Bram Stoker's Dracula: 110 years later, it still has bite
I just finished reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time, and I'm slapping myself on the forehead for having waited so long to read it. I had assumed, like many others, that since the story, and its titular character, was so deeply ingrained in our cultural consciousness, it was therefore unnecessary for me to actually read it. I felt I knew it through cultural osmosis, as it were. Evidently, I was wrong. Dracula is a true literary classic. Not just because of its influence on later works, or because of its merit as a novel (which is considerable, though it is an uneven tale, with its eerie and evocative first section overshadowing the plodding second), but because of its depth as a text that can be read and analysed in a multitude of ways, a text that reveals so very much about the era and culture that it was written in as to practically be a historical document in its own right.
Indeed, what first struck me about the novel is that it is actually presented as a historical document, consisting entirely of a series of diary and journal entries, memos, telegrams, newspaper articles and other documents. Not one of the events that take place in the book are described from the standard novelistic 3rd-person perspective; a fact which is brought to the reader's attention by the story's protagonists, who repeatedly doubt their own written testimony throughout the story and in doing so undermine the verisimilitude of their entire narrative (as one of them directly points out in the story's coda). I cannot help but wonder if Stoker, by doing this, was openly inviting his readers to examine his text critically, because that was its effect on me. Whether by purpose or by chance, this is one of the more thought-provoking and sophisticated uses of the "unreliable narrator" device that I have encountered in a novel, and one that I was surprised to see in a 110 year-old book.
I see why Dracula remains a popular text in literature classes. If I were still a student, I'd be more than happy to study it. It's themes and subtexts- sexual and gender politics, racial conflict, the uneasy tension between (then-)modern technology and the supernatural, and the dualities and inversions that lie at the core of the story- remain as fascinating and relevant today as the day it was written. As does the book itself. To repeat the awful pun I've used in this post's title- this book still has "bite".
