Dorian Gray and Dracula: A Gothic Comparison of Wilde and Stoker

In what ways are any TWO texts from the course innovative in terms of form, genre or literary technique and what are the effects of this innovation?

… It is so in a far greater degree to make the abstraction of the Gothic character intelligible, because that character itself is made up of many mingled ideas, and can consist only in their union. That is to say, pointed arches do not constitute Gothic, nor vaulted roofs, nor flying buttresses, nor grotesque sculptures; but all or some of these things, and many other things with them, when they come together so as to have life.

John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice (158).

These words, from the Victorian essayist and critic John Ruskin, refer to gothic architecture; however, he may have just as easily described gothic literature in such terms. That is to say that, like the architecture that Ruskin so revered, gothic, as a literary genre, is equally intangible; it is not, nor could never be, simply one thing. In this way the gothic form imitates its matter; the liminal being, the decaying castle, the labyrinthine streets of a gloomy city, everything exists as both image and symbol. However, it pays the reader to consider Oscar Wilde’s warning in the preface to his The Picture of Dorian Gray:

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril (Dorian Gray 22).

This essay will defy this warning and go beneath the surface of Wilde’s novel and that of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in search of signs of innovation within the gothic genre. These signs of innovation will be contextualised within circumstances of late Victorian Britain. It will be argued that while both texts draw heavily on the gothic genre, they have created two very different gothic narratives.

Although the gothic genre is not easily defined there are some common characteristics and devices that help to identify a narrative as ‘gothic’, the outlining of which is the logical starting place for this discussion. The setting for gothic texts are often antiquated, or given antiquated characteristics, that evoke a dark, barbaric or mysterious past (Hogle 02). For example, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, an archetypal gothic tale, utilizes a castle, a dark forest, a monastery and a labyrinth, as settings. The use of such antiquated settings indicates another major concern of the gothic genre, that of time. Growth, decay, degeneration and mortality are recurring themes, which are often inverted or manipulated by the author. All of these motifs invoke in the reader thoughts of creation and death, which are both terrifying and exciting. Implicit in this is the inherently psychological nature of the gothic. By utilizing the fantastic and the terrifying, most typically a supernatural grotesque such as a monster or a ghost, the texts are giving outward form to the internal fears and desires of the author and the readers. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, for example, is often interpreted as being representative of the fear of the development of new technologies and automation that were occurring during the first industrial revolution (Goss and Riquelme 435). As with Walpole, such social critiques can be read into gothic texts, a process that this essay will attempt to replicate; however, it is important to note the work of the subconscious in the act of creation:

“I gave reign to my imagination; visions and passions choked me,” Walpole on The Castle of Otranto (Intro. X).

“My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arouse in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie,” Shelley on Frankenstein (Intro. 8-9)

These quotes show the importance of the subconscious to the gothic, not just as a subject matter but in the act of creation as well. These elements, then, here broadly categorised as setting, time, creation and death, the monstrous, and the sub-conscious, may be considered archetypal themes of the gothic genre. This essay will look specifically at setting, the monstrous and the sub-conscious and compare and contrast the ways in which they are used in both Dorian Gray and Dracula and consider whether these uses constitute innovation.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula utilises many of the archetypal settings of the gothic genre. Of Dracula’s castle, Jonathan Harker observes “even in the dim light that the stone was massively carved,” and that “the carving had been much worn by time and weather” (Dracula 24). This ominously dark setting immediately anticipates the role of Dracula and separates his aging residence from the modern, metropolitan London, the setting for the later text. The scene of Lucy’s falling prey to Dracula is also classically gothic, “Then as the cloud passes I could see the ruins of the Abbey coming into view; as the edge of a narrow band of light … moved along, the church and churchyard became gradually visible” (Dracula 120). The “ruins of the Abbey” and the “Churchyard” are clear examples here. It is also interesting to note the similar use of light as in Harker’s impression of Dracula’s residence. Darkness and light are invoked and juxtaposed throughout the text. They are symbolic of good and evil, but also serve to add ambiguity to the perception of the narrators. These are just two examples of the way that Stoker uses typically gothic settings in Dracula. However, it must be noted that Stoker for large sections of the novel moves the action of his narrative to London, a setting that is shared by Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray.

