Dracula: A Study of Editorial Practices

By Cristina Artenie

This book focuses on deconstructing sanctioned Dracula criticism which, for decades, has constructed Transylvania as the land of vampires. Following in the Saidian tradition, this study makes the case that the editors of Dracula have misrepresented Transylvania, Romania, and East Central Europe in general.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2016
• ISBN: 9781988963464

Book preview

Note on Quotations

Several scholarly editions have been used in this study, but all quotations from Stoker’s novel, identified with the title in italics between brackets (Dracula) followed by the page number, come from Glennis Byron’s edition (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998). Whenever an explanatory note or any other contribution of the editors themselves is mentioned, it is identified with the name(s) of the editor(s) between brackets. This is also true of the Notes for Dracula, quoted as Bram Stoker’s Notes when the source is Stoker, but identified with the names of the editors (Eighteen-Bisang and Miller) when the quotation reproduces a commentary on Stoker’s text. If two or more works of the same author are quoted, the title is also mentioned after the author’s name. To avoid repetitions, the name of Dracula is omitted from such titles. Quotations from other works by the editors are always identified with the name and title. The editions themselves are mentioned only by the name of the editor.

Introduction

One of Stoker’s biographers recently acknowledged that, when he began to write a biography of Bram Stoker in the mid-1990s, [he] did not expect to be still engaged with the subject almost two decades later. . . . New commentators entering the field suggest fresh possibilities, while the frequent unearthing of new material is constantly altering seemingly fixed perspectives (Murray, The Facts and Fictions 72). The same can be said of the perspectives on the novel’s aesthetic value. In their much debated introductions to the first Oxford University Press editions of Dracula, both A.N. Wilson and Maud Ellmann rejected the literariness of the novel. In an essay published in the same year as Wilson’s edition, Franco Moretti confessed that "[o]nly a few years ago, to write about Dracula meant being taken for an eccentric loafer, and one’s main worry was to prove that one’s work was legitimate: ‘You see, Dracula is part of literary history too’ (Moretti 15-16, original emphasis). However, the view persists today: one expert in Gothic literature recently introduced a volume of essays on the novelist by stating that No one, except a maniac, would claim that Stoker was a particularly great writer, although he is better than his reputation would have you believe. Admittedly, his novels are often tedious, over and under plotted, sometimes nonsensical, confusing, confused, and Dracula, in as much as it is a Gothic masterpiece, is clearly a kind of fluke. Even with Dracula, we are dealing with a very uneven novel" (Killeen 16).

Dracula is, after all, an adventure story and a horror novel with fairy-tale undertones: the hero becomes the captive of a monster who later threatens his beloved but, with the help of several allies, he manages to destroy the brute back in its remote lair. In "The Children of the Night: Stoker’s Dreadful Reading and the Plot of Dracula," Dick Collins argues convincingly that, in the choices he made in the spring of 1890 and later, Stoker was crucially influenced by the characters and plot of The String of Pearls (1846-1847), the penny dreadful series that introduced the character of Sweeney Todd. In both narratives, there is a young solicitor[1] who is engaged but goes abroad on business leaving his fiancée behind in England; the young woman has a friend who is courted by three suitors; all of them, led by an older, wiser man, join a quest to kill the monster who is the young solicitor’s employer; and the monster flees England in a boat, but is later killed in the open (see Collins 3ff). All this might explain the reluctance of some readers (including myself) – and moviegoers – to accept Stoker’s novel as a masterpiece, albeit of the Gothic kind.

Unlike the editors discussed in the following study, with the notable exception of the Romanian-born Radu Florescu, I never read Dracula as a child or as a teenager. While in Transylvania, one of Stoker’s major sources wrote that Hungarians

greatly prefer English authors. They do not, however, care for the sensational, preferring the sentimental and romantic. In their cheap journalistic literature the kind of pabulum known as penny dreadful does not exist. The Hungarians of the lower class do not care to take their horrors hot; and such things as delight an Englishman of the same calibre fall flat upon the mental palate of a Hungarian. (Mazuchelli II, 50)

The traveller’s words still ring true more than a century later, in that part of Europe, at least for Romanians. I first read Dracula for a graduate seminar on the British novel and it did not surpass my expectations. I did understand, however, that it is a work of fiction worth studying as representative of late-nineteenth-century attitudes in Britain, especially with regards to the notion of degeneration and the encounter with the European Other. Therefore, I expected the novel to include a series of misrepresentations about the lands visited by its characters in the first and last chapters.

