Who iinspired Bram Stocker to write Dracula?
When it came time to write Dracula, Bram Stoker looked for inspiration a little closer to home—namely to a Romanian ruler known as Vlad the Impaler.Bram Stoker openly admitted to drawing inspiration from Vlad Tepes when creating Count Dracula. In fact, the name Dracula is directly taken from Vlad the Impaler's moniker 'Dracul'—given because of his membership to the Order of the Dragon.
Where did Bram Stoker get the idea for Dracula?
The name Dracula came from the British Library. He was doing background research on Transylvania and was struck by the name and character of the blood-thirsty 14th century ruler. The structure of the novel was probably inspired by the novel The Moonstone which was also taken from characters’ diaries.
Why did Bram Stoker create draula?
This name was derived from the Latin draco, meaning “dragon,” the basis for the elder Vlad’s epithet. In modern Romanian, drac has evolved to mean “devil.”. Stoker is thought to have picked the name Dracula after reading a book that revealed to him this modern translation.
What is the plot summary of Dracula?
- A newspaper reports the arrival of the strange ship after a terrible storm. There is no one on board except a dog and a dead man tied to the wheel.
- They find a journal on the dead man that tells what happened. Every time they would put someone on watch that person would disappear. ...
- Mr. Swales dies, too. Of some kind of fright.
What are Stoker's notes about Dracula?
Stoker's notes illuminate much about earlier iterations of the novel. For instance, they indicate that the novel's vampire was intended to be a count, even before he was given the name Dracula. Stoker likely found the name Dracula in Whitby's public library while holidaying there with his wife and son in 1880. On the name, Stoker wrote: "Dracula means devil. Wallachians were accustomed to give it as a surname to any person who rendered himself conspicuous by courage, cruel actions or cunning". Stoker's initial plans for Dracula markedly differ from the final novel. Had Stoker completed his original plans, a German professor called Max Windshoeffel "would have confronted Count Wampyr from Styria", and one of the Crew of Light would have been slain by a werewolf. Stoker's earliest notes indicate that Dracula might have originally been intended to be a detective story, with a detective called Cotford and a psychical investigator called Singleton.
What is the significance of Dracula?
Dracula, and specifically the Count's migration to Victorian England, is frequently read as emblematic of invasion literature, and a projection of fears about racial pollution. A number of scholars have indicated that Dracula 's version of the vampire myth participates in antisemitic stereotyping. Jules Zanger links the novel's portrayal of the vampire to of the appearance of Eastern European Jews in fin de siècle England. Between 1881 and 1900, the number of Jews living in England had increased sixfold because of pogroms and antisemitic laws. Jack Halberstam provides a list of Dracula's associations with antisemitic conceptions of Jewish people: his appearance, wealth, parasitic bloodlust, and "lack of allegiance" to one country. In terms of his appearance, Halbertstam notes Dracula's resemblance to other fictional Jews; for example, his long, sharp nails are compared to those of Fagin in Charles Dickens 's Oliver Twist (1838), and to George du Maurier 's Svengali, who is depicted as animalistic and thin.
How is Dracula narrated?
As an epistolary novel, Dracula is narrated through a series of documents. The novel's first four chapters are related as the journals of Jonathan Harker. Scholar David Seed notes that Harker's accounts function as an attempt to translocate the "strange" events of his visit to Dracula's castle into the nineteenth-century tradition of travelogue writing. John Seward, Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker all keep a crystalline account of the period as an act of self-preservation; David Seed notes that Harker's narrative is written in shorthand to remain inscrutable to the Count, protecting his own identity, which Dracula threatens to destroy. Harker's journal, for example, embodies the only advantage during his stay at Dracula's castle: that he knows more than the Count thinks he does. The novel's disparate accounts approach a kind of narrative unity as the narrative unfolds. In the novel's first half, each narrator has a strongly characterised narrative voice, with Lucy's showing her verbosity, Seward's businesslike formality, and Harker's excessive politeness. These narrative styles also highlight the power struggle between vampire and his hunters; the increasing prominence of Van Helsing's broken English as Dracula gathers power represents the entrance of the foreigner into Victorian society.
