Dracula’s Appearance: Race & Otherness
Bram Stoker published Dracula in 1897. The novel is about a monstrous vampire from Transylvania that plans on colonizing England, and has some implications about race and sexuality that are reflective of the time period Stoker was writing in. Though Stoker may have crafted Dracula’s frightening physical characteristics consciously, it seems that he was majorly influenced by Victorian societal fears subconsciously.
Dracula’s appearance is described cartoonishly: He’s a tall, pale man with white hair, a long mustache, pointed ears and teeth, and hairy palms. This description paints Dracula to be animalistic. Many of the physical characteristics can also be interpreted as Eastern European or Jewish coded. Dracula lives in Transylvania and is clearly written to be a figure from the East wanting to colonize the West. He tells Jonathan Harker at the beginning of the novel that he is eager to be a part of London. Once Dracula moves to London, he starts draining Lucy of her blood, already attacking a part of the West. This was a big fear in Victorian society with so much social change occurring.
Hairy Palms & Connection with Animals
In Victorian society, it was believed that a person who had masturbated would sprout hair in the center of their palms. Victorians were very strict about sexuality and desire — Jonathan, for example, feels horrified at his lust over the Weird Sisters. Dracula is a rather sexual kind of villain in the novel. Dracula’s sexuality closely ties with him being “othered” from the human English characters. Not only is he foreign to London, he appears more like an animal than a well-mannered Englishman. His hairy palms indicate he gives into “animal” desires whenever he wants to.
After all, Dracula is not human, he’s a vampire, which appears to be the most evolved animal separate from humans. Dracula has command over wolves, not just dogs. When Jonathan is first being driven to Dracula’s castle (by Dracula himself), dogs are barking outside the carriage. The barks change to howls as Jonathan realizes wolves are chasing the carriage. Dracula is the only one able to tame the wolves. Whether the wolves came under Dracula’s order as the “alpha," or if they came to feast on Jonathan, this scene represents Dracula’s ability to be the ultimate predator over a man.
Stoker writes Dracula’s crossing to England in a similar way that he wrote Dracula’s introduction from Jonathan’s perspective in that the reader doesn’t know at first that Dracula is on the ship to England. A captain details an account of how his ship was terrorized until they made it to England, and a black dog leaps from the boat, never to be seen again. The captain had never seen this dog, and actually felt some sadness at the dog’s disappearance because, after all of his men dying, the dog could be seen as a comfort.
In this way, Dracula’s command over wolves isn’t the most sinister thing about him. His ability to transform himself into a regular dog makes his disguise more sinister than his appearance: he can appear as a companion to humans, if he wants to. It is only for his own gain. Dracula kept the captain alive because he needed the ship to get to England. In a different manner, he kept Jonathan alive for his own special reasons.
The most notable animal attached to Dracula and vampire lore is the bat. Bats are nocturnal animals, and nighttime is Dracula’s favorite time to haunt his first victims in London. Stoker did not make Dracula allergic to sunlight. Rather, Dracula is nocturnal because that’s the kind of animal he is. When Lucy writes to Mina about having a hard time sleeping, she mentions a bat angrily flapping around her window, as if trying to get in. Though bats are not particularly well-loved creatures, Lucy felt relatively safe inside at night, with a window separating her from the creature. Dracula in his regular form must be invited inside a home, and based on his appearance, this seems unlikely. However, in his bat form, he can very easily get in.
“Aquiline Nose” & Jewish Immigrants
Much of how Stoker describes Dracula’s physical appearance is mostly used to terrify — his pale skin, intense eyes, and sharp nails and teeth — and to depict his connection to aggressive or “creepy” animals (Ray 6). However, a feature that Jonathan takes note of when he first meets Dracula is his “aquiline nose.” An aquiline nose gives a slightly beak-like appearance with a prominent bridge. Seeing as how Dracula’s animal connections are not bird related, is Dracula’s distinctive nose meant to terrify Jonathan? Some people think that Stoker was referring to the Jewish race.
When Stoker published Dracula, there was a mass emigration of Eastern European Jews into England. Much like modern day’s American border crisis, at the time the novel was published, there were many dissenters against the immigration in England. For some critics, there is concern over whether Stoker’s creation of a wealthy, blood-sucking, Transylvanian monster is meant to be a commentary on the Jewish race (Ivry).
There is a long-standing myth amongst antisemites that Jewish people drink the blood of Christian children for religious ceremonies. The connection between this myth and the legend of vampirism raises eyebrows for the author’s intentions at such a tense time period for Jewish people. The aquiline nose description could be read into as trying to depict either Jewish or non-Western European races, especially as Dracula is canonically foreign to England.
A Jewish stereotype is directly mentioned in the text when Dracula has boxes of soil transported to London. The subtext is obvious already: Dracula is already bringing pieces of his homeland with him, invading the London soil with his own. When one of the cargo transporters describes it, the worker says that the soil smelled of “ole Jerusalem.” J. Jack Halberstam, a literary historian, said about the passage, “Like the diseases attributed to the Jews as a race, bodily odors, people assumed, clung to them and marked them out as different and indeed repugnant objects of pollution” (Ivry). The soil is effectively part of Dracula’s grave from his estate. The cargo is essentially his home, and his home is a part of him. It’s not hard to see the parallels between antisemites’ fears and Dracula.
Regardless of whether or not Count Dracula himself was supposed to represent the Jewish race, the undertones in Stoker’s descriptions of Dracula clearly depict a villainous foreign character that reflects Victorian fears of immigration and foreign invasion. When writing an obituary for Bram Stoker, Stoker’s friend Hall Caine wrote that Stoker only wrote stories “to sell” for entertainment, and he never inserted his own agenda into his writing (Ivry). This is widely reported on Stoker as an author, but if this is the case, Dracula’s physical appearance and characteristics are clearly influenced by the time period Stoker was writing in, regardless of the authorial intent.
Works Cited
Hollingsworth, Alexis. “Fear of Progress:” Medium, Medium, 9 Jan. 2019, medium.com/@lexiloulee/fear-of-progress-b42fc00c023a.
Ivry, Benjamin. “125 Years Later, Is Dracula Antisemitic - or Is He Just Another Vampire?” The Forward, 31 Oct. 2022, forward.com/culture/503182/dracula-bram-stoker-antisemitic-jewish-125th-anniversary-transylvania-vampire/.
Ray, Mary. “Animals and the Predator Motif in Dracula - Scholars Crossing.” Liberty.Edu, digitalcommons.liberty.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1060&context=montview. Accessed 25 Apr. 2024.
Stoker, Bram. “DRACULA.” The Project Gutenberg eBook of Dracula, by Bram Stoker, 1995, www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm.
