Dracula

‘them there animiles’

Although subsequent representations of Dracula have tended to fix his alter ego as a vampire bat, in Stoker's 1897 novel itself the animal analogies are more varied and extensive. Early on, when Jonathan Harker spies Dracula crawling down the wall of his castle, he compares his host's movements with those of a lizard (p.35). Shortly afterwards, Dracula is heard calling to wolves, which seem to answer ‘from far and wide’ (p.46), and he throws a child to be consumed by them. Five days later, Harker hears the howling of these ‘allies’ of Dracula, ‘almost as if the sound sprang up at the raising of his hand, just as the music of a great orchestra seems to leap under the baton of the conductor’ (p.49). The day after this, Harker discovers Dracula in his coffin with blood spilling from his mouth onto his chin and neck: ‘he lay like a filthy leech, exhausted with his repletion’ (p.51). Indeed, when in Whitby a bat is seen outside Lucy's window (p.89), we are left to infer its connection with the recently arrived Dracula. Much later in the novel, Mina Harker's journal records Van Helsing's explanation that the vampire ‘can transform himself to wolf’ and that ‘he can be as bat’ (p.223). He also has ‘long, sharp, canine teeth’ (p.24). All combine to create this ‘monster’ (p.51). It is a curious fact that most adaptations of the story pin down its protagonist to just one of these incarnations, as though the full range of shape-shifting in the original is too difficult to deal with.

More worrying than Dracula's bestiality, though, is the beast that he brings out in those around him. As Thomas Bilder, the hapless zookeeper, remarks: ‘Mind you … there's a deal of the same nature in us as in them there animiles’ (p.128). It is not simply that Dracula infects those whom he bites, but that he transforms those who observe the changes that result. A startling example occurs when Van Helsing has Dr Seward and Arthur join him in a mission to decapitate Lucy.