Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Byronic Hero

The Shadow of a Hero:

Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Byronic Hero

by Molly Miller

April 28 2008

Something comes in the night; a creature of darkness enveloped in an eerie green glow around his black-as-midnight cloak. His whole being, skin, hair, eyes, and clothes, are darker than the nightmare that brings him. You scream, not because of the darkness of his being, for if that were all he was, his approach would have been unseen. You scream at the appearance of two long, ivory fangs as they descend upon your neck…

What kind of creature is this? What human or animal would lure innocents into the curse of eternity on earth, thinking only of the hunger within? He is Dracula, which is the ancient Rumanian word for “devil” (Skal 10). The name of its species, Vampire, is also a dark word referring to evil spirits. According to Nina Auerbach, “the Oxford English Dictionary records, in 1734, defines them as ‘evil spirits’ who animate ‘bodies of deceased persons’” (Auerbach 20).

In modern times, society defines a “vampire” as a blood-sucking, un-dead, half-bat/half-person lurking about in shadows and seducing humans in order to feed upon them. They get this image from the novel “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. From Lon Chaney to Christopher Lee to Leslie Nielsen, this image has been used so often in the media that it has seeped into the modern mindset. However, the Romantic fascination with the macabre presents a different picture of the famous Count. Impossible as it sounds,

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Dracula, prince of Transylvania, becomes a hero. During the early Romantic period, the poet Lord Byron defined a new kind of hero. Bram Stoker’s character, Dracula, proves himself to be Byronic hero through his characteristics and actions. Before one can analyze Dracula as a Byronic hero, it is important to understand what a Byronic hero is. Then a comparison needs to be made between Dracula and the Byronic hero with his traits of dark personality, manic tendencies, arrogant airs, pride, a history of sexual deviancy, and a societal rebellion. The social behaviors a Byronic hero possesses are generally detrimental to the community as a whole. The Byronic hero is usually a rebel isolated from society (either physically or mentally) who rejects the values and moral codes of society (Norton 1455). Through careful evaluation of his characteristics and actions, it is evident that Dracula is, indeed, a Byronic hero.

Lord Byron, born in January 22, 1788, was disfigured with a club foot. Many wicked rumors surrounded his childhood, including sexual tensions between him and his nurse. As an adult, he wrote many poems that dealt with themes that reflected the difficulties of his childhood. Throughout his poems, as he dealt with his own inner demons, his heroes consistently had the same characteristics, from which grew the standards of a Byronic hero (Goodwin).

The first of these characteristics is a general dark personality. Archetypically, light is considered good and dark, bad. A hero is generally thought to have a certain brightness to him. When people say they want a “knight in shining armor” they usually mean they want a hero who radiates his inner qualities of strength, honor, and integrity. A hero is pure of heart, one who will always do the right thing; who will protect and defend the weak, such as King Arthur, Superman, or Frodo Baggins. For Byron, it was the

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other way around. His inspiration was Lucifer, the “angel of light” who rebelled against God. The Romantics loved Milton’s characterization of Satan, the mighty, but flawed “hero” of Paradise Lost because of his power and grandeur, but also because of his flaws and humanity. “It was precisely this aspect of flawed grandeur, however, that made Satan so attractive a model for Shelley’s friend Byron in his projects of personal myth-making.” Byron’s heroes were dark, mysterious, unpredictable, and used to explore the dark recesses of the human subconscious (Norton).