How many times has Dracula been adapted?
Dracula has been adapted a large number of times across virtually all forms of media. John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan S. Picart write that the novel and its characters have been adapted for film, television, video games and animation over 700 times, with nearly 1000 additional appearances in comic books and on the stage. Roberto Fernández Retamar deemed Count Dracula—along with characters such as Frankenstein's monster, Mickey Mouse and Superman —to be a part of the " hegemonic Anglo-Saxon world ['s] cinematic fodder". Across the world, completed new adaptations can be produced as often as every week.
Where is Dracula set?
Dracula is set largely in England, but Stoker was born in Ireland, which was at that time a British colony, and lived there for the first 30 years of his life. As a result, a significant body of writing exists on Dracula, Ireland, England, and colonialism.
When was Dracula translated into Icelandic?
In 1901, Dracula was translated into Icelandic by Valdimar Ásmundsson under the title Makt Myrkranna ( Powers of Darkness) with a preface written by Stoker. In the preface, Stoker writes that the events contained within the novel are true, and that "for obvious reasons" he had changed the names of places and people.
What is Dracula's guest?
A short story written by Stoker and published after his death, " Dracula's Guest ", has been seen as evidence of Carmilla 's influence. According to Milbank, the story was a deleted first chapter from early in the original manuscript, and replicates Carmilla 's setting of Styria instead of Transylvania.
What does Harker say about Dracula?
Here, Harker voices one of the central concerns of the Victorian era.
What does Dracula do to Lucy?
Dracula succeeds in transforming Lucy, and once she becomes a raving vampire vixen, Van Helsing’s men see no other option than to destroy her, in order to return her to a purer, more socially respectable state.
What makes Dracula dangerous?
However, Stoker is also quite pragmatic about the fact that part of what makes Dracula dangerous is his wealth, and his ability to engage in systems of economic exchange. Dracula buys his new home in England through a perfectly legal and commonplace financial transaction, and he pays for his voyages to and from England, rather than using any sort of magical ability to travel. When Harker is imprisoned in the castle, he observes finding “a great heap of gold in one corner,” evidence of Dracula having the money he needs to carry out his plans. While Dracula’s ancient origins and supernatural powers seem to make him a figure from the past, he is able to seamlessly navigate the modern cash economy and use it to his advantage. So long as he has the money to pay, many characters, including Harker himself, are willing to overlook his eccentric and menacing behavior.
What is the Victorian fantasy of Dracula?
A Victorian woman effectively had only two options: she was either a virgin—a model of purity and innocence—or else she was a wife and mother. If she was neither of these, she was considered a whore, and thus of no consequence to society.
What is Stoker's vision of salvation?
Stoker presents a particularly liberal vision of salvation in his implication that the saved need not necessarily be believers. In Dracula, all of the dead are granted the unparalleled peace of salvation—only the “Un-Dead” are barred from it.
Where does Stoker set his novel?
Though Stoker begins his novel in a ruined castle —a traditional Gothic setting—he soon moves the action to Victorian London, where the advancements of modernity are largely responsible for the ease with which the count preys upon English society.
Who falls under the count's spell?
Those who fall under the count’s spell, including Lucy Westenra and the three “weird sisters,” find themselves cursed with physical life that is eternal but soulless. Stoker takes pains to emphasize the consequences of these women’s destruction.
What are the themes of Dracula?
Themes The promise of Christian salvation; the consequences of modernity; the dangers of female sexual expression. Motifs Blood; Christian iconography; science and superstition.
Who is the narrator of Dracula?
Narrator Dracula is told primarily through a collection of journal entries, letters, and telegrams written or recorded by its main characters: Jonathan Harker, Mina Murray, Dr. John Seward, Lucy Westenra, and Dr. Van Helsing.
What did the wounds on Lucy's neck foreshadow?