London is the omnipresent setting for Wilde’s Dorian Gray. Even in the first scene, where Wilde invokes nearly all of nature’s charms, such as the “honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms,” there is still the presence of the “dim roar of London,” which “was like the bourdon note of a distant organ” (Dorian Gray 23). In a sense there are in fact two Londons in Dorian Gray, the West and the East. These settings set the tone for the action, and mimic the duality at the centre of the protagonist’s story. In the west, Gray lives as an aristocratic, dining and being entertained, with the assurance of a “pot of money waiting for him,” in the form of inheritance (Dorian Gray 57). However, while lounging in a park, or strolling down Piccadilly in the west, Gray feels a sudden need to explore a “passion for sensations” (Dorian Gray 73). Feeling “this grey, monstrous London of ours with its myriads of people, its sordid sinners, and its splendid sins,” Gray heads eastward: “Soon loosing my way in a labyrinth of grimy streets and black grassless squares,” (Dorian Gray 73). Here Wilde has made East London a gothic scene, invoking Dante’s descent into hell and using the classical image of the labyrinth to mix the geography of London with the psychology of his protagonist.

In this way both Wilde and Stoker, while using the archetypal images of the gothic, have innovated by bringing the action to London. This shows the centrality of the city to late Victorian writers, but also helps to illustrate a key difference in the two narratives.

Stoker uses London as the meeting place for his chivalrous band of heroes, who utilize the most up to date technologies and transportation, in pursuit of Dracula. London is the scene of the battle between the modern and the archaic, the good and the evil. This may symbolise anxiety about the possibility of a failing empire; Dracula tells Harker that he longs “to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London … to share its life, its change, its death“(Dracula 31). For Stoker, London is still mighty, but it is a mighty city under threat. Wilde’s use of London also serves to portray the anxieties at the heart of late Victorian Britain. However, the threat implicit in Wilde’s text is one from within; as Riquelme puts it, “Wilde has turned the critical direction of the Gothic inward, toward England” (614). The class divide between East and West London is an example of this (Dryden, 115). It is in the east that Dorian finds the “foulest dens in London” (Dorian Gray ) where he perpetrates his oblique sins. The acts of sexual perversion (or so they were considered at the time) are implicitly linked to Dorian’s forays to the east, which is also the scene of his first moral crime committed against Sibyl Vance. London both mimics and enables Gray’s descent into immorality. As Dorian’s fall develops, the darkness of the east is drawn back to the aristocratic world of the west, culminating in the murder of Hallward in the antique of his West London residence.

The way the two writers use London as a setting is different. Stoker uses London to further alienate his archaic villain, while Wilde uses London as part of the corruptive force that creates his. This difference in the use of London is paralleled when the character of the two monsters is considered. The use of the monstrous or grotesque is central to the gothic narrative. Both Wilde and Stoker have used monsters to embody the ostensibly abject. It is interesting to note that both Dracula and Dorian Gray take a human form; however, it can be argued that the way the two authors use the human and the monstrous is also different.