Dracula is no exception. No one within Stoker’s novel seems able to predict Dracula’s next move. He is a man of secrets shrouded in the vast abyss of his own mind. Stoker does not reveal Dracula’s mind in his book so the reader never quite knows his side of the story. Very few of his thoughts are revealed except through the little dialogue Stoker grants to Dracula. In one instance, Dracula tells Harker a little bit about himself. He uses his castle as a metaphor for himself when he explains, “The walls of my castle are broken; the shadows are many, and the wind breathes cold through the broken battlements and casements. I love the shade and the shadow and would be alone with my thoughts when I may” (29). Within this piece of dialogue, Dracula reveals a sense of frightening history that lives within his castle; “battlements” and “casements” being medieval, at least primitive, designs that bring the imagination of the reader back in time to a place of enchanted beasts and daring knights. Because Dracula loves “the shade and the shadow” the reader is left guessing at whether Dracula could be an enchanted beast or

a daring knight. The thoughts that occupy Dracula’s mind while he is alone are never explained, therefore, the reader must struggle to discover the true identity of Dracula.

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Jonathan Harker, the Count’s solicitor, has the opportunity to observe Dracula closer than any other character. He seems to recognize Dracula’s mania, from his eerie calm and polite tones to his aggressive outbursts. When Harker first arrives at the castle,

it seems that Dracula is almost too polite, too calm, and too ready with a reasonable answer for the odd occurrences in Transylvania. Because of this, Harker finds himself torn between the Count’s rationale and his worst fears and suspicions. Harker has no idea what Dracula intends for him and the unknown terrifies him because it is as unpredictable as the man himself.

Byron’s heroes were as unpredictable as the sea with its sudden chaotic outbursts and lethal storms. These deadly impulses were even more petrifying because of the serenity that Byronic heroes normally displayed. They preferred to keep their emotions secret, but when the rage surfaced, it left the observer exclaiming “Never did I imagine such wrath and fury, even to the demons of the pit” (43). This statement comes from a scene in which Dracula finds his vixens (the female vampires) claiming Harker as their prey. Harker describes the terror:

I saw his strong hand grasp the slender neck of the fair woman and with giant’s power draw it back, the blue eyes transformed with fury…His eyes were positively blazing. The red light in them was lurid, as if the flames of hell-fire blazed behind them. With a fierce sweep of his arm, he hurled the woman from him, and then motioned to the others, as though he were beating them back; it was the same imperious gesture that I had seen used to the wolves. (43)

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The anger Dracula displayed, which made even the vixens uneasy, was itself subject to another force common in Byronic heroes. There was another reason, besides the fact that the vixens would have drunk Harker’s blood, behind Dracula’s anger. Nina Auerbach explains that “the heart of Dracula was not blood, but an assertion of ownership” (Auerbach 71) telling the vixens that “this man belongs to me” (43).

Dracula’s claim that Harker belonged to him comes from nothing if not arrogance. The free dictionary defines arrogance in two ways: the first is “having or displaying a sense of overbearing self-worth or self-importance.” The second definition is “Marked by or arising from a feeling or assumption of one's superiority toward others.” This arrogance is a result of the pride Dracula highly treasured which was built upon the history of his family. He engrossed himself in the remembering and retelling of battles and great victories. Dracula spent many nights teaching Harker about the Transylvanian history and told him that “to a boyar (that is, a nobleman or prince) the pride of his house and name is his own pride, that their glory is his glory, that their fate is his fate” (33).

Dracula was a proud man of an esteemed family and he was not afraid to make others aware of that fact. He considered himself the master of the people living in Transylvania which, for the time being, meant Harker as well. As long as Harker was on Dracula’s property, he was his property and nothing more. Dracula had the right to use Harker to progress his plans and decide whether Harker lives or dies. To demonstrate his power, Dracula stole into the house of Mina, Harker’s fiancée, bit her, and forced her to drink his blood. This strange ritual seemed to be a type of marriage as he says, “And you, their best beloved one, are now to me, flesh of my flesh; blood of my blood; kin of my kin; my bountiful wine-press for awhile; and shall be later on my companion and my helper” (252).

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This is just one example of the odd sexual behaviors Dracula practices. This deviancy was concealed to all but his three concubines. These secrets are referenced when Dracula reprimands his vixens. When accused of never having loved anything, Dracula replied “Yes, I too can love; you yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not

so?” (37). Now, the word love can have many meanings, so it is hard to tell to what Dracula is actually referring.