Foreshadowing The initially unidentifiable wounds on Lucy’s neck foreshadow her fall to the dark side by confirming Dracula’s presence in England.
How does Harker kill Dracula?
Harker attempts to kill Dracula by gashing him in the face with a shovel, but Dracula seems only superficially harmed. Harker escapes from the castle through his window and brings his journal with him, to show his experiences to his fiancée Mina. Get the entire Dracula LitChart as a printable PDF.
Where does Dracula land?
They believe Dracula will land at the port Varna, near Romania, but he actually lands at Galatz—the group intercepts him, however, as he sleeps in his final box en route to the castle, and Harker and Morris stab him in the heart and cut off his head, thus truly killing him—freeing his soul from his Un-Dead body.
Where did Dracula ship his boxes?
The men of the group find out that Dracula has shipped 50 wooden boxes, filled with sacred earth from Transylvania, to England— Dracula needs these boxes to sleep in, to maintain his powers. The group realizes they must sterilize these boxes with holy communion wafers in order to remove their special restorative properties and destroy Dracula. The group finds 49 of the 50 boxes in London, at the Carfax estate and other of Dracula's properties, and sterilizes them; but the last box, they realize, Dracula has taken back to Transylvania. The group tracks Dracula and this final box to Dracula's castle.
Who is the solicitor in Dracula?
Dracula opens with a young solicitor's assistant, Jonathan Harker, en route from Budapest into Transylvania, to visit the Castle Dracula and to meet with Count Dracula, a nobleman who has recently purchased an estate in London called Carfax. Harker worries, as he approaches the castle, about the superstitious locals, who seem to fear Dracula.
What does Van Helsing believe about Lucy?
Van Helsing believes he knows the cause of Lucy's illness, but does not immediately explain it to Seward and the rest of the group. Lucy appears to be losing blood at night, and in turn Arthur, Morris, Van Helsing, and Seward all give Lucy transfusions to keep her alive. After a while, however, these transfusions prove insufficient. One night, when the men of the group are away, and when Lucy's elderly mother is in her bedroom, a wolf leaps in through Lucy's window, then rushes out—Lucy documents the events in her journal, and her mother dies from the shock of the wolf's attack. Afterward, Lucy cannot be saved by any future blood transfusions, and she dies surrounded by the men of the group.
Who claimed that parts of Dracula were real?
Bram Stoker Claimed That Parts of Dracula Were Real. Here's What We Know About the Story Behind the Novel. Abraham Stoker (1845 - 1912) the Irish writer who wrote the classic horror story 'Dracula' in 1897. “There are mysteries that man can only guess at which age by age may only solve in part.”.
What does Dracula mean in the Wallachian language?
Opening his journal, he turned to the information he’d written down back at the library —. Voivode (Dracula) Dracula in Wallachian language means DEVIL.
Was Dracula a fiction book?
Bram Stoker did not intend for Dracula to serve as fiction, but as a warning of a very real evil, a childhood nightmare all too real. Worried of the impact of presenting such a story as true, his editor, Otto Kyllman, of Archibald Constable & Company, returned the manuscript with a single word of his own: No.
How many pages were there in Dracula?
When the novel was finally released on May 26, 1897, the first 101 pages had been cut, numerous alterations had been made to the text, and the epilogue had been shortened, changing Dracula’s ultimate fate as well as that of his castle. Tens of thousands of words had vanished.
Where was Dracula found?
In the 1980s, the original Dracula manuscript was discovered in a barn in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. Nobody knows how it made its way across the Atlantic.
Who is Dacre Stoker?
Dacre Stoker is the great-grandnephew of Bram Stoker and the international bestselling co-author of Dracula: The Undead. He manages the Bram Stoker Estate. Together, they are the authors of the novel Dracul, available now, the research for which informed this piece.
Who wrote the account of Wallachia and Moldavia?
In the summer of 1890, a 45-year-old Bram Stoker entered the Subscription Library in Whitby, England, and requested a specific title — The Accounts of Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson. This wasn’t a title found readily on the shelves or typically made available to the general public.