Dracula is established as a man at the start of the text, but his inhumanity is soon emphasised. His physical description, his strength and “extraordinary pallor” (Dracula 28), when combined with his nauseating effect and identification of wolves as the “children of the night” (Dracula 29) quickly serve to delineate him from the all too human Jonathan Harker. This inhumanity quickly progresses to the monstrous when Harker observes Dracula as he begins “to crawl down the castle wall over that dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings” (Dracula 49). Dracula’s monstrosity, then, is made apparent, and he can be viewed as something close to the archetypal gothic villain: grotesque, inhuman and abhorrent. Additionally, he is a foreigner from the east who aims to invade the cultural centre of the west. This is why, as Hughes and Smith put it, “It is comparatively easy … to read Dracula as a fable of invasion from without” (04). However, it must also be noted that he is still able to take the human form, and, more importantly, to infect other humans with his monstrosity. In the scene where he infects Mina, Dracula is described as both “a tall, thin man, clad in black,” as well as a “wild beast” with eyes that “flamed red with devilish passion” (Dracula 363). This, according to Hindle, is what makes Dracula so terrifying; “it works on us from the inside” (Intro. IX). As both man and monster, there is a duality at the heart of Dracula, which is similar to the way that Stoker has used London; Dracula is brought home to the reader and then taken away, in terms of both setting and nature. This, it can be argued, serves to enhance his terrifying effect on the reader, in a sense making him more monstrous than if he were wholly inhuman.

Dorian Gray, as a gothic monster, is brought closer to his reader and kept there. His physical form is that of a man. He is created, corrupted and destroyed within the pages of the novel, from a young aristocrat with extraordinary good looks, who possesses the blank canvas of youth, to the immoral sensualist and murderer, who, in a sense kills his own creator and later himself. The course of his corruption, though oblique, remains human. The supernatural element of his story, Basil Hallward’s painting, enables his monstrous behaviour; however, it is ultimately Gray who decides upon and performs the acts. After killing Basil Hallward, retreating from the scene,

“He did not even glance at the murdered man. He felt that the secret of the whole thing was not to realize the situation. The friend who had painted the fatal portrait to which all his misery had been due, had gone out of his life. That was enough” (Dorian Gray 193).

This telling sequence portrays a man who has committed an act of symbolic patricide, in killing his creator and “friend”. He must not look at the “thing” (Dorian Gray 192) that he has destroyed, for that would be to “realize” the monstrous action he has just performed. This shows that Dorian Gray, though monstrous and grotesque, has retained his humanity. As with setting, Wilde uses the grotesque not to estrange his villain but to, in a sense, accentuate his humanity. Similarly, the unity of Dorian’s creation-to-destruction story does this; we understand Dorian as monster because we have watched him become one.

It remains, then, to discuss the role of the subconscious in the two narratives.

The characters of Dracula are continually in a state of unconsciousness or at least subconsciousness. Lucy’s sleepwalking (Dracula 115) and Jonathan Harker’s dream like journey to the Dracula estate (Dracula 24), serve as prominent examples. They also serve as precursors to the altered consciousness that the characters will reach later in the novel: Lucy’s vampirism and Harker’s mental breakdown after his escape from the Dracula estate. The narrative perspective also serves to accentuate the role of the sub-conscious; the journal as a medium enables continual insight into the psychology of Harker, Mina and Seward, a fact that is accentuated by the interplay of the journals within the text itself, as shown here, when Mina writes:

“That is the real reason of his coming [Van Helsing]; it is concerning Lucy and her sleep-walking, and not about Jonathan … That awful journal gets hold of my imagination and tinges everything with something of its own colour” (Dracula 233)

These layers and distortions of consciousness and perception in Dracula blur the narrative and indicate the role of the sub-conscious in its creation; as Hindle puts it, “Abnormal psychological states and hypnotic trance have a significant roles to play in Dracula, a novel of narrative fragments that seems to refuse to tell its story from a reliable, single point of view” (Intro. XXIV). The implicit and latent sexuality of the depictions of vampirism further emphasize this point. The sexually charged scene where Jonathan is preyed on by three female vampires, who are then thwarted by Dracula when he declares that Jonathan “belongs to me!” (Dracula 55), can be interpreted as expressive of certain latent desires on behalf of Stoker. This is a common critical interpretation and has led to Dracula becoming “the Freudian text par excellence” (Hughes and Smith 03).

