Once Bitten, Several Times Read: Revisiting Bram Stoker’s Dracula
October 22, 2026
By my reckoning, this is probably my third or fourth reading of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (I have had different editions of this book, and I at present gratuitously have four different copies). I first encountered it as a teenager, during that awkward Gothic phase, when I had a particular fascination with everything morbid, macabre, Byronic, and vaguely supernatural. Naturally, vampires were part of the attraction. Yet here I am, considerably older, returning to the same novel, knowing practically every turn of the plot, and still enjoying it immensely. That is quite an achievement for a book whose capacity to surprise me has long since expired. Apparently, the Count and I have unfinished business.
Published in 1897, Dracula remains one of the most recognizable works of Gothic literature, although its actual narrative is probably less familiar than the creature it introduced to popular consciousness. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to assist an eccentric aristocrat with a property purchase in England. His host, Count Dracula, proves an exceptionally peculiar gentleman, possessing an alarming aversion to mirrors and an equally alarming appetite for blood. Harker gradually realizes that he is a prisoner in a castle inhabited by something profoundly unnatural. The Count eventually travels to England, where his predations claim the unfortunate Lucy Westenra and threaten Mina Murray, Harker’s fiancée and eventual wife. Enter Professor Abraham Van Helsing, that wonderfully eccentric Dutch polymath, whose knowledge of medicine and obscure folklore becomes indispensable in the pursuit of the vampire.
I have always considered the opening chapters among the finest in Gothic fiction: the journey through the Carpathians, the superstitious peasants, the Borgo Pass, the sinister hospitality of the castle. Stoker knows precisely how to manipulate atmosphere. His descriptions occasionally indulge in Victorian excess, but there is a delicious pleasure in that elaborate prose. The castle itself possesses an almost physical malevolence, its isolation intensifying Harker’s growing realization that the ordinary laws governing human existence have been suspended. Dracula, meanwhile, is terrifying precisely because he remains so courteous. There is something particularly offensive about a monster who observes impeccable manners while contemplating your destruction.
What distinguishes the novel structurally is its epistolary form. Stoker assembles the narrative from journals, correspondence, newspaper reports, telegrams, and even phonograph recordings. The result resembles an enormous dossier documenting an extraordinary criminal investigation. I particularly appreciate how this technique distributes knowledge among characters who possess only fragments of the truth. Mina’s painstaking transcription and organization of these documents becomes essential to reconstructing the Count’s movements. There is something rather amusing about an ancient supernatural predator being pursued through modern administrative efficiency. Dracula has survived centuries of wars and upheavals, only to encounter the formidable organizational abilities of an Englishwoman with a typewriter.
Stoker was remarkably industrious in researching his monster. His reading included Emily Gerard’s accounts of Transylvanian superstitions, which described beliefs surrounding the undead, the transmission of vampirism, and the gruesome methods of disposing of suspected vampires. From such traditions he constructed an elaborate supernatural mythology involving garlic, crucifixes, consecrated objects, burial earth, and the peculiar limitations governing a vampire’s movements. These beliefs originated in a complicated mixture of regional folklore and religious practices, which Stoker selectively appropriated and transformed into a remarkably coherent fictional system.
Then there is the inevitable association with Vlad III, or Vlad Țepeș, the fifteenth-century Prince of Wallachia, whose enthusiasm for impalement earned him a particularly unpleasant historical reputation. Stoker encountered the name Dracula through William Wilkinson’s account of Wallachia and Moldavia. The historical connection, however, is frequently exaggerated. Vlad was a Wallachian ruler, not the supernatural Transylvanian aristocrat of the novel, and the extent of Stoker’s knowledge of his atrocities remains uncertain. The association between the historical prince and the literary vampire has since acquired a mythology almost as extravagant as vampirism itself. History supplied a name and a suggestive reputation. Literature accomplished the resurrection.