What is the theme of Dracula?
All the above lead into the final, and perhaps most important, theme of the novel: that of the relationship between life, death, and the state in between these two, known by Van Helsing as "undeadness." Dracula is a creature of the undead. He sleeps during the day and lives at night; he is of incredible strength when awake, but must be invited into one's room in order to begin his "seduction." But the touchstone of…
What is the treatment for both "insanity" and "illness" in Dracula?
The treatment for both "insanity" and "illness" in the novel is confinement, which recurs throughout. Practically every character in the group questions his or her wellness or sanity at some point.
Who is the author of Dracula?
Instead, Dracula consists of series of diary entries, letters, telegrams, memoranda, and occasional newspaper clippings, assembled and typed up by Mina Harker, with help from Seward, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Quincey Morris, and Arthur, Lord Godalming. In a sense, then, Mina is the "author" of the book: she….
Is Dracula's blood sucking a forcible act?
Much has been made of this aspect of the novel, particularly in 20th-century criticism, and with good reason: it is impossible to separate the act of Dracula's forcible blood -sucking, directed at unsuspecting women, from the process of violent seduction and sexual assault.
Overview
Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. As an epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist, but opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian noble, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van He…
Plot
Jonathan Harker, a newly qualified English solicitor, visits Count Dracula at his castle in the Carpathian Mountains to help the Count purchase a house near London. Ignoring the Count's warning, Harker wanders the castle and encounters three vampire women; Dracula rescues Harker, and gives the women a small child bound inside a bag. Harker awakens in bed; soon after, Dracula leaves the castle, abandoning him to the women; Harker escapes with his life and ends …
Background
As the acting manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London, Bram Stoker was a recognisable figure: he would greet evening guests, and served as assistant to the stage actor Henry Irving. In a letter to Walt Whitman, Stoker described his own temperament as "secretive to the world", but he nonetheless led a relatively public life. Stoker supplemented his income from the theatre by writing romance and sensation novels, and had published 18 books by his death in 1912. Dracul…
Textual history
Prior to writing the novel, Stoker researched extensively, assembling over 100 pages of notes, including chapter summaries and plot outlines. The notes were sold by Bram Stoker's widow, Florence, in 1913, to a New York book dealer for £2. 2s, (equivalent to UK£208 in 2019). Following that, the notes became the property of Charles Scribner's Sons, and then disappeared until they were bought by the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia in 1970. H. P. Lovecraft wrote …
Major themes
Academic analyses of Dracula as sexually charged have become so frequent that a cottage industry has developed around the topic. Sexuality and seduction are two of the novel's most frequently discussed themes, especially as it relates to the corruption of English womanhood. Modern critical writings about vampirism widely acknowledge its link to sex and sexuality. Bram Stoker himself was possibly homosexual; Talia Schaffer points to intensely homoerotic letters se…
Style
As an epistolary novel, Dracula is narrated through a series of documents. The novel's first four chapters are related as the journals of Jonathan Harker. Scholar David Seed notes that Harker's accounts function as an attempt to translocate the "strange" events of his visit to Dracula's castle into the nineteenth-century tradition of travelogue writing. John Seward, Mina Murray and Jonathan Harker all keep a crystalline account of the period as an act of self-preservation; David Seed not…
Reception
Upon publication, Dracula was well received. Reviewers frequently compared the novel to other Gothic writers, and mentions of novelist Wilkie Collins and The Woman in White (1859) were especially common because of similarities in structure and style. A review appearing in The Bookseller notes that the novel could almost have been written by Collins, and an anonymous review in Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art wrote that Dracula improved up…
Legacy
The story of Dracula has been the basis for numerous films and plays. Stoker himself wrote the first theatrical adaptation, which was presented at the Lyceum Theatre on 18 May 1897 under the title Dracula, or The Undead shortly before the novel's publication and performed only once, in order to establish his own copyright for such adaptations. Although the manuscript was believed lost, the British Library possesses a copy. It consists of extracts from the novel's galley proof wit…