Dracula Returns

Dracula's Castle

The only time I read Bram Stoker’s classic horror novel was when I was in high school. That was an abridged Malayalam translation which focused on horror with its concomitant suspense, and nothing more. I had to walk four kilometres from home to school and one way of reducing the affliction of that long barefoot walk was to tell stories to friends or listen to their stories.

Dracula and Tarzan were my favourite stories in those days. Dracula was nothing more than a vampire story for us children. We were all used to a lot of Malayalam ghost stories and Dracula was just another ghost, with probably the only exception that he was male while Malayalam vampires were generally female.

This gender discrimination in the Malayalam vampire (yakshi) stories caught my fancy recently and I decided to read Dracula once again. While the female yakshis of Kerala’s folklore did carry the Malayali men’s fearful fantasies about the menacing seductive prowess of young and attractive women, I wished to understand the psychological baggage that the Western Dracula was fated to carry.

Kerala’s yakshis are all initially very charming. Once the male victim is under the bewitching intoxication of their feminine charm, they change shape and become diabolic with protruding canine teeth and all other accessories of ghosts anywhere. The outer beauty of the woman is treacherous: that’s the essential message, I think.

Dracula has similar themes, I understand as I go on with my adult reading of the novel. As Jonathan Harker, the initial narrator of the novel, moves from London to Dracula’s Transylvania, the landscapes become increasingly seductive as well as ominous. “Before us lay a green sloping land full of forests and woods, with here and there steep hills, crowned with clumps of trees or with farmhouses… There was everywhere a bewildering mass of fruit blossom - apple, plum, pear, cherry.” Soon he tells us that he had left the West and entered the East. Dracula, the vampire, belongs to the East where the music consists of the terrifying sounds of jackals and other nocturnal creatures.

Well, I’ve just begun my adult reading of the novel. I don’t want to jump to any conclusion. But I’m sure, by the time I complete my reading, I’ll understand why Dracula remains a classic. It is definitely more than a vampire story that tickles our adrenalin glands. Does it tell a story about a reverse colonisation? The British went into primitive, uncivilised lands and conquered the people there and also thought of civilising them. Is Dracula an Eastern force that is invading the civilised West with demonic vengeance?

Even the women in the novel have metaphorical undertones, I think. I need to explore in greater depth Lucy the sensual woman and Mina the good woman, both of who m face disasters. After all, Bram Stoker was writing for the Victorian England with its outward purity and modesty when it came to sex and sexuality. Was Dracula bringing the unmentionable sex, lust, and perversity into the ordered world of Victorian England with certain motives? Was Dracula a metaphysical rebel with his deep-rooted contempt for whatever the Victorian England held sacrosanct? 

I will answer the questions and tell you a lot more. Let me finish reading the novel.