On the other hand, I was surprised at the mistakes in the annotations concerning Transylvania and Romania in the editions of the novel; indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that, in any of the scholarly editions of Dracula, it is almost impossible to find a single annotation on Transylvania and Romania that does not include at least one mistake. The present study is the result of my inquiry into the reasons for this situation. Over the years, I discovered that some of the mistakes had been caused by the editors’ desire to follow a rule generally accepted by textual critics, according to which explanatory notes should use sources that were available to the original reader of the work, in this case late-nineteenth-century British sources, rather than more recent reference books. This poses a series of unexpected problems for a text like Dracula. First, much of the information about East Central Europe in the Victorian era did not come from the most reliable sources. Second, and more important, most of the information about Transylvania and Romania provided by Bram Stoker came not from encyclopaedias, guidebooks or newspapers and thus it was not common knowledge. Rather, it came from the works of a series of travellers who had passed through the region in the quarter of a century before 1890, when it is generally assumed that he began working on the novel.

Up to 2015, there have been five extensively annotated editions of Dracula, identified here as Wolf 1975 (to differentiate it from his later edition, from 1993), McNally/Florescu, Wolf, Leatherdale, and Klinger. There are also three more sparsely annotated editions, which use instead a considerable amount of background material (Byron) or background material and critical essays (Auerbach and Skal, and Riquelme). Finally, Oxford World’s Classics has published a more generously annotated edition (Luckhurst), after the very succinct ones by Wilson and Ellmann. With the exception of Wolf, they all make use of some or all of Stoker’s known sources: William Wilkinson, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (1820); Charles Boner, Transylvania: Its Products and Its People (1865); Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (1865); Andrew Crosse, Round about the Carpathians (1878); Nina Mazuchelli, Magyarland (1881); E.C. Johnson, On the Track of the Crescent (1885); Emily Gerard, Transyvanian Superstitions (1885) and The Land beyond the Forest (1888).[2]

Leonard Wolf first published The Annotated Dracula (1975), a pioneering work in which he correctly identified many of Stoker’s sources, although he did not have access to the novelist’s working notes. These notes were discovered by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu, the editors of The Essential Dracula (1979). Wolf borrowed this title for his 1993 revised edition of the novel, in which he again did not use Stoker’s notes. The edition produced by Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1997) is notable for the consideration, both in annotations and in the supplementary material, of the novel’s adaptations. Glennis Byron’s edition (1998) uses extracts from other works by Stoker, while Riquelme’s (2002) includes essays that analyse the novel from different critical perspectives. The most heavily annotated editions are Clive Leatherdale’s Dracula Unearthed (1998) and Leslie Klinger’s The New Annotated Dracula (2008): the former introduces a religious perspective, while the latter is the first edition to make use of Stoker’s manuscript.

Whenever they explain information originating in one or more of these travelogues, the editors of Dracula appear to quote from these very texts. They were, after all, nineteenth-century sources. However, they were neither common knowledge to readers of the time nor entirely reliable. Moreover, with few exceptions, the annotations do not quote from these texts directly, but rather from Stoker’s research notes, which include misreadings, misinterpretations, and reworkings of the original. They usually summarise long passages and thus often hide some of the information that shows both how Stoker constructed his fictionalised version of Transylvania and why he might have chosen to include such details in his narrative. It is the study of the sources, in fact, that spearheaded the in-depth study of the novel: "More extended and admiring treatments of Dracula began to appear when critics examined in detail the book’s relation to folkloric and historical sources and its narrative techniques. Source studies and commentaries concerned with literary form provided a backdrop against which later critics could treat Dracula seriously from psychological and social perspectives" (Riquelme 411). However, the discovery of Bram Stoker’s research notes for the novel has been a boon and a bane for Dracula studies. All editors have been persuaded to use them to the exclusion of most other source texts, including the actual passages that Stoker summarised, distorted or used out of context. Paradoxically, the notes’ existence has made research into Stoker’s notes redundant.

