At the New Yorker, Joan Acocella has an intelligent and typically graceful essay on the Dracula thing – origins, romantic form of, subsequent treatments of, annotated versions of – very thorough treatment. She brings the story up to the current teenage hit, Twilight, and its sequels. (Number one son says Twilight is sort of OK but the sequel is rubbish.)
She asks, Why is there a cult about this particular figure? Good question, I reckon, speaking as one untouched and untouchable by stories, films, plays or essays about Dracula.
. . . cults often gather around powerful works of the second rank. Fans feel that they have to root for them. What, then, is the source of ?Dracula? ?s power? A simple device, used in many notable works of art: the deployment of great and volatile forces within a very tight structure.
That assumes that the supernatural, for the reader, counts as a ‘great and volatile force’, even if we gloss the supernatural in the various ways it has been: as strange forms of desire, as buried fears of ‘racial pollution’, the menace of the New Woman (Hardy’s Sue Bridehead) and so on. As for the ‘tight structure’, Acocella locates it in the tension between the rational and rationalising Victorian characters and Something Not Dreamt of in Your Philosophy. This is articulated in the book by documentary and testimonial forms of writing, mutiplied sources, partial points-of-view, irony and double irony. Acocella, in contrast to today’s academic commentators, recognises that novels are not collections of stationary objects to be labelled but are required to provide some sort of experience. She makes her case well.
I remain convinced that this stuff is not fit reading or viewing for grown-ups. The context in which Dracula becomes interesting, to my mind, is the sociology of faith, especially in the US. It would be good to know why people hanker after the supernatural in its literal and profane forms, even better to know how to stop them doing it. From this point-of-view, I prefer interpretations which see the act of drinking blood as symbolic of this or that political or sexual fantasy. Those at least are free from the oo-ahs. On the other hand, they are boring, in that the behaviour of interest, as the experimenters say, is displaced from the text into a little, airless cupboard of ‘theory’.