Since Dracula is a hero, it may be tempting to think he means the love of a knight to his lady; with undying servitude or with his life pledged away to complete feats of daring deeds for her. However, considering Dracula’s lifestyle, this is not the case. It’s more likely that the “love” Dracula speaks of really means “the emotion of sex and romance” (The Free Dictionary). The way he says this line pointedly to the vixens could mean that his “love” was for them, or his victims that they watched him devour. Love, for Dracula, could mean a way to entice his prey into his trap. Nina Auerbach puts it best when she says “intimacy and friendship are the lures of Romantic vampirism” (Auerbach 14). Vampires from the Romanic period often used homoerotic friendships to find victims from the intimates of the ones “befriended”. These victims were always women from whom blood was drunk. The vampires did not drink the blood of men, but seemed truly interested in a relationship (16-17).

With this repulsive villainy, Dracula could hardly be considered a hero, yet Byron identified with him and wanted to justify his own actions. Many, if not all, of Byron’s heroes had some sort of un-named sexual crime in their past. Byron, himself, had a childhood tainted with sexuality and the loss of innocence, and he wrote about what he knew. As for Dracula, a sexually immoral, even criminal, past is very possible, considering his sexual feats during the course of Stoker’s novel.

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First, Dracula has his vixens. What he does with the vixens is never explained, though they themselves are very sex-driven. When Harker first sees the creatures, he describes them in great detail.

There was something about them that made me uneasy, some longing and at the same time some deadly fear. I felt in my heart a wicked, burning desire that they would kiss me with those red lips. It is not good to note this down, lest some day it should meet Mina’s eyes and cause her pain; but it is the truth. They whispered together, and then they all three laughed- such a silvery, musical laugh, but as hard as though the sound never could have come through the softness of human lips. It was like the intolerable, tingling sweetness of water-glasses when played on by a cunning hand.” (43)

Dracula also flirts with the character Lucy. At the beginning of the book Mina sees Lucy “half reclining with her head lying over the back of the seat” and a figure, whom she could not tell if it was man or beast, hovering over Lucy (88). This scene is very sexually suggestive and the figure is most likely Dracula. As the story continues, Dracula pursues Lucy, continually sucking her blood until she joins the realm of the un-dead.

This sexuality, and the other characteristics of a Byronic hero, produces an interesting reaction from both the characters of the book and most readers. Readers see him as a figure of both repulsion and fascination. The repulsion grows naturally. When a character is so dark and insidious to do things that trigger a shudder through the reader’s conscious, it is predictable that they should want to have nothing to do with that so-called “hero”. The other characters in Stoker’s novel were repelled by him as well. For example,

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Harker needed to search the sleeping Count in order to find the key to the castle and his freedom. He reflected upon his feelings toward his host. “I shuddered,” Harker writes “as I bent over to touch him, and every sense in me revolted at the contact; but I had to

search, or I was lost” (53). This reaction is understandable and predictable but it was not Harker’s first response. His initial reaction, a deep desire to know more about the Count, bordered on the obsessive.

Although repulsed by the Byronic hero, many readers feel a strange longing to figure him out; the Byronic hero becomes a figure of fascination. David Skal states truthfully “Dracula has exerted an irresistible, and at times, Faustian attraction upon numerous individuals” (Skal 7). Faust is an old story of a man who sold his soul to the devil to acquire knowledge and power. Skal refers to the same fascination with Dracula that people have had with Faust for hundreds of years. Hermann Weigand, in his critical essay about Faust, explains the romantic view of Faust, “The age of the Reformation saw the career of Faust as an object lesson and a warning. To the age of Goethe it was natural, on the other hand, to look upon the doctor-magician as a blurred and distorted prototype of man’s ideal aspirations” (447). This is the quest of the Byronic hero, the quintessential romantic, to “trespass upon the realm of the forbidden” (447) and discover a way to express “altered and expanded aspirations of the human soul” (446).