It can be argued that, if read this way, Stoker’s Dracula is a classically gothic narrative, created through the subconscious of its author. It reflects many of the fears of late Victorian Britain such as emasculation, threat to empire, the rise of the ‘new women’ and repressed sexuality.

Dorian Gray is much less a creation of the sub-conscious, though it too utilises altered states of consciousness. It can be argued that Wilde uses the gothic, be it in setting, monstrousness or altered states of consciousness, in a brilliant but artificial way. Wilde was an acutely self-aware artist who has used the gothic genre in order to create a contemporary narrative about the society in which he lived. His narrative does not, however, make a value judgment about the society. “The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist,” he tells us in his preface, but “No artist desires to prove anything” (Dorian Gray 21). In a sense, Wilde’s gothic is an artifice, which is paradoxically a common motif of gothic literature. Dorian Gray is paradox upon paradox; a psychological maze from which there is no escape, as character, as reader, as critic. Wilde has used “So many doublings and shifts of position … the possibility of reading the book as realistic, that is, as containing primarily intelligible patterns and answers rather than enigmas that cannot be readily resolved” (Riqueleme 616). This holds true for his use of the gothic as well. In many ways Wilde’s gothic is a thin veil (perhaps too thin when the book’s reception and effect on Wilde’s life is considered) through which real, contemporary social commentary is occurring. In other ways Dorian Gray is a truly gothic maze of psychology, darkness and intangibility. In this sense, Wilde has achieved his goal, as stated in his preface, and created a blank canvas upon which the reader, and society as a whole, can project themselves.

If, then, Stoker’s is predominantly a classical gothic and Wilde’s an artificial one, which is the purer? Which the more innovative? These are surely impossible questions even if the subjective conclusions here reached contain any measure of truth. For the gothic remains as intangible as when we started. Perhaps the last word on the gothic is best left to Ruskin, from whose perspective we started:

For in one point of view Gothic is not only the best, but the only rational architecture, as being that which can fit itself most easily to all services, vulgar or noble. Undefined in its slope of roof, height of shaft, breadth of arch, or disposition of ground plan, it can shrink into a turret, expand into a hall, coil into a staircase, or spring into a spire, with undegraded grace and unexhausted energy; and whenever it finds occasion for change in its form or purpose, it submits to it without the slightest sense of loss either to its unity or majesty,—subtle and flexible like a fiery serpent, but ever attentive to the voice of the charmer.

The Stones of Venice (168-169)

Reference List

Dryden, L. The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles. 1954. Gordonsville, VA: Palgrave Macmillan 2003. Web 12 June 2013.

Goss, T, Riquelme, J. “From Superman to Posthuman: The Gothic Technological Imaginary in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Octavia Xenogenesis”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies Vol 53, No 03 (2007): 434-459 Web 12 June 2013.

Hindle, M. Introduction to Dracula. VII-XL. Stoker, B. Dracula. 1897. London: Penguin. 1993. Print.

Hogle, J. Gothic Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2002. Print.

Hughes, W, Smith, A. Bram Stoker: History, Psychoanalysis and the Gothic. 1998. Hampshire: Palgrave. Print.

Requelme, J. “Oscar Wilde’s Aesthetic Gothic: Walter Pater, Dark Enlightenment, and The Picture of Dorian Gray”. MFS Modern Fiction Studies Vol 46, No 03 (2000): 609-631. Web 12 June 2013.

Ruskin, J. The Stones of Venice. 1851. London: J. G Links. 1960. Print.

Shelley, M. Author’s Introduction 5-10. Shelley, M. Frankenstein. 1818. London: Penguin. 1994. Print.

Stoker, B. Dracula. 1897. London: Penguin. 1993. Print.

Walpole, H. Introduction to The Castle of Otranto VII-XVI. Walpole, H. The Castle of Otranto. 1764. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1982. Print.

Wilde, O. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1891. London: Penguin. 1985. Print.