The scholarly editions of Dracula give the impression that Stoker’s sources have been researched and all or most of the relevant passages have been matched with, and explained through, these sources. In reality, the editors have used Stoker’s notes – containing brief jottings, general ideas and some quotations out of context – instead of his actual sources to explain passages in the novel. Literally, the editors annotate Stoker by quoting Stoker, while referencing the travellers. Instead of explaining the information in Stoker’s text, these notes rather compare the final version of Dracula with its earlier avatars contained in the author’s research for the novel. As Stoker’s working notes often find their way, almost unchanged, into the text of Dracula, the author’s research can be considered an early draft of the story. This means that the editors explain the novel through the novel itself. The reader almost never finds out how Stoker manipulated the information of his sources or how much of that information was erroneous in the first place. The travellers from whom Stoker borrowed the information about Transylvania and Romania, including the part about the belief in vampires (taken from an essay by Emily Gerard), are introduced as authorities or without any comments. To support the information about vampire beliefs among Romanians, the editors use, without questioning, two sources from the 1920s (Agnes Murgoçi and Montague Summers), even though Stoker could not have known them. More often, however, they simply make unsourced statements about Romanian, Transylvanian or even Balkan lore. The idea that Stoker used some authentic lore in his novel (Miller, Sense & Nonsense 128) is taken for granted and none of the editions ever mentions a single Romanian source about the folklore or the history of the region. In many ways, the scholarly editions of Dracula reclaim Transylvania for the West as its own fictional construct. Furthermore, what the editors do not say can be just as important as what they do say: the non-fictional aspect of Dracula, in other words the historical and biographical facts that Stoker would have been tempted to use in his novel, are consistently avoided by his editors. Yet, Stoker was literal rather than literary (Frayling, Mr Stoker’s Holiday 196) and much that remains unexplained in the scholarly editions of Dracula can become less obscure if one takes into account the fact that Stoker had many other opportunities to find out about his subject than just the five books and one essay from which he took research notes.

A look at the most impersonal of the editors of Dracula can be quite revealing. Reviewers have noticed that Riquelme is particularly objective in his notes, preferring concise historical facts and word etymology to any subjective commentary or interpretation (Martin 107). The objectivity as well as the brevity can be explained through the list of books consulted by Riquelme for his annotations: five are guides (four concern London or Great Britain, only one the Austrian-Hungarian empire, none Romania); six are dictionaries and encyclopaedias (two versions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the rest are English dictionaries and a dictionary of law); the works of Shakespeare and Pope’s translation of the Odyssey; and two of Stoker’s sources: Wilkinson’s Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia and Emily Gerard’s book on The Land beyond the Forest (Riquelme xii). Heavily relying on encyclopaedias, the annotations in his edition are often perfunctory. There is very little independent research and the choice of encyclopaedias is never explained. Some notes rely on a recent online version of the Britannica, some on the eleventh edition published in 1910, and others on both. The reader is therefore introduced sometimes to knowledge from about the time of the publication of the novel and sometimes to knowledge from the time of the publication of the Riquelme edition.

The editors’ inclusion of background material is discussed in the following study, although the focus will always be on the annotations. However, I have included the annotations that are relevant to the topic of the present study, which is the representation of Transylvania and Romania in Bram Stoker’s Dracula as explained by the novel’s editors. The fact that their ideas are usually very similar has been helpful. While each editor (or duo of editors) builds his or her own parallel narrative about the novel, together they also build one common narrative. They quote each other, they borrow from each other, they dialogue within the space of the annotations. Riquelme admits that he has used Auerbach/Skal and Wolf in "writing the glosses for Dracula (Riquelme viii). Auerbach/Skal is rather lightly annotated but Wolf provides rich annotations and Riquelme puts them to good use, as he sometimes quotes Wolf directly in his own glosses." In historical and geographical matters, the more sparsely annotated editions (Auerbach/Skal; Byron; Riquelme; Luckhurst) often rely on the two most popular annotated editions that have preceded them: Wolf and McNally/Florescu. All the editors are discussed in each of the chapters of the present study.

