Irish Wishing Well

I feel drained. I’m wondering if Dracula bit me. I walked by a mirror and while I was cheered up by the fact that I did see my reflection, I looked pretty pasty, even by Irish standards. Sure fall is a common time for sinus infections, but it’s also the season of the undead, is it not? I am stirred out of my drowsiness by my fear of being caught sneaking Halloween candy and the adept skills of an Irish horror writer whose dark tale I am reading for a book club. (Seriously, Dracula climbs walls, people. Like a spider. It’s badass and creepy.)

That’s right, you have an Irishman to thank for Dracula crawling into your nightmares. Bram Stoker was not a native Transylvanian, despite his poetic descriptions of the Romanian countryside. (An excerpt from the book reads: “As the evening fell it began to get very cold, and the growing twilight seemed to merge into one dark mistiness the gloom of the trees, oak, beech, and pine, though in the valleys which ran deep between the spurs of the hills, as we ascended through the Pass, the dark firs stood out here and there against the background of late-lying snow. Sometimes, as the road was cut through the pine woods that seemed in the darkness to be closing down upon us, great masses of greyness, which here and there bestrewed the trees, produced a peculiarly weird and solemn effect, which carried on the thoughts and grim fancies engendered earlier in the evening, when the falling sunset threw into strange relief the ghost-like clouds which amongst the Carpathians seem to wind ceaselessly through the valleys.”) You’d think he was a local, right?

Yet, Mr. Stoker’s mortal life began on November 8, 1847, in Clontarf, County Dublin, Ireland. He attended Trinity College Dublin, where “he excelled in rugby, walking races, gymnasium, sling shot, high jump, trapeze, and rowing. He was on the rugby team, and in 1867 won prizes for weight lifting and for the five- and seven-mile walks.” (There was no mention of the exercise of our favorite vampire - wall climbing.) He also worked as a civil servant at Dublin Castle.

His origins as a writer are in Ireland too. He was an unpaid drama critic for the Dublin Evening Mail. His first book doesn’t seem like the page-turner Dracula is, but you never know. It is The Duties of Clerks of Petty Sessions in Ireland, a handbook in legal administration, published in 1879. His first novel, The Snake’s Pass, is “a romantic thriller with a bleak western Ireland setting, in 1890.” (I found it interesting that one of the characters in the story has the same name -first and last- as my father. It’s a comedic character apparently, but that’s better than being a Dracula, even if he is a count, with ruthless ancestors’ from whose “veins flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights, for lordship.”

Still, there are those who argue Dracula is in its own way an Irish novel too, despite Ireland not being a location in the novel at all.. In Literature of Region and Nation: Proceedings of the 6th International Literature of Region and Nation Conference at the University of New Brunswick, in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, from August 2-7, 1966. Susanne Hagemann, a German translation and literary scholar, presented a critical essay titled, “The Irishness of Dracula.” The paper notes that Dracula is a landlord and she quotes Stephen D. Arata, an English professor at the University of Virginia:

In Count Dracula, Victorian readers could recognize their culture’s imperial ideology mirrored back as a kind of monstrosity. Dracula’s journey from Transylvania to England could be read as a reversal of Britain’s imperial exploitations of “weaker” races, including the Irish. This mirroring extends not just to the imperial practices themselves, but to their epistemological underpinnings. Before Dracula successfully invades the spaces of his victims’ bodies or land, he first invades the spaces of their knowledge. […] he is […] what we might call an incipient “Occidentalist” scholar. Dracula’s physical mastery of his British victims begins with an intellectual appropriation of their culture, which allows him to delve the workings of the “native mind.” As Harker discovers, the Count’s expertise in “English life and customs and manners” […] provides the groundwork for his exploitative invasion of Britain. Thus, in Dracula the British characters see their own ideology reflected back as a form of bad faith, since the Count’s Occidentalism both mimics and reverses the more familiar Orientalism underwriting Western imperial practices.

Still, Bram Stoker is not really thought of as an Irish writer, according to the introduction to The Dublin Years: The Lost Journal of Bram Stoker by Elizabeth Miller & Dacre Stoker, Bram’s great grand-nephew. “Relevant to this book are efforts to present Stoker as an Irish writer. Many naysayers, however, still contend that even though Stoker wrote one novel set in Ireland (The Snake’s Pass), he completely ignored Dublin, the city where he spent the first thirty years of his life. He still has never quite ‘made it’ as a literary Dubliner.” The authors write that they plan to change that impression through the book, which contains entries from his private journal. Check out my next post about this book to read my reflections on Bram Stoker’s musings about Ireland. In the meantime, celebrate Halloween because nobody, including Dracula (spoiler alert) lives forever.