While most heroes uphold the morals needed to keep a society functioning, and help preserve ideals and hope, the Byronic hero is quite the opposite. Likewise, Dracula does not like to be under the authority of anyone. He says “I have been so long master

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that I would be master still- or at least that none other should be master of me” (26). His rebellion, though more subtle, is also more deadly. Carol A. Senf talks about the dangers

of Dracula’s rebellious nature in a short critique of Stoker’s Novel called “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror.”

Dracula is dangerous because he expresses his contempt for authority in the most individualistic of ways- through his sexuality. In fact, his thirst for blood and the manner in which he satisfies this thirst can be interpreted as sexual desire which fails to observe any of society’s attempt to control it-prohibitions against polygamy, promiscuity, and homosexuality.

(Senf 428)

Because Dracula refuses to observe the moral codes and values of society (just like a true Byronic hero would) he is hunted down and punished. Although some laws may seem stifling to individuals, a set of rules of some kind are needed to make a community work. When someone, or rather something, comes along to disrupt that, and tries to dissolve that moral code, the whole community is threatened. When that happens, the whole community rallies against the rebellious creature and punishes it.

At first, Dracula was merely reprimanded through isolation. No one would go near his castle for fear of the rumors about him. They would even warn other people not to go near his castle because the things Dracula did in that castle was beyond comprehension. The only time Stoker reports a villager choosing to wander near the castle was when Dracula had taken a child from the village and fed it to his vixens. The mother of the child stood outside the castle beating her hands against the door and crying out “Monster, give me my child!” Dracula then calls his wolves and lets them eat the woman (48).

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This is where the line is drawn. From the scene above, it is evident how far Dracula is willing to take his rebellion. It is not enough that he rejects moral codes or values; he must also reject the value of life itself. How can a hero, even a Byronic hero,

disregard life itself? At this point in Stoker’s novel, the hero in Dracula melts away, leaving room only for the Vampyre- the monster.

Dracula seems content to take away life without any thought and that is what seems to bring about his final punishment. Harker, Mina, and others who were most

affected by Dracula’s rebellion, resolve to find him and destroy him forever. Now the powerful boyar, who once was a hero, is hunted like the beast he truly is.

Like the old stories, the truly good seek to bring the monster to justice. Like the old stories, Dracula flees to the safety of his home and fakes a show of confidence, hissing at the traditional heroes. Like the old stories, the traditional heroes pursue the fiend until he is defeated.

Unlike the old stories, the line between hero and monster is blurred. Traditionally, the villain receives justice through death and eternal punishment. For Romantics like Byron, morals and justice are not valued as highly as self-discovery as the hero and monster co-exist in all people. As long as the hero finds his identity in whatever means necessary, rebellion, deviancy, pride, rule of emotion, or even destruction, his actions are valid. In the end, Dracula received death of a true Byronic hero, justice for the monster but peace for the hero.

Works Cited

Auerbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,

1995.

The Free Dictionary. The American Heritage Dictionary. Fourth Edition. Houghton

Mifflin Company. 2003. .

Goodwin, B. Lou. The Most Famous English Poets. Helium.

<http://www.helium.com/items/788589-byron-known-george-gordon>

Norton Anthology of English Literature. Major Authors edition. New York: W. W.

Norton & Company. 1968.

Norton Anthology of English Literature. Norton Topics Online. Satan and Byronic Hero:

Overview. W. W. Norton Company. 2003.

<http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/topic_5/welcome.htm>.

Senf, Carol A. “Dracula: The Unseen Face in the Mirror.” Dracula. New York: W.W.

Norton & Company, 1997.

Skal, David J. Hollywood Gothic. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1990.

Stoker, Bram. Dracula. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1997.

Weigand, Hermann. “Goethe’s Faust: An Introduction for Students and Teachers of

General Literature.” Faust A Norton Critical Edition. New York: W. W. Norton

& Company, 1976.