Grounded and Ungrounded: Technology of Space in Dracula

This week, I’ll be working through the beginnings of a new reading of the gothic horror novel Dracula (1897) to both argue something about the novel and connect its work to broader themes in horror media. In this post, I’ll explore how the book’s villain-vampire Count Dracula is recurrently characterized as having a kind of groundedness, or an explicit physical connection to the Earth, which the protagonists of the novel must overcome with new ungrounded information technology in order to defeat him. Some scholars have already argued for the importance of information technology in the novel previously (such as Jennifer Wicke[1] and Jennifer Fleissner[2]), but I’ll intervene here to suggest that architecture and real estate play a primary symbolic role in the text’s staging of this conflict.

The very first textual encounter we have with Dracula in the book happens in his castle-home in Transylvania, where he is working out the details of a real-estate deal with Jonathan Harker. When he finally reveals himself, Dracula is not only coded as old, traditional, and foreign (he is described using racial markers like “aquiline nose” and speaks throughout the text in dialect), but is also symbolically represented by the Transylvanian castle in which he is introduced. In this opening, the castle actually takes on a more prominently threatening position as Harker is cautioned from entering certain rooms in the castle and eventually realizes his entrapment:

But I am not in heart to describe beauty, for when I had seen the view I explored further; doors, doors, doors everywhere, and all locked and bolted. In no place save from the windows in the castle walls is there an available exit.

The castle is a veritable prison, and I am a prisoner! (28)[3]

Harker, though threatened both by Dracula and the three other vampires in the castle, senses his danger and paralysis by attention to the castle and its architecture itself. Harker’s repetition of “doors” conjures a threatening labyrinth which both seals Harker within its confines and suggests potential danger awaiting him beyond.

Though this castle figures importantly in both the beginning and end of the book, Dracula’s activity in London further associates him with architecture and groundedness. Following some arcane vampire rule, Dracula has to spend each day sleeping in some amount of dirt gathered from his homeland in Transylvania. To make his trip to London possible then, Dracula prepares 50 boxes filled with soil to be shipped and then divided amongst a number of real estate properties throughout London. Having multiple properties grants Dracula multiple safe houses for the storage of his boxes and provides him easier access to different locations. In order to ultimately defeat Dracula, then, the vampire-hunters of the novel have to seek out his different properties to both sanctify his boxes (in order to prevent him from using them) and destroy his property title deeds. This part of the book sees the fight against Dracula move principally towards a contestation over architectural space, or perhaps more correctly, the control over land.

As seen through his ability to purchase and use strategically-placed properties, Dracula is both an adept user of real estate and, I’ll suggest, of architecture itself. Not only do the vampire-hunters have to prevent Dracula from buying properties all over London, but they also have to combat his control over particular architectural spaces. The book stages this conflict with attention to the windows of buildings. Because of another arcane vampire rule, Dracula cannot enter new buildings without first being invited inside. When he targets his first victim, Lucy Westenra, he uses her bedroom window as a direct point of contact. The window in Dracula is the thinnest boundary between inside and outside and, therefore, between Lucy and Dracula.

This interaction is repeated later in the book between Dracula and Mina Harker as she resides in Dr. John Seward’s asylum. Again, there is a seeming protection from the building’s walls and the penetration of those walls through the improper use of window-as-entrance. The window is Dracula’s point of penetration into his victim’s residences which, in a story about vampires, appears to draw a strong analogy to his victims’ necks. The window and the neck both serve as fragile boundaries between an interior — the contents of the house for the window, and blood for the neck — and an exterior — Dracula himself. It is Dracula’s ability to exercise mastery over these fragile boundaries and force an improper entry which provides him power over both his victims and, in the first part of the novel, the vampire-hunters as well.

It is the assortment of both explicit and inexplicit examples described here which functionally tie Dracula to the ground. As he is a master of groundedness, the vampire-hunters ultimately have to make use of groundless technologies to defeat him. This is perhaps best exemplified through the vampire-hunter squad’s use of the telegraph to determine Dracula’s whereabouts in the last section of the novel. The telegraph here provides a more amorphous sense of the environment which works beyond the confines of Dracula’s grounded relationship to the world.

It would seem fruitful to explore this reading of Dracula in regard to both gender and sexuality and British Empire and xenophobia, but I’ll end here by suggesting Bram Stoker’s novel as a critique of the confinedness of the landed aristocracy. Possession and mastery of architecture and real estate ultimately cannot compete with the wide-reaching abilities of modern information technologies.

[1] Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH, vol. 59, no. 2, 1992, pp. 467–493., doi:10.2307/2873351.

[2] Fleissner, Jennifer L. “Dictation Anxiety: The Stenographer’s Stake in Dracula.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts, vol. 22, no. 3, 2000, pp. 417–455., doi:10.1080/08905490008583519.

[3] Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Edited by Roger Luckhurst, Oxford University Press, 2011.

Dylan Caskie is a first-year PhD student in the Syracuse University Department of English, and broadly studies interactive media and visual culture with an increasing emphasis on film and digital media.