This is, arguably, the most unsettling invitation in literature.

It saddens me a little that Dracula (much like other Gothic classics such as Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) is so often distilled into a straightforward good-versus-evil monster narrative. These novels have so much more for us to explore and think about.

Blocking our ears to the sounds of blood slurping then, today I want to talk about boundaries.

We have the thresholds of various properties, of course, and the familiar vampire convention that you’re safe as long as you don’t invite them in. Beyond that, the novel is full of less tangible but equally important distinctions: East and West; masculine and feminine; innocence and experience; life and death. And, fascinatingly, between what we’re ‘permitted‘ to do and what’s ‘prohibited‘.

Dracula’s welcome to Jonathan Harker is a particularly sinister example. Unless you’re listening to me loudly declaim it in the worst Romanian accent you’ll ever hear. (And I do this far more often than you might think. I LOVE this quotation.)

Hospitality, ordinarily an expression of generosity and trust, becomes a means of entrapment. Harker is invited into the castle, but discovers that the freedom to enter does not necessarily include the freedom to leave. The threshold becomes a boundary controlled by someone else.

There is something particularly interesting about the betrayal of hospitality.

In Dante‘s Inferno, those who betray their guests occupy Ptolomea, a region of the ninth circle of Hell, encased in ice amongst the most grievous of traitors.¹

The invitation into one’s home carries obligations which extend beyond mere courtesy; to offer sanctuary and then exploit the trust it implies is an especially profound act of treachery. Dracula’s welcome to Harker is therefore more than an unsettling piece of Gothic theatre. It’s a deliberate perversion of one of the oldest social conventions.

It’s also, incidentally, a significant factor in Macbeth‘s reluctance to murder King Duncan:

[I am] his host,

Who should against his murderer shut the door,

Not bear the knife myself.²

Back to the novel – arguably, this invitation, and Harker’s realisation that he cannot leave, provide an early signal of Dracula’s ‘outsider’ status. He doesn’t play by the rules; he isn’t ‘one of us‘. It’s an interesting contrast with Van Helsing, himself a foreigner, but one whom Stoker goes to considerable lengths to establish as an ‘acceptable’ one.

And, at the risk of making this a university essay, I’m very keen to revisit the origins of that wonderfully Gothic term, the ‘uncanny‘. The German word unheimlich, often translated as ‘uncanny’, carries the sense of the ‘unhomely‘.³ And what could be more unhomely than hospitality which transpires as imprisonment — and worse, predation?

So. Much of the novel concerns the transgression of boundaries. Dracula travels westwards, bringing the perceived threat of the unfamiliar into the heart of Victorian England. He occupies that uncomfortable space between life and death, while his relationships with women challenge conventional expectations of sexuality and feminine behaviour. The world he inhabits is one in which familiar distinctions become increasingly difficult to maintain.

Our attitudes and responses to texts change organically over time, but sometimes a notion or theory persists. In this case, looking back through my university essays suggests I’ve been thinking about boundaries in the novel since at least 2011: especially the one between defence and persecution.

Stoker presents the group of men determined to destroy Dracula as the defenders of civilisation, protecting their homes, their families and, ultimately, humanity itself. Their intentions are ostensibly righteous. But look at their actions. They pursue Dracula across countries, break into his properties, destroy his belongings and brutally kill those who have become vampires.

For fifteen years now, only half-mischievously, I’ve been asking a simple question:

‘What’s the difference between what Dracula does, and the actions of what I call Van Helsing’s “Crew of Light”?’

The Crew’s conduct is remarkably cavalier with the laws and social conventions they claim to uphold. When Lucy is finally destroyed (after a lengthy period vacillating at the boundary of death and undeath) the violence is presented as necessary, even merciful. We’re encouraged to welcome her death as a victory.

But why? Is it because we have independently considered the morality of the act, or because the novel’s trusted authorities have assured us that it is the right thing to do?

I find myself wondering where the distinction lies between defending ourselves against a threat and taking pleasure in its destruction. When does the pursuit of justice become revenge? And at what point does a determination to protect our own become an excuse for persecuting those we’ve decided do not belong?

Perhaps the most unsettling thing about Dracula is that the monsters aren’t necessarily the only characters capable of monstrosity.

Nietzsche warned that those who fight monsters should take care not to become monsters themselves.⁴ And if they gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into them. Stoker’s ‘Crew of Light’ might have done well to heed the warning.

Stoker’s novel is, amongst other things, a reminder that the people who claim the authority to defend our boundaries might be just as willing to transgress them.

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References and Further Reading

1. Dante Alighieri. Inferno, Canto XXXIII (c.1321) ↩︎
2. William Shakespeare, Macbeth, ed. Sandra Clark and Pamela Mason, Arden Shakespeare Third Series (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2015) ↩︎
3. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) ↩︎
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (1886) ↩︎