Although I have relied mostly on a close reading of the annotations, introductions and other materials included by the editors, as well as on historical research, each of the two parts of the study can be said to have its own methodology. The first part is an attempt to understand the inner workings of scholarly editions of modern fiction in general, and of the editions of Dracula in particular. The eight critical editions of Stoker’s novel are analysed strictly from the point of view of editorial theory. The notions of textual note, note of recovery and explanatory note are used to distinguish the various types of annotation found in these editions. The way these notes are arranged on the page as well as the part played by illustrations and supplementary material is also analysed here. More importantly, perhaps, I discuss the widely circulated precept according to which editors should explain a text with sources contemporary with the text itself. A more descriptive chapter introduces the eight editions that are analysed in this study, along with three others that have played an important role in the editorial history of Dracula and with the 2008 edition of Bram Stoker’s working notes for the novel. Each of these versions of the work is placed in its historical and cultural context, which includes the way they have been received. Towards the end of the first part, the editors themselves are introduced, along with the reasons behind many of their editorial decisions. Transylvania is discussed for the first time as a place of the imagination, constructed by Stoker and kept alive by the Dracula enthusiasts.

The second part discusses the ways in which the editors of Dracula use Stoker’s notes, as well as other resources, to explain the people and places of Transylvania and Romania. Stoker’s vision is regularly reinforced through the annotations in various ways. The author’s working notes are used instead of the original sources, which often paint a different picture, and the reader does not find out how much is received information and how much is fictionalised. The editors never question the idea, preserved in a single paragraph in Emily Gerard’s article about Transylvanian Superstitions, that the vampire, or nosferatu is a real folk belief; instead, they seek ways to confirm it. Romanian sources are conspicuously absent from all the editions, despite the fact that the most heavily annotated passages are those concerning Transylvania and Romania. Ultimately, the editors of Dracula preserve and sometimes enhance the operation of othering initiated by Bram Stoker.

In order to trace the genealogy of the sanctioned interpretative directions of the novel as well as of the editorial notes, it is useful to review, however briefly, the development of Dracula Studies. Overlooked for more than half a century, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula was reborn as a subject of literary study in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when two competing readings of the novel emerged, one historicist and the other psychoanalytical, which were to remain the leading interpretative approaches for the quarter of a century that followed. The historicist view on Dracula began with two essays in which Stoker’s character was identified with a Romanian medieval ruler better known as Vlad the Impaler: Bacil F. Kirtley’s "Dracula, the Monastic Chronicles and Slavic Folklore (1956) and Grigore Nandriş’s The Historical Dracula: The Theme of His Legend in the Western and in the Eastern Literatures of Europe" (1966). This was supported by the first biography of Bram Stoker, published in 1962 by Harry Ludlam and based on interviews with the author’s only son Noel, who also suggested that the novelist had found out about Vlad from a Hungarian acquaintance named Arminius Vambéry. The beginning of the psychoanalytic reading of Dracula is also usually placed in the late 1950s, with the publication of Maurice Richardson’s 1959 essay on The Psychoanalysis of Ghost Stories.[3]

Dracula’s second rebirth in literary studies was in 1972. Several books on Dracula and his Romanian origins appeared in the early 1970s (including a new biography by Daniel Farson, Stoker’s great-nephew, and Leonard Wolf’s first critical edition of the novel, both from 1975), but none were as important as the 1972 bestselling In Search of Dracula by Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu. In the following years, McNally and Florescu published more books on the subject and were invited on TV shows as experts on both Dracula and Vlad the Impaler, who had by then come to be automatically associated with Stoker’s vampire Count. In 1979 they, too, provided a scholarly edition of the novel. The two critical approaches mentioned above were influential in the shaping of the annotations in the first scholarly editions of the novel. In the meantime, the medieval stories about Vlad Ţepeş were studied, among others, by William C. McDonald, Matei Cazacu and Raymond McNally, while Harry A. Senn worked on cognizant tales and legends, resulting in his monograph Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (1982).