Of course, Stoker did not invent the literary vampire. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) had already established the aristocratic bloodsucker in the person of Lord Ruthven, a mysterious gentleman whose social sophistication conceals a predatory nature. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872), which I have read several times, further developed the genre through its intimate atmosphere of seduction, obsession, and feminine desire. I admire both works, particularly the disturbing psychological intimacy of Carmilla. Nevertheless, Dracula represents a considerable advancement in narrative ambition. Polidori established an archetype; Le Fanu explored its erotic possibilities. Stoker expanded the vampire story into a sustained confrontation between an ancient supernatural evil and the institutions of modern civilization. His creature possesses a history, an elaborate physiology, and an entire system of vulnerabilities. The mythology becomes more fully realized, the threat more expansive.
The Victorian anxieties embedded in the narrative are particularly interesting to revisit as an adult. Dracula is a foreign aristocrat penetrating respectable English society, purchasing property and contaminating the bodies of its inhabitants. His invasion carries unmistakable anxieties about immigration, disease, sexual corruption, and the fragility of civilization. Blood becomes an unusually versatile metaphor, suggesting inheritance, vitality, sexuality, and spiritual contamination. The Count’s appetite violates the boundaries separating individual bodies, while his victims become participants in their own destruction.
The treatment of women invites equally interesting scrutiny. Lucy, initially innocent and desirable, undergoes a grotesque erotic transformation after becoming a vampire. Her destruction restores an ideal of feminine purity through an act of extraordinary violence. Mina, meanwhile, demonstrates greater intellectual competence than several of the gentlemen attempting to protect her, yet is repeatedly subjected to their paternalistic assumptions. I find these contradictions fascinating. Stoker clearly admires feminine intelligence while remaining attached to Victorian conventions of womanhood. His novel exposes some of the very anxieties it attempts to contain.
There is also a philosophical tension between modern science and ancient belief. Van Helsing, ostensibly a man of scientific learning, succeeds because he recognizes the limitations of materialist explanations. The supernatural demands an intellectual humility that the strictly rational characters initially lack. Yet the vampire hunters employ modern technology with extraordinary enthusiasm. Stoker’s civilization requires both the laboratory and the crucifix. Perhaps that is among the novel’s more enduring insights: human knowledge becomes dangerously impoverished whenever intellectual certainty hardens into an inability to recognize its own limitations.
My principal irritation remains exactly what it was during my earlier readings: Stoker’s insistence on rendering certain characters’ speech phonetically. Christ. Those interminable passages of dialect, especially the Yorkshire speech, remain dreadful obstacles to my enjoyment. I understand the literary intention, the desire for authenticity and regional distinction, but must every peculiar vowel be reproduced on the page? I am perfectly willing to suspend disbelief concerning an undead aristocrat transforming into a bat. Asking me to decipher several paragraphs of aggressively phonetic English is another matter altogether. Even Van Helsing’s peculiar syntax occasionally tests my patience. The story is sufficiently compelling without turning conversation into an exercise in linguistic archaeology.
Still, these annoyances are ultimately minor beside the novel’s astonishing cultural longevity. The Dracula of popular imagination owes much to subsequent adaptations, particularly Bela Lugosi’s hypnotic elegance and Christopher Lee’s ferocious physicality. Stoker’s creation has become a cultural inheritance, endlessly reproduced in cinema, literature, theatre, and popular art. Countless vampires have followed, including Anne Rice’s beautifully tormented immortals, but they remain indebted to the imaginative architecture Stoker helped establish. Ironically, Dracula himself is less psychologically accessible than many of his descendants. His motives remain largely predatory, his interior life obscure. Perhaps that opacity preserves his monstrosity.
Rereading Dracula has also reminded me that my literary pleasures need not always depend upon novelty. I am more conscious now of its ideological assumptions, narrative contrivances, and occasional absurdities. Its conclusion feels rather hurried after so elaborate a pursuit, and certain characters possess more virtue than psychological complexity. Nevertheless, the novel continues to command my affection. I loved it as a teenager for its Gothic atmosphere and supernatural horrors. As an adult, I admire the extraordinary imaginative labor required to sustain them.
After more than a century, Stoker’s Count continues to inhabit the imagination with remarkable tenacity. And after three or four readings, I remain perfectly happy to invite him in again.
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