notable texts which capitalized upon Victorian hysteria. Drawing frequently upon the sensational trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, Skal constructs a world in which sexual identity was a significant source of worry and paranoia. Writes Skal,
Given its many mysteries, it is not surprising that disease would almost effortlessly inform supernatural metaphor. the signature fictional works of both Wilde and Stoker would be fin-de-siècle horror stories easily interpretable as syphilis parables. The secret, corrupted painting in The Picture of Dorian Gray emblemized the process of a hideously insidious disease rising from sensuality and vice. Dracula similarly fixed on a corruption of the blood, pseudoscientific remedies, and the anxious anticipation of tell-tale marks on the skin. Each book illuminates the other, just as the lives of Stoker and Wilde provide endlessly reciprocal insights.
Perhaps the reason why Gothic literature is so fascinating is because it is usually about something else. Here is where Skal truly shines, because his ability to draw the following connections indicates an immense store of knowledge of which the life of Bram Stoker is only a small part. In addition to being an expert on Gothic literature, Skal is clearly interested in every aspect of Victorian society, which, to be fair, is rather Gothic anyways. In a typical sample of his literary analysis, Skal manages to draw Stoker into a wider cultural conversation and to indicate his relative position within the literary pantheon of Gothic fiction.
…it is almost impossible to imagine Poe’s claustrophobic tales not being informed by his famous abuse of alcohol, or not to link Dr. Jekyll’s nightmarish personality transformations (reliably triggered by a liquid potion) to Robert Louis Stevenson’s own lifelong struggle with binge drinking. The use of opium as a creative stimulant by the Romantic poets is well known, and that Percy Shelley administered quantities of opium to the teenaged Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin is hardly controversial.
Perhaps the above quotation will clarify the reason why Gothic novels are a psychoanalyst’s wet dream. Gothic fictions like Dracula can almost always be read as extended metaphors. They say something about the authors—their experiences with childhood trauma or an unhappy marriage. They also say something about the current state of civilization, about the psychological cost of living in a metropolis, and about the destructive powers of drugs and alcohol. They reflect fears of disease and immorality which might proliferate in cities where prostitutes run rampant. They often look upon the past with ambivalence—as the time before such large-scale urban degeneration, but also as the time when such immortal monsters were first conceived. In Something in the Blood, David J. Skal touches upon all of these anxieties and reminds readers why Dracula is more than a handsome guy with pointy teeth and a funny cape. Bram Stoker’s monster is the vessel of Victorian anxiety and his image deserves to outlive its cinematic parodies.
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