Starting with the early 1980s, however, the two most important avenues of critical inquiry in Dracula Studies have been, on the one hand, the scholarly edition, the biographical study, the collection of essays and the close reading of the novel; and, on the other hand, examinations of the political and cultural implications of Dracula. New biographies were published by Phyllis Roth (1982), Barbara Belford (1996; revised edition, 2002), Paul Murray (2004) and Lisa Hopkins (2007). New editions included those edited by A.N. Wilson in 1983, followed by Maud Ellmann in 1996 for Oxford University Press; Leonard Wolf (1993, a revised version of the 1975 edition); Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal (1997); Clive Leatherdale (1998); Glennis Byron (1998); John Paul Riquelme (2002); Leslie S. Klinger (2008); and Roger Luckhurst (2011). Clive Leatherdale also published Dracula: The Novel and the Legend (1985) and edited excerpts from Stoker’s sources for the novel in The Origins of Dracula (1987). Elizabeth Miller edited Bram Stoker’s Dracula: A Documentary Volume (2005) and, together with Robert Eighteen-Bisang, a facsimile edition of Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula (2008). Some of the most influential essays on the novel have appeared in Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Sucking through the Century (1997; ed. Carol Margaret Davison); Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow (1998; ed. Elizabeth Miller); Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic (1998; eds. William Hughes and Andrew Smith); Post/Modern Dracula (2007; ed. John S. Bak); and Bram Stoker: Centenary Essays (2014; ed. Jarlath Killeen). Studies of Dracula as a response to nineteenth-century cultural realities in Great Britain, more specifically reflecting the fears of Victorian society, began chiefly with Carol A. Senf, "Dracula: Stoker’s Response to the New Woman (1982); Franco Moretti, The Dialectic of Fear (1982); Patrick Brantlinger, Imperial Gothic: Atavism and the Occult in the British Adventure Novel (1985); and Daniel Pick, ‘Terrors of the Night’: Dracula and ‘Degeneration’ in the Late Nineteenth Century" (1988), republished in Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c. 1848-c.1918 (1989). Some of the most influential studies belonging to this second avenue of research appeared in the 1990s: Stephen D. Arata, "The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation (1990); Kathleen L. Spenser, Purity and Danger: Dracula, the Urban Gothic, and the Late Victorian Degeneracy Crisis (1992); Judith Halberstam, Technologies of Monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1993); Alexandra Warwick, Vampires and the Empire: Fears and Fictions of the 1890s" (1995); and David Glover, Vampires, Mummies and Liberals: Bram Stoker and the Politics of Popular Fiction (1996).

The most recent studies focus on the context of Imperial Britain and attempt to approach the novel from a postcolonial perspective: William Hughes, Beyond Dracula: Bram Stoker’s Fiction and Its Cultural Context (2000); Eleni Coundouriotis, "Dracula and the Idea of Europe" (2000); Matthew Gibson, Dracula and the Eastern Question (2006); Jimmie E. Cain, Jr., Bram Stoker and Russophobia (2006); and Thomas McLean, Dracula’s Blood of Many Brave Races (2013). These are all studies that focus solely on Stoker’s Dracula and that struggle to find the best way to approach and explain Stoker’s attitudes as a man of his time, closely connected to those who kept the Empire running.

There have also been important theoretical developments that help the advancement of postcolonial inquiry in Dracula Studies, particularly Maria Todorova’s seminal study Imagining the Balkans (1997) and Vesna Goldsworthy’s Inventing Ruritania: the Imperialism of the Imagination (1998). The former traces the discursive construction of the Balkans (understood as all Central and Eastern European territories that were, at various times, under Ottoman rule) in the Western imagination and how this biased representation has informed the attitude of policy makers and intellectuals in what is today called the first world towards the Balkans. Applying Todorova’s balkanist framework would be beneficial to the study of a great number of British and American works of fiction and non-fiction. Many of the novel’s descriptions of peoples, places, and cultures can be revealed as informed by prejudice and the belief in British superiority. Until now, no such approach has been introduced in Dracula studies. This work would have been a perfect tool for this research, had it not been limited to countries that, as Todorova explains, have never been a colony of the West. In the beginning, Todorova’s study was indeed the study I was using to build my theoretical approach. However, as I discussed in a previous study (Dracula Invades England), the Romanian Principalities are a special case. In the nineteenth century and up until the end of World War Two, the Lower Danube, which features prominently in Stoker’s novel, was a neo-colony of the West, especially of Britain. In the case of Stoker’s vampire novel, the already established methodology of postcolonial inquiry, as outlined by Raymond Kennedy (1945) and Daniel Chirot (1976), proves to be more helpful in uncovering the coloniser-colonised relation that informs Dracula and that often influences the work of the editors and various commentators who analyse the Romanian elements of the novel. Furthermore, this study, like the previous one, is greatly influenced by Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978). Said discusses how the West’s construction of the East is an exercise in power which leads to the orientalising of those who cannot represent themselves but must be represented